Wearing the Inside Out
February 26, 2026 | 6:00–8:30 PM
Campus Center Multi-Purpose Room and Main Lounge
Philadelphia-based artist and Rutgers professor Margery Amdur presents Wearing the Inside Out, a one-night performance that reimagines the hospital gown as both garment and metaphor. This immersive, interdisciplinary event dissolves the boundaries among fashion, installation, and ritual—reclaiming carewear as a form of emotional expression, personal agency, and artistic intervention.
Each garment begins with a recognizable clinical silhouette—scrub tops, gowns, walker jackets—but is radically transformed by Amdur’s signature materials: digitally printed textile strips, stitched wire seams, hand-cut overlays, and translucent layers of journal text written by patients. These garments are not costumes. They are real, wearable objects transformed into vessels of memory, intimacy, and vulnerability.
While Amdur’s practice is rooted in abstraction, it is driven by internal longings rather than predefined concepts. Over her career, she has come to trust the nonverbal, intuitive nature of her process. “I tell my students to leave their intellectual brain on a shelf outside the studio,” she says. “There’s time to analyze later—but the making comes first.” Her work gives voice to fragmented or unintegrated parts of the self through pattern, color, and form—in compositions that feel celebratory yet carry undertones of fragility, tension, and unresolved memory.
“By manifesting what was not initially understood,” Amdur writes, “my work serves as both a mirror and a door.”
The performance unfolds slowly—a nonlinear procession in which garments are not modeled but inhabited, carried, shed, and reconfigured. The show traces a visual and emotional arc of depersonalization and repair, with each movement echoing the labor of healing.
Much like wallpaper veils a wall or clothing wraps a body, each garment becomes a palimpsest—a layered surface of expression. Beneath every stitched line and printed text lies a trace of the original: a patient’s voice, a scarlike seam, a story overwritten yet not erased. The garments shift from wall-mounted sculpture to the body and back again—suggesting that healing is not a fixed destination but an unfolding state of becoming.
This performance is presented in dialogue with the broader Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Grant at Rutgers University–Camden. The grant supports Amdur’s collaboration with Dr. Sheila Linz, a professor in the School of Nursing with an emphasis on behavioral health. Dr. Linz brings extensive experience working with underserved communities and individuals living with serious mental illness. She is leading the project’s research component, including the quantification of outcomes and qualitative findings from their work with patient populations.
The performance also features theatrical direction by Damon Bonetti, co-founding artistic director of The Philadelphia Artists’ Collective (The PAC), Philadelphia’s only theater dedicated to rare classical plays staged in site-specific locations.
Presented with student performers, Wearing the Inside Out extends Amdur’s decades-long exploration of vulnerability, care, and transformation. Known for her immersive Felt Narratives installations and interdisciplinary social-practice work, Amdur bridges art, medicine, and lived experience in a compelling performance that turns garments into gestures and fashion into advocacy.
Wearing the Inside Out is part of Runway to Renewal: The Rutgers–Camden Fashion Showcase, and is funded in part by the Chancellor's Year of the Arts.