Emily Kam Kngwarray @ Tate Modern, London

Emily Kam Kngwarray 

Tate Modern, London

10 July 2025 – 11 January 2026

Emily Kam Kngwarray 

near Mparntwe  / Alice Springs in 1980

Photograph © Toly Sawenko

Tate Modern presents Europe’s first major solo exhibition dedicated to one of the most extraordinary figures in international contemporary art, Emily Kam Kngwarray (c.1914-1996). A senior Anmatyerr woman from the Sandover region in the Northern Territory of Australia, Kngwarray translated her ceremonial and spiritual engagement with her ancestral Country, Alhalker, into vivid batik textiles and monumental acrylic paintings on canvas. Taking up painting in her 70s and devoting her final years to creating a large body of art, Emily Kam Kngwarray forged a path for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, women artists and Australian artists, and continues to entice audiences around the world three decades after her passing. Organised in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia, this extensive survey brings together over 80 works from across her extraordinary career. Showing many pieces outside Australia for the first time, the exhibition offers European audiences a once in a lifetime chance to experience Kngwarray’s powerful batiks, paintings and vibrant legacy.

Emily Kam Kngwarray began experimenting with new art media at Utopia Station in the 1970s. After learning the technique of making batik, in the late 1980s she transitioned to painting in acrylic on canvas. Her practice was shaped by her intimate knowledge of her Country and by her role in women’s ceremonial traditions of ‘awely’, which encompass song, dance and the painting on bodies with ground ochres. She sat on the ground when she painted, much in the same way she would sit to prepare food, dig yams from the earth, tell stories by drawing on the sand or ‘paint up’ for awely ceremonies. Her deeply personal approach to painting was developed in isolation from the European and North American artistic practices of her time. This exhibition presents Kngwarray’s work through the lens of her own world, showcasing her as a matriarch of her community, storyteller, singer, visual artist, and custodian of Country.

Encapsulating the ecology of her homeland, Kngwarray’s work features motifs derived from native plants, animals and natural forms. She regularly depicted the pencil yam (anwerlarr) and its edible underground tuber and seedpods (kam), after which she is named, as well as the emu (ankerr), reflecting the animal’s significance to Aboriginal Peoples. The exhibition opens with three acrylic paintings acquired for Tate’s collection in 2019 - Untitled (Alhalker) 1989, Ntang 1990, and Untitled 1990 - featuring densely layered fields of dots representing native seeds. These are accompanied by Awely 1989, inspired by designs women paint on each other’s bodies before performing awely. Two of Kngwarray’s early batiks join Emu Woman 1988, her first ever work on canvas that attracted widespread national attention. These introductory rooms trace the evolution of the artist’s visual language, grounded in her detailed knowledge of the desert ecosystems of Alhalker.

Works from the early phase of Kngwarray’s painting career are shown alongside a striking display of batiks on silk and cotton that hang from floor to ceiling and immerse visitors in the artist’s vivid evocations of her Country. These works are often rooted in the Dreaming (Altyerr), the eternal life force that created the land and its myriad living forms and defined the social and cultural practices of people. Ntang Dreaming 1989 depicts the edible seeds of the woollybutt grass (alyatywereng), while Ankerr (emu) 1989 maps a path of emu footprints travelling between water sources. Larger canvases, including the three-metre Kam 1991, demonstrate how Emily Kam Kngwarray began working on monumental paintings and employing a brighter colour palette.

At the heart of the exhibition is The Alhalker Suite 1993, one of Kngwarray’s most ambitious works on loan from the National Gallery of Australia. Produced at the height of her painting career, it offers a vibrant portrait of Alhalker Country across 22 canvases. Revealing Kngwarray’s broadened colour spectrum and techniques, bright pastel pinks and blues evoke the wildflowers which carpet the landscape after rainfall, and collections of merging dots represent the rockfaces and grasslands of Alhalker. The artist did not impose any limitations for the configuration of the panels, so a new way of seeing her land is possible each time the work is displayed- an ongoing reminder that the stories and places she painted are very much alive.

In her final years, Emily Kam Kngwarray made an abrupt stylistic change, creating a suite of works comprising bold parallel monochrome lines in her familiar palette of reds and yellows, painted on white paper or canvas. Tate Modern presents Untitled (Awely) 1994, a six-panel work originally shown as the centerpiece of the Australian Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. The evident tactile quality with which Emily Kam Kngwarray applied the paint evokes the gesture and intimacy of painting on the body for awely ceremonies. Moving away from lines and dots during this late period, Kngwarray developed gestural paintings with fluid brushstrokes that burst with energy. Closing the exhibition, Yam Awely 1995 with its intricately painted twists of white, yellow and red intertwined with linear markings of grasses, yams, roots and tracks signifies the timeless connection between Emily Kam Kngwarray and her Country.

Exhibition organised by Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Australia based on an exhibition curated by Kelli Cole, Warumungu and Luritja peoples and Hetti Perkins, Arrernte and Kalkadoon peoples.

Curated by Kelli Cole, Director of Curatorial & Engagement, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Gallery of Australia project, with Kimberley Moulton, Adjunct Curator, Indigenous Art, Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational; Charmaine Toh, Senior Curator, International Art, Tate Modern; Genevieve Barton, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern and Hannah Gorlizki, Exhibitions Assistant, Tate Modern.

