Contemporary Art, Drawing, Sculpture

Tom Sachs at the New School

Lecture notes Feb 11 2026, New School, New York.

1. The Ethos of Making vs. Owning

Sachs argues that ownership is passive, while making is an active spiritual state.

“Drive for making, not for owning”: A critique of consumerism. The value of an object isn’t in its MSRP, but in the labor, repair, and understanding of how it functions.

Tom Sachs speaking at the New School auditorium

Broadway Boogie Woogie: This refers to Piet Mondrian’s 1942-43 painting, which he replicated with gaffer’s tape. Sachs views it as a blueprint for organized chaos. It represents the “grid” of the city—pulsating, rhythmic, and strictly structured yet vibrating with energy. He uses it as a metaphor for his studio’s organization.

2. Bricolage & Gesamtkunstwerk

These are the two bookends of his technical and conceptual approach.

Bricolage (“Everything kind of works”): The art of using whatever is at hand. In a Sachsian world, “perfect” is the enemy of “done.” If a zip-tie and plywood solve the problem, that is the most honest solution. It highlights the “scars” of construction.

Gesamtkunstwerk: A “total work of art.” This is why he doesn’t just make a sculpture; he makes the zine, the film, the uniform, and the ritual ceremony to go with it. Every detail of the environment is considered part of the piece.

3. Layers of Experience & Sympathetic Magic

Space Suit Details: Sachs focuses on things like LCGs (Liquid Cooling Garments). Even if the cooling tubes don’t “work” to NASA standards, the act of sewing them creates a “layer of experience” for the maker and the viewer.

Sympathetic Magic: This is a key Sachs concept. It’s the idea that by building a 1:1 scale model of a Saturn V rocket out of plywood, you are actually “summoning” the power and prestige of the space program. If you build it with enough devotion, it becomes the thing it represents.

The Shoe: His Nike collaborations (like the Mars Yard) are extensions of this. They aren’t “fashion”; they are tools for the “sport” of making.

4. The Studio as a System

“I’m not James Bond, I’m Q”: Bond is the consumer of gadgets; Q is the creator. Sachs identifies with the tinkerer in the basement who enables the mission.

The Sports Team: The studio (131 Varick St) operates under “Ten Bullets” (his code of conduct). Like a team, everyone has a role, a uniform, and a shared goal of excellence through discipline.

5. ISRU & The Daily Ritual

ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization): A NASA term for “living off the land” (e.g., making fuel from Martian soil). Sachs applies this to the studio: use what you have, don’t buy new stuff if you can build it.

Output before Input: This is his productivity mantra. Do not check your phone or “consume” (input) in the morning until you have “produced” (output) something—writing, drawing, or building.

Avoid the Phone: The phone is a portal to “other people’s agendas.” Sachs advocates for keeping the morning sacred for your own creative labor.

6. The Archive (Zines and Books)

A Book for Every Project: Documentation is as important as the object. A project isn’t finished until it is “codified” in a zine. This traces back to his high school days—the DIY ethos of punk rock and skate culture where if you didn’t print it, it didn’t happen.

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20 Years of Looking: From a Private Notebook to a Public Archive

February 2026

Naim Jun Paik, Gagosian, Hong Kong
Naim Jun Paik at Gagosian, Hong Kong

Twenty years ago today, I hit “Publish” for the first time. Didn’t realize I was creating what would be the longest running blog covering art exhibitions.

I didn’t do it to build a “brand” or to become an “influencer.” In fact, those words barely existed in the way we use them now. I did it because I was tired of forgetting what I’d seen. I was tired of walking out of a white-walled gallery in Chelsea or a dim basement in London and having the names of the artists and the visceral feeling of the work slip from my memory.

It took an architecture-adjacent exhibition, on Le Corbusier’s furniture designs, to make me stop and photograph what I saw so that I would have access to it later.

So this blog started as a digital notebook, a place to park my thoughts so I could find them later. I never expected it to become a twenty-year map of my life.

The Ghosts of Galleries Past

Looking back through the archives is a trip through a version of the art world that mostly exists in memory now. There are reviews here of galleries that folded during the 2008 crash, pop-ups in neighborhoods that have since been completely transformed, and “emerging” artists who are now household names (and a few who vanished entirely).

It turns out that when you keep a notebook for two decades, you accidentally become a historian.

