Culture Cap

Claudia Cuesta’s Culture Cap (2002) questions who culture belongs to. Originally made in conjunction with the exhibition Taste (2002) at the Helen Pitt Gallery in Vancouver, Culture Cap later became part of Lee Plested’s curatorial project Backpacker (2002), where Plested collected small artworks from 18 Canadian artists to fit into a hiking backpack. The works in Backpacker use the simple and vastly relatable language of everyday objects to ask questions about economy, culture and national identity in relation to artistic production. For Cuesta, the act of wearing these caps invites a democratization of art and a de-centring of institutional culture-making. As part of an ongoing exploration, Cuesta produced a new series of caps for the 2023 exhibition, What Is Welcome? at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, which were distributed to the first person who enters the gallery to view the exhibition each day that the gallery is open. The institution in which the cap is being shown, contextualized and considered, is its point of distribution. By making a multiple that exited the gallery, Cuesta’s work asks how culture is being consumed and how it is being carried back out the door.