Category: textiles

Ghada Amer: Disobedient Thought

May 1, 2025

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

April 20, 2025

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.