Paul Klee at David Zwirner, New York
paul klee at Zwirner, NY

The Evolution of the “Eye”

If you go all the way back to the early blog (I don’t encourage), it’s frankly a bit cringeworthy. My “eye” back then was different, my biases were different. But that’s the beauty of a 20-year trail. I can see exactly where I learned to appreciate what I appreciate, where I fell out of following certain trends, and how I found my own voice as a viewer (if that makes sense).

A note to my 2006 self: You didn’t properly cover that one show, but your enthusiasm was exactly where it needed to be. It got this rolling.

To Those Who Stumbled In

To anyone who has been reading since the early days of RSS feeds, or anyone who just found this notebook via a random search for an obscure exhibition: Thank you. This space is still just a notebook. It’s a place for me to remember. But knowing that there’s a community of fellow observers peering over my shoulder has made the process of looking more rewarding.

Here’s to twenty years of white walls, strange installations, and the endless pursuit of seeing something that changes the way we think.

Julian Schnabel at Gagosian
julian schnabel at gagosian ny

What’s next?

I’m not stopping. The notebook is still open.

-Smokychimp

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Dan Flavin: Grids

Zwirner, New York, January 15—February 21, 2026

Dan Flavin at David Zwirner is often the rare “big-name light show” that is actually about looking, not just bathing in color for the selfies. This one, titled Dan Flavin: Grids, is a tight, historically specific presentation: it focuses on Flavin’s “grid” constructions, a body of work he began in 1976.  Zwirner frames it as the first focused examination of that format.

The gallery’s stated premise is also unusually specific: several installations are “re-creations” of how Flavin installed the grids in significant lifetime exhibitions, with loans from public collections and the Estate. That matters because Flavin’s work is not just “light in a room.” It is light behaving against a particular corner, a particular wall height, a particular ceiling condition. In other words: architecture, but with fluorescent tubes doing the drawing.

Flavin’s grids are a special subset of his practice because they push past the clean one-liner summary of him as the artist of commercially available fluorescent lamps. In the exhibition text, curator Michael Govan is quoted calling the grids “among the most intense and concentrated” of Flavin’s lights. The reason is structural: the grids pair an equal number of vertical fixtures facing backward with horizontal fixtures facing forward, in varying color combinations. You end up with a work that broadcasts outward to you while also pumping color into the corner itself, so the room becomes a mixing chamber.

[…]
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Photography

Zhang Kechun: Yellow Land

La Galerie, Hong Kong, 20 November 2025 to 24 January 2026

La Galerie Paris 1839 presented “Yellow Land and The Sky Garden” from November 20, 2025 through January 24, 2026 at 74 Hollywood Road, Central. The exhibition marked Zhang’s first Hong Kong outing since 2017 and paired recent work from two series. “Yellow Land” extends his long engagement with northern China’s loess plateau and the afterimage of industry. “The Sky Garden” shifts the gaze to engineered green spaces that hover over new urban fabric. In his Yellow River project, Zhang uses a large-format, high-key palette and broad, atmospheric compositions to position small human figures and infrastructure inside vast, muted landscapes. The effect is cool and unsentimental. You read the pictures for evidence of modernization and urban geometry. The gallery anchored the run with bilingual artist talks at the opening.

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Modern Art, Painting

Joan Mitchell: To Define a Feeling, 1960-1965

David Zwirner, New York, November 6–December 13, 2025.

At David Zwirner’s 20th Street gallery, To define a feeling, 1960–1965 zeroed in on a short, charged span in Joan Mitchell’s practice. Curated by Sarah Roberts with the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the show brought together canvases and works on paper from the so-called “black paintings” years, when Mitchell tightened the palette, stacked brushwork into dense verticals, and let black and white flare through restrained color.

Several loans and foundation works clarified the transition from the Paris move to the fuller chroma of the later French years. You could feel her testing speed and structure, especially in the ravishing charcoal sketches. The title came from a 1965 remark of hers – they were attempts to catch sensation before it turns into a picture.

The exhibition formed part of the artist’s centennial programming, one node among museum events and publications that traced her influence. It also marked a return to Chelsea, with Zwirner presenting a period that often gets overshadowed by the late sunflowers.

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Ceramics, Sculpture

A Hidden Oasis in the Bronx

Tucked away on the ground floor of the Walsh Family Library at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, the Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art is one of New York City’s best-kept secrets. For anyone in the Bronx, it offers a startlingly intimate encounter with the ancient world, particularly the enigmatic Etruscan civilization that predated and influenced the rise of Rome.