Following its presentation at Tate Modern, the exhibition will tour to Fondation Opale, Switzerland in a new iteration developed in collaboration with curator Kelli Cole.

TATE MODERN

Bankside, London SE1 9TG

www.tate.org.uk

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction @ MoMA, New York

Woven Histories:

Textiles and Modern Abstraction 

MoMA, New York 

April 20 — September 13, 2025 

Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) 

Weaving 89/21 (Tejedura 89/21), 1989 

Cut-and-woven paper, 9 × 8″ (22.9 × 20.3 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through 

the Latin American and Caribbean Fund 

in honor of Jeanne Collins 

© 2024 Fundación Gego

Ed Rossbach 

Constructed Color Wall Hanging, 1965 

Synthetic raffia, 57 x 71″ (144.8 x 180.3 cm) 

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Emery Fund

Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) 

Weaving 90/36, 1990 

Pencil on cut paper woven with plastic packaging, 

6 1/4 × 5″ (15.9 × 12.7 cm)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through 

the Latin American and Caribbean Fund 

in honor of Patty Lipshutz 

© 2024 Fundación Gego

The Museum of Modern Art presents Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, an in-depth exhibition that delves into the dynamic intersections between weaving and abstraction. The exhibition includes approximately 150 works in a range of mediums—from textiles and basketry to painting, drawing, sculpture, and media works—exploring the overlap between abstract art, weaving, craft, and fashion. Woven Histories challenges long-held notions of the weave as a function of textile alone, exploring the many forms both warp and weft have taken when explored by abstract artists over the past 100 years. 

Previously on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the exhibition’s final presentation is at MoMA, with numerous works not seen at earlier venues.

Unfolding chronologically, Woven Histories begins with works by pioneering artists of the early 20th century whose explorations in textile transformed the scope of modern art. Highlighting MoMA’s substantial holdings from the period, the show’s final iteration exclusively features Gunta Stolzl’s "Wall Hanging" (1924), and an expanded selection of work by Anni Albers, including her historic "Free-Hanging Room Dividers" (c. 1940). More recent works by such artists as Igshaan Adams, Rosemarie Trockel, and Andrea Zittel reveal common threads between this expanded history of abstract art and contemporary practice. Highlighting issues of labor and identity that are intertwined with modern textile production, Woven Histories posits weaving and textiles as the quintessential link between lived experience and art, as explored in works by Diedrick Brackens, Liz Collins, Jeffrey Gibson, and Laura Huertas Millán.

Inspired by contemporary artists’ interest in, and engagement with, both traditional and avant-garde weaving practices, Woven Histories hinges on key historical moments during which these intersections are clearest, from the early 20th century, through the postwar moment, and continuing today. Many of the included artists have work on view at MoMA for the first time, including Shan Goshorn, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Ellen Lesperance, Carole Frances Lung, and Marilou Schultz. Woven Histories expands the notion of the development of abstraction from its earliest days, challenging its status as a solely conceptual and formalist framework by suggesting that its materiality—found in woven, knotted, and braided fabric—is equally critical to its understanding and success.

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. The exhibition is curated by Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art. The Museum of Modern Art presentation is organized by Esther Adler, Curator, with Emily Olek, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawing and Prints, and Paul Galloway, Collection Specialist, Department of Architecture and Design.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART - MoMA, NEW YORK

www.moma.org

Laura Letinsky and John Paul Morabito @ Yancey Richardson, New York - "orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit" Exhibition

Laura Letinsky and John Paul Morabito

orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit

Yancey Richardson, New York

February 27 – April 12, 2025

Laura Letinsky & John Paul Morabito 

indiapilehamletmemajamina, 2015 

Cotton and wool, 52 x 41 inches

© Laura Letinsky & John Paul Morabito

Courtesy Yancey Richardson

Yancey Richardson presents 

orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit, an exhibition of cotton and wool tapestries made by Laura Letinsky and John Paul Morabito. The exhibition is on view in the project gallery.

Since 2013, Letinsky and Morabito have worked collaboratively, bringing photography and weaving into dialogue and exploring the cooperative possibilities between the two mediums. Central to their conception of this project was an understanding of the loom as a kind of precursor to the creative capacities eventually unleashed by the computer and the digital age more broadly.

In orchidsgladiolascowsdaffodilscandywrappersyelloworange-bloodredroses&shit, Laura Letinsky continues her career-long investigation of photography’s relationship to temporality, specifically through the genre of still-life. While travelling across India in 2014, Letinsky made multiple trips to the Bangalore Flower market where she found streets transformed by remnants from the early morning market. Crushed gladiolas, orchids, roses, marigolds and lilies blended together, creating dense and vivid fields of complex color. In Mumbai, Laura Letinsky made pictures of flower petals left behind on the streets following celebratory wedding nights. With her camera aimed straight  down she created pure abstractions of texture and color.

Weaving together richly hued cotton and wool thread, Morabito translated Letinsky’s digital abstractions into lusciously colored painterly tapestries. In contrast to the sharp delineation of forms so typical of photographic prints, the tapestries present abstract yet tactile visual fields that connect us back to moments viscerally felt. Expressed through a wide range of brilliantly colored threads, the works explore the tensions between beauty, fragility and loss.

