Chivas Clem: Shirttail Kin – New Work

Chivas Clem: Shirttail Kin – New Work
On view: November 7–December 19, 2025

Daniel Cooney is proud to announce the opening of Shirttail Kin – New Work, our first solo show with celebrated Texas artist Chivas Clem. The exhibition comes exactly one year after his solo museum survey at the Dallas Contemporary and will feature fourteen previously unseen photographs from his ongoing body of work Shirttail Kin, which began in 2012. “Shirttail Kin” is a southern colloquialism used to describe someone you are kin to by affection, not by blood.

Shirttail Kin is a document of young white men living in and around Northeast Texas and Southeast Oklahoma, near Clem’s hometown of Paris, Texas. The photographs capture the men mostly naked, in and around his studio, at motels, trailers parks, and abandoned houses. Some are posing while others are caught simply living in the moment. The work explores masculinity, class, power, and eroticism, as well as the dynamics of visibility and performance. Clem has suggested that he considers his models actors in a movie that has no script. The photographs allude to larger concerns of white, rural, working-class marginalization and the fragile nature of this community. Furthermore, it can be seen indirectly as an apologue of the larger crisis of masculinity that has gripped the public consciousness under the rise of the burgeoning fascist state.