Roman bust carved in marble
Fordham's Museum of Etruscan Art
etruscan vase at Fordham
An Etruscan Mosaic

The museum’s location (literally inside a library) creates a quiet atmosphere. Unlike the sprawling halls of the Met, where you might feel like one of many thousands, here you are often the only person in the room with artifacts that are 2,500 years old. Windows look out onto the campus, grounding the ancient objects in a modern academic setting.

Etruscan Highlights

While the collection spans the Mediterranean, its Etruscan holdings are particularly evocative of a culture that blended elegance with a deep focus on the afterlife and ritual.

  • Bucchero Ware: The collection’s standout is its array of Bucchero pottery. This is the signature “black-on-black” ceramic of the Etruscans, designed to mimic more expensive hammered metal. The deep, lustrous black finish and sharp, angular shapes provide a striking contrast to the more common red-and-black figure Greek vases nearby.
  • Votive Offerings: You’ll find a fascinating collection of terracotta votive heads and feet. These were left at temples as “thank you” notes or prayers for healing. They are surprisingly human and individualistic, offering a direct emotional link to the people from the Italian peninsula long before the Caesars.
  • The Burial Amphora: A centerpiece of the renovated gallery is a large Etruscan Amphora (ca. 650 B.C.E.). It serves as a focal point for understanding Etruscan burial ceremonies, surrounded by smaller implements like bronze spearheads and cosmetic applicators.
[…]
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Wolf Kahn

Miles McInerney, New York, October 30 to Dec 20 2025

The Wolf Kahn exhibition reads like a clear, late chapter for an artist who made color carry far. Curated by M. Rachael Arauz, the show gathered oils and pastels with chromatic abandon. Acid greens press against smoky violets. Barns and tree belts hold the field. The result was a concise survey of how Kahn fused observation with Color Field thinking, replacing topography with sensation.

Wolf Kahn was born in Stuttgart in 1927 and immigrated to the United States in 1940. He studied with Hans Hofmann and moved fluidly between New York and a farm in West Brattleboro, Vermont. The blend of realist structure and luminous color became his signature across oil and pastel. Kahn died in 2020.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Maria Lassnig: Self with Dragon

Hauser and Wirth, Hong Kong Sept 26 2025 to Feb 28 2026

Hauser & Wirth’s Hong Kong exhibition of Maria Lassnig last year felt like a clear, unsentimental reminder of how much of contemporary figurative painting still sits in her shadow. The show gathered works from the 1960s through the early 2000s and framed them not as historical artifacts but as still-charged experiments in how a body can be felt, pictured, or even invented. Lassnig called it “body awareness,” which sounds gentle enough until you’re in front of the paintings. They’re anything but soft. They are negotiations between sensation and representation, full of edits, ruptures, and moments where the figure seems to peel itself out of the paint in real time.

The curators made a smart decision to avoid overloading the space. Hong Kong can overwhelm quickly; here, the relative sparseness gave each canvas room to broadcast its pressure. Early works like Self-Portrait with Telephone positioned her as an artist already suspicious of realism’s promises. The body is both there and not there, rendered in zones of color rather than anatomical confidence. You sense she’s painting what she feels rather than what she sees, and sometimes the feeling isn’t particularly coherent. That incoherence is the point. Lassnig trusts it more than a mirror.

[…]
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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists

M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 20 September 2025 to 8 January 2026

From the M+ Museum in West Kowloon, this blockbuster exhibition, Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now, was a massive, shimmering statement that basically told the Hong Kong art scene that women have been building entire worlds for decades. The show takes over several key spaces in the museum, including the West Gallery, Focus Gallery, Atrium, and the Main Hall. Because many of the installations were “environments” (like the Feather Room and Spectral Passage), the show had specific “House Rules” most notably that visitors had to remove their shoes and wear socks to enter the actual artworks.

The Concept: Art You Can Live In

The brilliance of Dream Rooms was perhaps in the scale, but also in the reclaiming of history. For years, “environmental art” (large-scale installations) was seen as a masculine pursuit: heavy materials, industrial grit, “man against nature.” This show proves that women were also the true pioneers of immersive spaces, often using “soft” or ephemeral materials to create even more powerful psychological impact.