In Letinsky and Morabito words: “Last night’s flowers, digitally apprehended, are cast out of an Eden remembered, and brought home to the loom. The shutter’s click is joined by a wooden whirr as the shuttle plies back and forth. Line by line, the digital screen is consumed by lapis blues, acid yellows, and putrescent greens. Those wool threads, loose and tangled, are mired amongst the flowers (redolent with their perfumes and high noon sweat).”

Laura Letinsky was born in 1962 in Winnipeg, Canada. She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1986 and MFA from Yale University’s School of Art in 1991. Since 1994, she has been a Professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at FOAM, Amsterdam; PhotoEspaña, Madrid; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Denver Art Museum; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. Public collections featuring Letinsky’s work include the Art Institute of Chicago; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Art Gallery. She has received numerous awards, including the Canada Council International Residency (2014); Richard Driehaus Foundation Award (2003); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2002) and the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2000). Publications include To Want for Nothing, ROMAN NVMERALS, 2019; Time’s Assignation, Radius Books, 2018; Ill Form and Void Full, Radius Books, 2014; After All, Damiani, 2010; Hardly More Than Ever, Renaissance Society, 2004 and Venus Inferred, University of Chicago Press, 2000.

John Paul Morabito was born in 1982 in New York, USA. They are Assistant Professor and Head of Textiles at Kent State University School of Art. In 2024, John Paul Morabito was named a United States Artists Fellow for their significant contributions to weaving and contemporary art. Morabito has exhibited at international venues including the Zhejiang Art Museum (Hangzhou City, China); the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (affiliate of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem, NC); the Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA); the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); the Center for Craft (Asheville, NC); and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI). Their work is represented in public and private collections including the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, NC) and the Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec (Montréal, Canada). They hold a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. John Paul Morabito is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.

YANCEY RICHARDSON

525 West 22nd Street, New York City

www.yanceyrichardson.com

Olga de Amaral @ Fondation Cartier, Paris - Retrospective + Catalogue

Olga de Amaral

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris

Jusqu'au 16 mars 2025

Please Scroll down for English version

Olga de Amaral

Vue d'exposition / Installation View

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

© Olga de Amaral. Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Photo © Cyril Marcilhacy

La Fondation Cartier présente la première grande rétrospective en Europe de l'artiste colombienne Olga de Amaral, figure incontournable du Fiber Art.

Dès les années 1960, Olga de Amaral repousse les limites du médium textile en multipliant les expériences sur les matières (lin, coton, crin de cheval, gesso, feuilles d’or ou palladium) et les techniques : elle tisse, noue, tresse, entrelace les fils pour créer des pièces tridimensionnelles et monumentales. Inclassable, son œuvre emprunte tant aux principes modernistes, qu’elle découvre à l’académie de Cranbrook aux États-Unis, qu’aux traditions vernaculaires de son pays et à l’art précolombien. Après avoir présenté six œuvres de la série Brumas dans le cadre de l'exposition Géométries Sud en 2018, la Fondation Cartier retrace l’ensemble de la carrière d’Olga de Amaral et célèbre celle qui marqua une véritable révolution dans l’art du textile.

L'exposition rassemble un grand nombre d’œuvres historiques jamais présentées hors de Colombie ainsi que des œuvres contemporaines aux formes et couleurs vibrantes. L’architecture de l’exposition est conçue par Lina Ghotmeh. Jouant sur les contrastes et les échelles, l’architecte lie les œuvres entre elles et propose également un dialogue avec notre mémoire, nos sens et le paysage qui nous entoure.

Née en 1932 à Bogotá, Olga de Amaral est une figure emblématique de la scène artistique colombienne. Après un diplôme d’architecture au Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, elle poursuit ses études à l’académie de Cranbrook dans le Michigan, équivalent américain du Bauhaus allemand. Elle y découvre l’art textile dans l’atelier de tissage de Marianne Strengell, une artiste et designeuse finno-américaine qui fut l’une des premières à privilégier la structure et la grille du textile au motif.

Dans les années 1960 et 1970 Olga de Amaral participe aux côtés de Sheila Hicks et Magdalena Abakanowicz au développement du Fiber Art en utilisant de nouveaux matériaux et de nouvelles techniques empruntées tant aux principes modernistes qu’aux traditions populaires de son pays. Ses œuvres abstraites à grande échelle s’affranchissent du mur et refusent toute catégorisation : à la fois peintures, sculptures, installations et architectures elles enveloppent leur public dans l’univers sensoriel et intime de l’artiste.

Olga de Amaral est nommée “Visionary Artist” par le Museum of Art & Design de New York en 2005 et elle reçoit le Women’s Cacus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award en 2019. Ses oeuvres figurent dans de grandes collections publiques et privées à travers le monde dont la Tate Modern, le MoMA, le Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris ou l’Art Institute of Chicago. Le Museum of Fine Arts de Houston lui a consacré une grande exposition intitulée Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock en 2021.

Commissaire de l'exposition : Marie Perennès

Un superbe catalogue accompagne cette exposition.

