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.