The Standouts:

  • Chiharu Shiota’s Infinite Memory: Walking into the Focus Gallery felt like entering a collective dream. Shiota’s signature red thread webs were so dense they felt like architecture. It was a massive, pulsating nervous system that made you feel slightly trapped.
  • Aleksandra Kasuba’s Spectral Passage: This was the show-stopper for anyone who loves color theory. A series of interconnected nylon tunnels that felt like walking through a rainbow. Paired with Gustav Holst’s The Planets, it turned the museum into a futuristic transit hub for the soul.
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Architecture

Skylight Magic!

When the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) reopened in March 2025 after its two-year closure, the “stealth” nature of the work was its greatest success.

It’s a rare feat in architecture to spend over $16 million and have the most common reaction be, “Wait, what actually changed?” But for a Louis Kahn masterpiece, that is exactly the point.

Before the renovation, the 224 domed skylights (which Kahn called the building’s “fifth elevation”) had yellowed and cracked over nearly 50 years.

Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)
Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)
Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)
Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)
Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)
Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)
Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)
Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)
Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)

The Material Swap: The original acrylic domes were replaced with high-performance polycarbonate. To the naked eye, they look identical to the 1977 originals, but they are significantly more durable and offer much better UV protection.

Just below the domes, the museum installed new “daylight cassettes.” These are the diffusers that catch the sunlight. They were engineered to mimic the original quality of light while better protecting the delicate Turner watercolors and Constable oils from direct sun.

The “Butterfly” Effect: Kahn famously said that on a gray day the building looks like a moth, and on a sunny day like a butterfly. Because the new skylights are so clear, that “breathing” quality of the light, where the galleries brighten and dim as clouds pass, feels more vivid than it has in decades.

Subtle but Significant Upgrades

Beyond the roof, the “barely there” changes were meticulously executed by Knight Architecture:

LED Transition: They swapped out the hot halogen bulbs for custom-tuned LEDs. This reduced energy consumption by nearly 60%, yet they managed to keep the warm, incandescent “glow” that Kahn preferred.

The “Domestic” Feel: The walls were refreshed with new natural Belgian linen, and the worn synthetic carpets were replaced with New Zealand wool. Even the iconic white oak wall panels were refinished by hand rather than replaced, preserving the “patina of use.”

Why it Matters in 2026

Since you’re likely visiting or following the current cycle, the museum is now in its “New Light” era. The reinstallation of the permanent collection is not just a chronological walk.

Note: If you are there this spring, don’t miss the “Going Modern: British Art, 1900–1960” exhibition. Seeing those mid-century works under the newly clarified light of the fourth-floor galleries is a completely different experience than it was five years ago.

It’s a demonstration in how to honor an architect’s ghost while bringing the building’s infrastructure into the 21st century.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

Gagosian, New York, September 12 to December 20 2025.

At Gagosian’s West 21st Street space, Running Arcs (For John Cage) returned to public view after more than three decades, its first presentation in the United States. The three monumental, conical steel plates are arranged in a staggered rhythm that bends the room into corridors of weight. Each plate is roughly 52 feet long, 13 feet high, and 2 inches thick. The title nods to Serra’s friendship with Cage and to the way the piece scores movement, tempo, and chance as you pass along its curve. (Gagosian)

The plates do not tower for effect. They lean in and run, turning peripheral vision into an event and making the floor feel like a material in the piece. It is Serra at his most austere. And most cinematic. (Gagosian)

Richard Serra (1938–2024) reshaped late 20th-century sculpture with site-scaled steel works that use mass, balance, and procession to produce experience. Trained in painting before moving to industrial materials, he developed a vocabulary of rolled or forged steel plates and torqued forms, along with a major body of drawings. His long relationship with Gagosian includes landmark installations across the gallery’s New York spaces. (Gagosian)

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Photography

Paolo Roversi Along The Way

Pace Gallery, New York, Sept 11 to 25 October, 2025

Paolo Roversi show in Pace’s focused retrospective, titled Along the Way, staged to coincide with New York Fashion Week and running mid-September through late October.

What surprised me, walking into it, was how little the show tried to “convert” the skeptical viewer. A lot of fashion photography in a white-cube gallery arrives with an apologetic posture: please notice the craft, please forget the client, please treat these as pictures not product. Pace mostly sidestepped that anxiety by leaning into Roversi’s real subject, which is not “fashion” so much as the conditions under which someone becomes image. The wall texts and selection emphasized collaborators and long relationships, which is the right frame for him. His best work is basically an extended study in trust, timing, and light.