Olga de Amaral

Éditions Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris

Version française et version anglaise

Broché, 22 × 29 cm, 300 pages

250 reproductions couleur et noir et blanc

ISBN : 978-2-86925-184-7

Parution : octobre 2024

Avec les contributions d’Ann Coxon, conservatrice et spécialiste de l’art textile ; de Lina Ghotmeh, architecte de l’exposition ; de Marie Perennès, commissaire de l’exposition ; et de María Wills Londoño, historienne de l’art.

ENGLISH VERSION

The Fondation Cartier presents the first major retrospective in Europe of Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, a key figure of the Fiber Art movement.

Since the 1960s, Olga de Amaral has pushed the limits of the textile medium by increasing experiments with various materials (linen, cotton, horsehair, gesso, gold leaf or palladium) and techniques: she weaves, knots, braids, and interweaves the threads to create monumental, threedimensional pieces. Unclassifiable, her work borrows as much from the Modernist principles she discovered at the Cranbrook Academy in the United States, as from the vernacular traditions of her country and from pre- Columbian art. After presenting six works from the Brumas series as part of the Southern Geometries exhibition in 2018, the Fondation Cartier retraces Olga de Amaral’s entire career and celebrates a figure who brought about a true revolution in the textile arts.

The exhibition brings together a large number of historical works never presented outside Colombia, as well as contemporary pieces with vibrant shapes and colors. The architecture of the exhibition is designed by Lina Ghotmeh. Playing on contrasts and scales, it links the different works together and initiates a dialogue with our memory, senses, and the surrounding landscape.

Born in 1932 in Bogotá, Olga de Amaral is an emblematic figure of the Colombian art scene. Following a degree in architecture at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, she pursued her studies at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, the American equivalent of the German Bauhaus. While there, she discovered textile art in the weaving workshop of Marianne Strengell, a Finnish- American artist and designer who was one of the first to favor the structure and grid of textiles over the pattern.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Olga de Amaral participated in the development of Fiber Art alongside Sheila Hicks and Magdalena Abakanowicz, using new materials and techniques borrowed both from the Modernist principles and from the popular traditions of her native country. Her large-scale abstract works free themselves from the wall and refuse any form of categorization. At once, paintings, sculptures, installations, and architecture, they envelop the audience in the artist’s sensorial, intimate universe. Olga de Amaral was named "Visionary Artist" by New York's Museum of Art & Design in 2005 and received the Women's Cacus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. Her work can be found in major public and private collections worldwide, including Tate Modern, MoMA, Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, has dedicated a major exhibition to her entitled Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock in 2021.

Curator: Marie Perennès

The exhibition is accompagned by a wonderful catalogue with English version.

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

261, boulevard Raspail - 75014 Paris

www.fondationcartier.com

OLGA DE AMARAL 

FONDATION CARTIER POUR L'ART CONTEMPORAIN, PARIS

12-10-2024 - 16-03-2025

Jacqueline Poncelet @ Richard Saltoun Gallery, London - "this, that and the other" Exhibition

Jacqueline Poncelet

this, that and the other

Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

11 March – 3 May 2025

Jacqueline Poncelet

Untitled, 1985 c.

© Jacqueline Poncelet / Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Belgian-born, London-based artist JACQUELINE PONCELET (b. 1947), whose pioneering approach to colour, material, surface, and space has redefined the boundaries between fine art and craft. Spanning fifty years of work, this, that and the other brings together Poncelet’s early sculptural ceramics, large-scale drawings, and small paintings from the 1970-1980s with recent watercolours and composite paintings, tracing a continuous dialogue between material, process, and pattern across diverse media. This is Poncelet’s first major London presentation in over 20 years, following her major retrospective at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) last year.

Working on the fringes of the American Pattern & Decoration and the French Supports/Surfaces movements, Poncelet’s practice has never been confined to a single medium, moving fluidly between ceramics, painting, drawing, photography, textiles and site-specific design. Unlike many of her male contemporaries in the New British Sculpture movement, her work remained deeply engaged with material instability, ignoring the boundaries between fine art and craft. 

She first gained recognition in the 1970s for her sculptural ceramics, which explored modular variation and repetition. A selection of small vessels on view from this period demonstrates how she transformed decorative objects into works of art through subtle interventions in pattern and form, challenging traditional expectations of ‘craft’ and functional design. 

A major turning point came in 1986, when she participated in the Venice Biennale, presenting sculptural ceramics resembling fragmented, tangled limbs, starkly arranged on a white platform. These works abandoned traditional associations with ceramics, instead evoking disembodied, visceral forms, reflecting both personal and cultural tensions at the time. This approach is echoed in exhibited works such as Handbag (1985) and Object in Four Parts (1986), where Jacqueline Poncelet embraced a more architectural, constructivist sensibility. These pieces feature folded, stacked, and interlocking elements, their surfaces enriched with embossed wallpaper textures and painted finishes, reinforcing her fascination with pattern, repetition, and material complexity. At times resembling fragmented architectural facades, at others recalling the draped quality of textiles, these ceramics redefine the relationship between form and function, marking a pivotal moment in her practice.

