I didn’t know what to expect, so when we walked into the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, I was sucker-punched by the sight of Nick Cave’s soundsuits, extraordinary costumes constructed from everyday objects, everything from Grandma’s doilies to washboards to mid-century toy tops.

They were wonderful, but what was the artist up to?

I’m speaking of Nick Cave the Chicago-based fabric artist, performance artist and dancer, not the singer. His show was on at the Frist when I visited Nashville, in town for a hockey tournament. I went there with a friend who is a fabric artist herself (and a goalie).

Cave’s first soundsuit was a disguise, which he constructed in response to the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1992. “I started thinking about myself more and more as a black man—as someone who was discarded, devalued, viewed as ‘less than,’” he says in the gallery guide.

“Sitting in a Chicago park,” curator Katie Delmez goes on, “Cave began to gather twigs and sticks (also discarded and devalued), eventually stringing them into a wearable sculpture. When he put it on, he realized he had created a second skin that camouflaged his race, gender, class, and sexuality, thereby shielding him from judgment.

“He called the work a soundsuit because of the rustling noise generated as he walked around in it. While soundsuits mask physical features of wearers, their loud auditory and visual presence boldly expresses alternate identities. This negates the possibility of being classified as an invisible man, a condition lamented by Ralph Ellison in his landmark 1952 novel.”

The soundsuits grew from there, and Cave has made hundreds to date. One on display was a shimmering dress-like costume of white buttons sewn on white fabric with a washboard for a face, shown to the left. Another incorporated doilies and tin toys—buckets and shovels and big fat tops—into elaborate protections that were also explorations of Cave’s childhood, particularly as it involved his relationship with his grandparents.

I always think of the bond between children and their grandparents as being less fraught than the one between parents and children, so I couldn’t help seeing the soundsuits as tied up not just in protection but also acceptance—which may come down to the same thing.

They’re costumes, too. As a dancer trained by the modern master Alvin Ailey, Cave has sometimes used his soundsuits in dance performances, exploring their extraordinary susurrations. At rest, they’re sculptures. In play, they’re wardrobe, as shown in an extraordinary video that made up part of the show, with dancers hidden inside rustling soundsuits joining and parting, occasionally revealing a hint of hand or foot.

“I think I’ve sort of come to an understanding with these two ways of responding to the work,” Cave said in a New York Times interview. “I used to go to the Met or the Museum of Natural History and see artifacts that I’m forced to look at in a sculptural role—yet these objects played such significant roles in culture and society. That’s when I came to a bit of an ‘Aha’ moment in realizing that yes, it can be a sculptural object, but it has the potential of being brought to the body and activated.”

Other objects in the show, called Feat, replicated the elements of childhood, protection and nesting—or if not replicated, then elaborated upon it. In one long gallery hung three joined wall panels: Cave’s Wall Relief from 2013. In the roughly twenty-foot long assemblage, china ornaments of the type that I, too, remember from my childhood were nestled amid beading and tangled necklaces and crystals, all of them backed by a nearly-invisible field of crochet.

Most of the ornaments were birds, so perhaps the word is nesting as much as nestled. Maybe it was my own female bias, but I saw much of Cave’s work on display at the Frist as being tied up in nesting and its allied sense of protection: those important grandparents again. A separate piece in the same gallery showed a plaster dog sitting on an old-fashioned upholstered slipper chair nestled under the same sort of beading and ornamentation that was seen on the wall.

In a final room, Cave had installed multi-layered curtains of ceramic beads hung from the ceiling, like the type of beaded curtains fashionable in 1960s doorways. Layers upon layers of beads made up a forest, yet they also revealed patterns or images when seen from particular angles. Stand in one place and you’d see a jaguar watching you from the trees. Again, the sense of hiding, which in this case was not only tied up in protection (for the jaguar) but also in danger (to us).

I wondered if the Frist Art Museum intended Cave’s show to speak to another exhibition then on display, This is Slavery: The Prison Industrial Complex: Photographs by Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick. Over thirty years, Calhoun and McCormick photographed African-American men incarcerated in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola. The prison farm was once a plantation worked by slaves, many of whom were from Angola, which is where the huge maximum-security complex got its name. At 18,000 acres, the prison is bigger than Manhattan and houses 6,000 inmates, three-quarters of them African American men.

According to the curators, “It is also called ‘The Farm’ because it continues to grow cash crops—as much as four million pounds a year—using inmate labor. The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits involuntary servitude, does not apply to convicted inmates. In the minds of Calhoun and McCormick, slavery never really ended at Angola.”

Prisons supposedly protects society from criminals—that word again. In fact, the inmates themselves are in dire need of protection, hidden away from friendly eyes inside the prison complex, where they can be victimized both by guards and by other prisoners. They’re Invisible Men, the opposite of Cave in his soundsuit, which allows him to both protect and display himself at the same time.

I found the photographs of Angola searing, and a video interview with one former inmate brought me to tears. This quiet man explained he dangers of life inside the prison, where inmates could be punished severely for sharing a cell with someone who had fashioned a weapon even when they didn’t know he’d made it.

What particularly struck me was the was the way this man described his experiences in passive language and the third person. Not, I suffered this. Not even, This happened to me. But, You see, what could happen if a person was held in a cell…The passive tense became both a disguise and perhaps protection from the traumatic memories. For me, the video talked back to Cave’s flamboyant refusal of invisibility in his soundsuits while underlining the need for greater protection of Black lives, which matter. Obviously.

One final note on Cave’s soundsuits. As a white woman, I don’t live the black experience nor have any personal understanding of racism. My main job in attending Cave’s show was to try and hear what he was saying.

Yet Cave is clearly concerned with speaking to a wide audience, and for a morning, I was part of that audience. And which novelist doesn’t both hide and reveal herself in fiction?

Cave makes clear that the suits are not only protection, they’re self-revelation, drawn as they are from Mardi Gras costumes, Dogon ceremonial attire and LGBTQ ball culture, all of which declare as well as hide. Since I lived in Rio de Janeiro for several years, they made me think of both Carnival costumes and the flamboyantly-dressed gods of the macumba and candomblé pantheon, the orixas.

Orixas offer protection for their followers, but randomly. The messenger Exu is charged with delivering prayers to the higher gods, but he only does it when he feels like it, and the gods often respond in unexpected ways. Pray to get to work faster, and you might not get the car you wanted, but instead find the city putting up a bus stop outside your front door, which attracts crowds of people who litter your steps, talk loudly, fight unpredictably and generally make your life miserable. Protection is dodgy in Brazil and prayers often go unanswered. (I’ve always found this to be a pretty realistic world view.)

This is a long way of saying that I also saw Cave’s soundsuits as being embodiments of gods tacked all over with unanswered prayers. Rustling with them. That susuration.

Or perhaps the suits were prayers in themselves. Isn’t camouflage a prayer? Don’t hurt me, please. That poor dignified man from the video who was held in Angola prison complex for so many years. Wasn’t everything about his third person speech and passive voice simultaneously a way to protect himself and a prayer to be left alone?

Finally. In peace.