[…]
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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Uncategorized

Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, New York
June 27, 2025–January 4, 2026

At the Morgan Library & Museum (June 27, 2025–January 4, 2026), Lisa Yuskavage: Drawings presents three decades of the artist’s works on paper—studies, monotypes, and freestanding drawings that function like blueprints for her paintings. You can watch her figures come from graphite sketches into radiating flesh, then dissolve again into stains and distemper; the materials list alone—graphite, Conté, pastel, charcoal, gouache, watercolor, ink, acrylic—maps a vocabulary of touch that’s looser, funnier, and more intimate than the canvas persona most people know. The Morgan’s presentation makes a case that the drawings aren’t side notes, they reveal how sex, comedy, and sentimentality get tuned at the level of the line.

Critics have read the show as a recalibration of her reputation, where early ’90s sheets sit beside recent work to show an artist steadily iterating how bodies occupy desire and space. Whether you find the erotics subversive or skeptical, the draftsmanship is the constant, and the Morgan’s intimate room serves it well.

Artist bio (brief): Born in 1962, Lisa Yuskavage is a New York–based painter represented by David Zwirner, known for saturated, figurative canvases that splice Old Master atmospheres with pop-libidinal charge. The Morgan exhibition marks the first comprehensive museum presentation of her drawings, spanning the early 1990s to today.

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Architecture, Sculpture

“A Time to Build” at the Shaker Museum

Shaker Museum, Kinderhook, New York opened May 31 2025

Shaker Design and the Art of Removal

Walking through the Shaker Museum’s pop-up exhibition in Kinderhook, A Time to Build, I kept returning to a sculptural idea that sits underneath the familiar story we tell about Shaker “minimalism.” We tend to describe Shaker design as spare, disciplined, and unornamented…a kind of pre-modern Minimalism. But the deeper common ground is actually its method. Shaker craft is, again and again, subtractive sculpture.

In subtractive sculpture, or generally subtractive fabrication, the object starts with a mass in excess of the final result. Whether the object is a block, a beam, a plank, a thick door stile, its first state contains more material than the finished thing requires. It’s an obvious fact, but important enough to be stated clearly. The work, then: ongoing decisions about what to remove, what to spare, and what must stay intact for the object to hold together. Subtractive sculpture is a very different logic than additive sculpture (clay, wax, assemblage, collage), where form accrues through buildup, revision, layering, and so forth. With subtractive fabrication, the object becomes what’s left. The object is a remainder.

Shaker museum, A time to build

In the exhibit’s tool case, the story is told bluntly. The curved-handled hewing tool and the broad hatchet aren’t “about” decoration; they’re about transforming raw stock into legible planes. The plumb bob, dangling with its string, is companion to the blade: the plumb bob makes sure the subtraction lines up with gravity. The bush hammer is a device for texturing or dressing a surface by controlled removal. Put together, these implements revolve around a vocabulary of subtracting. The tools here are designed to make material smaller, truer, flatter, tighter.

[…]
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Uncategorized

Anindita Dutta: Performance Piece

Pen and Brush, New York, May 20, 2026

Anindita Dutta is an Indian-born, US-based sculptor, installation artist, and performance artist whose practice is materially anchored in wet clay and, increasingly, in the collision between clay and repurposed everyday matter (textiles, clothing, domestic remnants). Her work treats the body as a site of pressure: memory, mortality, and impermanence made literal through the thick clay that cracks, slumps, dries, and records her imprint.

Her most legible “signature” is the way she uses clay as both medium and metaphor. Clay lets her keep process visible: surfaces read as worked and worried. In performance-related work, the body and clay often blur into one another. Clay carries its own behavior, and Dutta leans into it rather than hiding it.

A mildly skeptical read, and I think it is fair, is that work like this can tip into seduction by material density. When it’s strongest, the material excess is in service of a specific psychic or bodily proposition, not just “look how much the surface can hold.” The better pieces tend to be the ones where she maintains a clear hierarchy: sensation first, symbolism second, then spectacle.

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Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture

Robert Indiana: The American Dream

Pace, New York, May 9 to August 15, 2025



Pace Gallery’s Robert Indiana: The American Dream pulls the artist’s signage, numerology, and road-worn Americana together into a single argument: Indiana didn’t just brand LOVE; he built a whole visual grammar for the country that taught him its alphabet on billboards and gasoline pumps. The show gathers early hard-edge paintings, later meditations on highways and coinage, and the sculptural ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers).