Such sculptural works are shown alongside large-scale drawings and small paintings from the 1980s, which reflect her exploration of form, space and structure on a two-dimensional plane. Using interwoven lines, gridded compositions, and layered washes of colour, Poncelet experimented with the optical tension between depth and flatness. Her exhibited Untitled drawings almost recall architectural blueprints, mapping out imagined spaces and objects through multiple shifting perspectives at once. Her small paintings from this period reflect similar ideas, typically juxtaposing rigid geometric structures and definitive blocks of colour with more organic, meandering forms. This playful push and pull between order and fluidity, structure and improvisation, remains central to her work.

The grids and weaves of these works are taken a step further by Poncelet with her composite paintings, such as Kiss c.1995, which literally integrate handwoven elements, digital printing, and painted forms, layering different processes, textures, and imagery within a single surface. Echoing the grid-like structures of her early paintings, these works continue Poncelet’s interest in probing the tension between precision and spontaneity, structure and disruption.

The focus on pattern and movement is central to her more recent works on paper included in the exhibition. A selection of smaller geometric watercolours from 2009–2023 are characterised by fine pencil lines, intricate grid formations, and vivid colour. Inspired by the natural world and the changing seasons, these meticulous works balance precision with fluidity, using carefully constructed frameworks to explore rhythm, optical movement, and spatial depth. 

Her most recent watercolours from 2023 take a more gestural, expansive approach, reflecting an increasing interest in landscape and memory, particularly inspired by her time in Wales. Built up in layered washes of colour, these works move away from the structured geometry of her earlier pieces, embracing a more organic, shifting visual language that evokes horizons, changing light, and atmospheric transformation.

Poncelet’s work is held in major public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Though historically overlooked in favor of male contemporaries, her contributions to British sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and public art are now receiving overdue recognition. 

this, that and the other showcases Jacqueline Poncelet’s five-decade exploration of colour, material, pattern, and space, highlighting her enduring impact as one of the most important living artists working at the intersection of art and design.

JACQUELINE PONCELET - BIOGRAPHY

Born in Liège, Belgium, Jacqueline Poncelet is a pioneer in ceramics and textiles. Renowned primarily for her simple, bone china ceramics, Poncelet's work shifted after a trip to NYC in 1978/79. Inspired by the urban environment, she started replicating artificial patterns through the use of the incised line or via coloured clays leaving behind industrial techniques to create unique hand built shapes.

Returning to England in the 1980s, Jacqueline Poncelet became loosely associated with the New British Sculpture movement at the time, led by Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor and Bill Woodrow who were reacting to the prevailing ideas of Minimal and Conceptual art. As a woman, and the wife of Richard Deacon, she was overshadowed by her male contemporaries, never achieving the same level of success despite being actively collected by major museums and having two major solo shows during that decade (at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1985 and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 1988). The '90s heralded the start of the YBA movement, and her work fell out of favour in the commercial art world. Jacqueline Poncelet focused on large-scale public art commissions and teaching. In 2009, she was commissioned by Art on the Underground to make a permanent work for Edgware Road Tube station; Wrapper was completed in 2012. In 2013, she was commissioned by Tate Enterprises to work with Melin Tregwynt in Pembrokeshire to produce woven textiles, which are now available at Tate Britain and Tate Modern to purchase in the museums' shops.

Jacqueline Poncelet lives and works between London and the South Wales Valleys. She studied at Wolverhampton College of Art and the Royal College of Art from 1966 until 1972. Poncelet is represented in important public collections throughout the world, including Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Stedeljk Museum in Amsterdam; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

RICHARD SALTOUN GALLERY | LONDON

41 Dover Street,, London W1S 4NS

www.richardsaltoun.com

Artist Diedrick Brackens @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC - "blood compass" Exhibition

Diedrick Brackens: blood compass

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

April 25 – June 1, 2024

Jack Shainman Gallery presents blood compass, a solo exhibition of new work by Diedrick Brackens spanning both New York City locations, opening April 25 in Chelsea, and April 26 in Tribeca. In these weavings, the artist maps an imagined place — visualizing the internal mechanisms and symbols that animate his work while removing the anchor of direct narrative. The scenes depicted in each weaving exist out of time, suspended between a distant past and a world to come. The works in this series are set at dusk, twilight, and deep night — hours that become vehicles for ritual and interiority. The silhouetted inhabitants of this in-between realm are archetypes that Diedrick Brackens once described as ciphers, or “needles through which I slip the threads of biography and myth, and pass through a mesh of history and context.”

His figures are accompanied by an ecosystem of symbols and shapes that have recurred over the course of his practice. The animals, natural elements, and man-made objects, accrue significance every time they are cast in this ever-evolving mythology. The characters in this series are placed in dialogue with lightning bolts, waning suns, and sourceless orbs of light — open-ended devices of orientation. In these distilled arrangements, footholds for straightforward interpretation dissolve — inviting viewers to parse the compositions and uncover meaning.  

Diedrick Brackens’ semiotic language emerges from lived experience, but also through revisiting books, poems, and legends. In blood compass, some of these references — alluded to in his titles — include the novel Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler, the poem “How you might approach a foal” by Wendy Videlock, and the Bible’s parable of the prodigal son. These stories, though dramatically diverse in genre and subject, speak to Brackens’ inclination to loop, lose, and locate oneself in that which is known, but also to shape-shift, forming new meaning from that which is “familiar.” He approaches these symbols — weighted with memory, context, and history — with fresh eyes or, as Videlock’s poem concludes, ”like you / are new to the world.”  

Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the atapestriesrtist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Diedrick Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Often depicting moments of male tenderness, Diedrick Brackens culls from African and African American literature, poetry and folklore as source. Beginning his process through the hand-dyeing of cotton, a material he deliberately uses in acknowledgement of its brutal history, Diedrick Brackens’ oeuvre presents rich, nuanced visions of African American life and identity, while also alluding to the complicated histories of labor and migration. Brackens utilizes both commercial dyes and atypical pigments such as wine, tea and bleach to create his vibrant, intricately-woven tapestries that investigate historical gaps, interlacing the present with his singular magical realist worldview. Diedrick Brackens’ scenes intentionally lack any sort of moralizing tone, allowing his subjects the freedom of living life on their terms. Jack Shainman Gallery is proud to represent Diedrick Brackens in collaboration with Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, CA / Dallas, TX / Seoul, KR.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

513 W 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

46 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10013

jackshainman.com 

Alia Farid @ Chisenhale Gallery, London - "Elsewhere" Exhibition

Alia Farid: Elsewhere

Chisenhale Gallery, London

Through 4 February 2024

ALIA FARID 

Research image (2023)  

Produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London, 

and commissioned  by Chisenhale Gallery, London; 

Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain, Brest; 

The Power Plant, Toronto; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. 

Courtesy of the artist.

ALIA FARID 

El Amal (2023) and El Nilo (menú) (2023), left to right

Produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London, 

and commissioned  by Chisenhale Gallery, London; 

Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain, Brest; 

and The Power Plant, Toronto.

Photo: Andy Keate

ALIA FARID 

Mezquita de Río Piedras (2023), Chucherías (2023),

Tierra Santa (2023), and Mezquita de Hatillo (2023), left to right

Produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London, 

and commissioned  by Chisenhale Gallery, London; 

Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain, Brest; 

and The Power Plant, Toronto.

Photo: Andy Keate

ALIA FARID 

Elsewhere (2023) 

Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2023 

Produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London, 

and commissioned  by Chisenhale Gallery, London; 

Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain, Brest; 

and The Power Plant, Toronto.

Photo: Andy Keate

Elsewhere is a major commission and the first solo exhibition in the UK by ALIA FARID. Working in film, sculpture, and textile, Alia Farid traces histories often marginalised or obscured by the Global North. In her artworks, communities, local practices, and traditions are reconsidered, giving the rhythms of everyday life political significance and potency.

Sixteen hand-woven and embroidered rugs span the length of the gallery. Drawing from photographs, archival material, and interviews with local people, the works detail cityscapes – buildings, shop fronts, and adverts – that conjure the presence of the Palestinian diaspora in Puerto Rico. Pharmacies and restaurants, owned and operated by Palestinians, are woven alongside brightly coloured mosques and a menu detailing ‘Arabic cuisine’.

The result of a close collaboration with weavers in Samawa, in southern Iraq, the textiles have been crafted through a combination of flat weaving and chain stitching specific to the region. Architecture, script (Arabic and Spanish), and traditional woven motifs recur throughout, illuminating how migration from one region in the Global South to another, brings forth new meanings, forms, and expressions of shared struggle and solidarity. Hanging in two parallel rows, the installation creates panoramic views, and a layering of lived history and daily routine.

Elsewhere is a growing material archive that traces the ways styles, symbols, rituals, and other social devices coalesce across continents. It is the first chapter of an ongoing research project, initially conceived in 2013, which maps Arab and South Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean. Other sites of investigation include Trinidad, Cuba, and Mexico. In this accumulative and iterative process, Elsewhere marks one crossroads on an intricate map.

Elsewhere is produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London, and co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Passerelle Centre d'art contemporain, Brest; The Power Plant, Toronto; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. It will be exhibited at CAC Passerelle, Brest from 23 February to 18 May 2024 and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna thereafter

ALIA FARID lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from la Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico (San Juan), a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Visual Arts Program at MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and a Master of Arts in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from the Programa d’Estudis Independents, MACBA (Barcelona). Selected exhibitions include: In Lieu of What Is, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2022); Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s - Today, MCA Chicago, Chicago (2022); Alia Farid: At the Time of the Ebb, Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art (WAM), Turku, Finland (2021); 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane (2021); Alia Farid, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2020); Yokohama Triennale 2020, Afterglow, Yokohama, Japan (2020) In Lieu of What Was, Portikus, Frankfurt/Main (2019); Between Dig and Display, Galerie Imane Farès, Paris (2017). Farid is nominated for the Artes Mundi 10 and the Nam June Paik Award 2023, and is the recipient of The Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award 2023.

CHISENHALE GALLERY 

64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3 5QZ 

www.chisenhale.org.uk

Mika Tajima @ Pace Gallery, New York - "Mika Tajima: Energic" Exhibition

Mika Tajima: Energic

Pace Gallery, New York

January 12 - February 24, 2024

MIKA TAJIMA

Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Siena, Full Width, Exa), 2023 

© Mika Tajima, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Pace presents Mika Tajima: Energetics, an exhibition of new work by MIKA TAJIMA, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This presentation—bringing together sculptural, textile, and evolving sensorial works—will be the artist’s first exhibition with Pace in New York since she joined the gallery’s program in 2022 and her first solo show in the city in eight years.

