Artist Nicola L was born in Mazagan, Morocco in 1937 and now lives and works in New York City. Since the mid-1960s her work has interrogated the female body as an instrument and object.
Influenced by the socio-political upheavals and demonstrations of the 1960s, Red Coat 1969, was designed for a concert of Brazilian musicians Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, which took place at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. It was used for various improvised performances in public spaces, and is exemplary of Nicola L’s experimentation with presenting the human body as a conceptual piece of art. Red Coat strips the ‘body’ of any particular identity and immerses the wearers in a communal performance to declare the peaceful notion – ‘Same Skin for Everybody’.