If Indiana’s paintings read like dispatches from postwar America, the Cor-Ten numbers slow the message to a rust-blooming hum. Each numeral stands alone and can be re-sequenced to generate fresh alignments of time, memory, and fate. He often described the sequence as a life cycle: 1 as birth, 0 as death, with the intervening digits walking us through youth, prime, and autumn.

Indiana, a self-described “American painter of signs,” doesn’t illustrate the Dream so much as surface its infrastructure: the numerals we assign to ages and exits; the slogans that sell us gasoline and belonging; the hard edges of policy that decide who merges and who waits. Pace’s framing stresses that double register. Personal history braided with public language, make the show as much about how a country talks to itself as about one artist’s lexicon.

Pace includes canonical examples but the show’s real satisfaction is how the numbers re-center Indiana’s project. He builds a ledger for American aspiration, where desire reads as typography and consequence arrives as arithmetic. It is a quiet reminder that how we arrange our symbols is how we arrange our lives

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting

William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio

Hauser and Wirth, New York, 1 May to 1 August, 2025

The show’s organizing idea is disarmingly simple and, for Kentridge, unusually literal: the studio as a thinking machine. Kentridge has described the studio as “an enlarged head,” a place where the world comes in, gets broken into fragments, and returns as drawing, performance, or text. (Hauser & Wirth) That statement can read like artist talk boilerplate until you are in the installation, where the “head” is not metaphorical but procedural. The show was built around his episodic film “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,” and then surrounded the viewer with the working material that makes that film possible: drawings, paper fragments, revisions, and sculptural props that feel as if they have wandered out of rehearsal. (IFPDA)

The exhibition is not a greatest-hits survey. Instead of treating film, drawing, and sculpture as parallel lanes, it shows their cross-contamination. The film’s premise, a self-portrait displaced onto a domestic object, lets Kentridge do what he does best: think in public. The coffee pot is comic, but it is also a constraint, a way to keep autobiography from turning sentimental. That emphasis on apparatus is why the show feels closer to a studio visit than to a polished museum narrative. (The World Of Interiors)

[…]
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Contemporary Art, Sculpture, textiles

Ghada Amer: Disobedient Thought

Marianne Boesky, New York, May 1 to June 14, 2025

Ghada Amer’s exhibition Disobedient Thoughts at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, presented in spring 2025, offered a lucid and forceful summation of her long-standing project: to unsettle the hierarchies that separate abstraction from figuration, craft from high modernism, and private desire from public form. Installed across the gallery’s West 24th Street space, the show combined large-scale embroidered paintings with a suite of compact sculptures.

The paintings announce Amer’s method through contradiction. From a distance, several canvases read as exercises in modernist discipline, such as grids, nested squares, vertical bands. These recall canonical figures such as Mondrian or Albers. Up close, however, these structures are disrupted by cascades of hand-embroidered thread that slip, knot, and pool across the surface. The thread, often attached with gel medium, refuses the crisp authority of paint. It sags and tangles, asserting gravity and the unmistakable presence of the artist’s hand. Amer’s signature strategy, overlaying abstract order with unruly materiality, here feels less oppositional than accumulative.

[…]
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Modern Art, textiles

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction

Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, April 20 to Sept 13, 2025

Walk into Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at MoMA, and you’re not just entering a show, you’re stepping into a quiet insurrection that’s been stitching itself together across cultures. These labeled “craft” instead of “capital-A Art.”

This exhibition doesn’t simply display textiles alongside modern abstraction, it exposes how inseparable they’ve always been. The loom was never a footnote to the brushstroke; it was a parallel lineage, often overlooked because it was done by women, by Indigenous artists, by people whose hands weren’t holding oil paints in Paris but cotton threads in Peru, Ghana, or Gee’s Bend.

The show features works that blur the line between structure and spirit, labor and gesture. Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Rosemarie Trockel. But also artists who are less frequently canonized, bringing forward textile traditions embedded with political resistance, ritual, and cultural survival. What’s astonishing is not just how these works hold their own next to “pure” abstraction.

The warp and weft of this exhibit suggest that abstraction didn’t just emerge from cold, white studios filled with silence and theory. It also came from looms, from weaving circles, from hands repeating gestures older than the museums themselves.

Woven Histories is a tangle of narratives, materials, and meaning.

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