Through her multidisciplinary practice spanning performance, sculpture, painting, and installation, Tajima takes up questions of identity and agency in a world increasingly influenced and mitigated by technology. Drawing on various points of reference—including quantum mechanics, Hannah Arendt’s writings on the nature of freedom, and Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity and the body as a vexed relation—the artist imbues her work across mediums with scientific and philosophical import. At the center of Mika Tajima’s practice are her investigations of the ways that different digital and aesthetic technologies manifest as intertwined material, perceptual, and psychic experiences.

Her exhibition at Pace’s New York gallery takes its title from a segment of physics focused on flows and transformations of energy. Enactments of glowing, burning, blooming, and dying will recur across the gallery space, which, in Mika Tajima’s hands, becomes a stage for spiritual and physical transfigurations, traversing digital and ancient temporalities. The acute shifts in the sizes of the works in the show—in relation to human scale—draw attention to our staggeringly infinitesimal existence in the context of geologic and technological time. With her new works, the artist invites questions of what it means to be an individual within this deep time continuum and, in this contemporary moment, amid the inexorable rise of big data.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors will first experience a scent—which incorporates various ingredients used in ancient divination practices—emitted from a pyramidal incense sculpture in Mika Tajima’s exhibition. Initiating viewers into the presentation, this ambient olfactory element serves to open the mind and to remind one of existence through the senses.

Anchoring the show are new, large-scale textile paintings from the artist’s ongoing Negative Entropy series. For this body of work, the artist has worked with neurosurgeons specializing in repairing the brain through energetic stimulation and activation. Auditory maps of the brain’s activity are translated into visual representations of sound waves (spectrograms) to which Tajima assigns colors. The latest Negative Entropy compositions—produced in collaboration with an experimental textile lab in the Netherlands—are rendered at an entirely new, expansive scale. As such, these woven spectrograms, forged from virtually imperceptible records of brain activity, speak to the expansiveness of human potential.

Mika Tajima also presents Sense Object (January 1, 2023, United States) as part of Energetics—a portrait of the national sentiment in the United States on January 1, 2023, compressed within a 5d memory crystal. To create this work, the artist collected data from social media on that day, analyzing the sentiments of text-based posts by American users. Made with optoelectronics technology, the massive amount of data is represented as 24 small squares within a cloud image and inscribed into a tiny disc-shaped optical crystal, which balances atop rose quartz. Captured and locked away forever, the data laser etched within the image of the cloud becomes a memorial of sorts, an ode to the abstract, intangible nature of our digital selves.

Three rose quartz sculptures from Mika Tajima’s Pranayama series, a body of work in which the artist has pierced wood or marble surfaces with bronze nozzles cast from real Jacuzzi jets, will be included in the exhibition as well. The locations of punctures in the stones are loosely based on diagrams of bodily pressure points for acupuncture treatment, a traditional wellness technique used to control and direct unknowable life force. With her new rose quartz Pranayama sculptures, Tajima taps into the material’s associations with new age beliefs and aesthetics as well as its ability to produce electrical reactions. Meditating on mysterious flows and releases of energy in bodies, objects, and spaces, these practices that expose interiority and systematize abstract life functions are analogous to technology’s imperative to understand, regulate, and shape human activity.

New sculptural works that incorporate live flowers also explore these ideas of life energy and breath. Transfused with UV fluorescence, the flowers will glow in the exhibition, emitting light as they die. For Tajima, the ephemeral and performative dimensions of these works reflect the constantly fluctuating state of the natural, built, and digital worlds that we inhabit and create.

Following her exhibition with Pace, Mika Tajima will present Super Natural, a solo exhibition at the Hill Art Foundation in New York, in May 2024. Her work will also be included in Breath(e): Towards Climate and Social Justice, the Hammer Museum’s forthcoming Pacific Standard Time exhibition in Los Angeles, co-curated by Mika Yoshitake and Glenn Kaino and opening in September 2024.

Mika Tajima: Energetics is realized with support from Professor Peter Kazansky (University of Southampton), Dr. Amanda Carpenter, Textiel Lab, TAE Technologies, Seishoji Temple, Obayashi Corp., and Brooklyn Research.

MIKA TAJIMA (b. 1975, Los Angeles) is an artist whose practice materializes techniques developed to shape the physicality, productivity, and desires of the human body. Her sculptures, paintings, videos, and installations focus on the embodied experience of ortho-architectonic control and computational life. From architectural systems to ergonomic design to psychographic data, Tajima's works operate in the space between the immaterial and the tangible to create heightened encounters that target the senses and emotions of the viewer, underlining the dynamics of control and agency. Mika Tajima earned a BA in Fine Arts and East Asian Studies from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania (1997), and an MFA from Columbia University, School of the Arts, New York (2003). Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Appear, Dazaifu Tenmangu, Dazaifu, Japan (2022); Spectral, Taro Nasu, Tokyo, Japan (2022); Mika Tajima: You Must Be Free, Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles (2022). Recent group exhibitions of including her work include Dirty Protests, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); COLORI, Castello di Rivoli and GAM, Torino, Italy (2017); All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2017); and Mika Tajima: Meridian (Gold), Sculpture Center, New York (2016). Her work resides in numerous public collections worldwide including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C, among others.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Julia Bland @ Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Embers" Exhibition

