How Does it Feel? Home How Does it Feel?

Mimi Smith
United States, born 1942
Steel Wool Peignoir, 1966
steel wool, nylon, lace
Museum purchase: Helen Foresman Spencer Art Acquisition Fund, 2000.0071

• This artist did something unexpected by putting two very different kinds of material together. What combination of materials seems unusual? The artist Mimi Smith made a sculpture of a nightgown using cloth and steel wool.
• If you could touch this work of art, how would the steel wool feel? How would the cloth feel? You wouldn’t expect a nightgown to be rough and scratchy, would you?
• If you touched this work of art, would it feel the way it looks like it should feel, or not?
• Is this real or visual texture?

The artist created the texture by using actual cloth and steel wool, and so it is real texture. The soft material and rough steel wool in Mimi Smith’s sculpture Steel Wool Peignoir combines the comfortable, soft feeling we usually connect to nightgowns with the scratchy, uncomfortable feeling we connect to steel wool.