I first encountered Cave’s work in an exhibit titled Call and Response: Africa to America, in which curator Mark Sloan paired the Soundsuits with photographs by Phyllis Galembo of masqueraders from Benin, Nigeria and Burkina Faso. It was an electrifying cultural dialogue across time and space. 

It’s not enough to say Cave’s work is influenced by West African models. He has assimilated, sifted, filtered, recombined and re-contextualized those forms in a way that takes on everything from cultural identity to fashion.

What’s so startling—and cool—is how he personifies the shifting terrain of contemporary design practice. Cave is an artist, a dancer, a designer, a performer, an educator, a commentator and a craftsman. In the design world, boundaries are blurring, and labels aren’t sticking as well as they once did.