Julia Bland: Embers

Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole

14 December 2023 – 4 February 2024

JULIA BLAND

Long Alliance, 2023 

Oil and burnt canvas on panel, 32 x 32 inches

© Julia Bland / Courtesy Tayloe Piggott Gallery

JULIA BLAND

High Moon, 2022 

Linen, cotton, and wool threads, canvas, 

fabric dye, oil paint, 95 x 57 inches

© Julia Bland / Courtesy Tayloe Piggott Gallery

JULIA BLAND

Love In The Endless Night, 2020 

Hand-woven linen and wool textile, 

hand dyed linen, linen and wool threads, 

hand dyed blanket, wax, oil paint, 111 x 136 inches

© Julia Bland / Courtesy Tayloe Piggott Gallery

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY presents Embers, a solo exhibition of work by artist JULIA BLAND.

Julia Bland makes artworks that exist somewhere in the space between painting, sculpture, and tapestry. Her experimental process incorporates stitching, weaving, knotting, dying, and even burning her materials, creating sublime abstractions of geometric compositions. This exhibition, Julia Bland’s first at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, also features oil and canvas collages, as well as Bland’s drawings, which help her think through her ideas, functioning as a kind of map with different marks indicating the process or material she intends to engage. A digital catalog accompanies this exhibition with an essay by Glenn Adamson, which is excerpted below.

Early in Julia Bland’s career, after training as a painter at Rhode Island School of Design and before learning to weave, she spent time in Morocco, where she studied Islamic art and Sufism. As Glenn Adamson writes, “She absorbed the dense concentrations of pattern in people’s homes there, and for a time apprenticed herself to a carver of intricately decorated wooden doors. This saturation in craft reinforced experiences she’d had growing up in Palo Alto, California, where she had her first exposures to art through family friends who probably would qualify as flower children. One of them taught her how to make jewelry, and another gave her a loom that she still uses today.” Julia Bland incorporates her loom as one of many tools—alongside her trusty scissors, and, of course, her hands—to transform fabric into a transporting tableau. Julia Bland’s experience in Morocco has embedded itself in her work, which often contains intricate geometric patterns that recall ornate Islamic architecture and images of snakes, a sign of death and rebirth in Sufism. Other forms in her paint-tapestry hybrids, meanwhile, resemble the suspension bridges of New York—a reminder that majesty can come from the spiritual world, the natural world, and the urban world all the same.

Glenn Adamson observes, “The total effect is electrifying. Standing before the immense wall hanging, you are enmeshed in the internal oscillations of its “active surface” (to borrow a term from Op Art). The composition, while essentially symmetrical, is laced with tactical misalignments. Colors are usually reflected from one side to the other, but here and there, they shift unexpectedly. The work has the dynamic balance of a yin yang symbol, as if seen through a kaleidoscope.” Hints of familiar objects emerge through the layers of fabric and yarn. Adamson continues, “These multiple, elusive images are compacted within the pictorial field, much like the numerals in Jasper Johns’ celebrated 0 Through 9 series: a palimpsest of layers, with none taking precedence.”

Allusions to her process and remnants of her materials are always present in Julia Bland’s work. She observes that these vestiges “give you information about how the work came together. There are the technical and formal aspects of the technique, and then there is the social naming of it.” As Adamson observes, “Craft is typically encountered either as culturally-encoded, perhaps folkish, perhaps kitschy; conversely, it may be seen as a culturally-neutral modus operandi, simply a way of arriving at form. Julia Bland refuses this false opposition. When she uses a technique, she takes on its full range of association and potential, absorbing it whole. This is the impulse that drives her practice forward.”

JULIA BAND was born in Palo Alto, CA in 1986. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and received her MFA from The Yale School of Art in 2012. She has been an artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lighthouse Works, The Sharpe-Walentas Space Program, and The Shandaken Project: Storm King. She has received awards including The Milton and Sally Avery Fellowship from Yaddo, The Carol Scholsberg Memorial Prize, NYFA/NYSCA fellowship in Craft/Sculpture, The Florence Leif Award for Excellence in Painting, and the Natasha And Jacques Gelman Travel Fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Camille Obering Fine Art, Jackson, WY; The Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY; Helena Anrather, New York, NY; and On Stellar Rays; New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; Chambers Fine Art, Beijing, China; and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, NY. She has been reviewed or featured in many publications, including The New York Times, Mousse Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. Julia Bland lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY

62 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, WY 83001

www.tayloepiggottgallery.com

Africa Fashion @ Portland Art Museum

Africa Fashion

Portland Art Museum

November 18, 2023 – February 18, 2024

Models holding hands, Lagos, Nigeria, 2019 by Stephen Tayo

Courtesy Lagos Fashion Week

Sanlé Sory 'Je Vais Décoller, 1977' 

© Sanlé Sory / Tezeta. Courtesy David Hill Gallery

Self-portrait, Gouled Ahmed, Addis Foam, Ethiopia

Mbeuk Idourrou collection, Imane Ayissi, Paris 

Autumn/Winter 2019. 

Photo: Fabrice Malard / Courtesy of Imane Ayissi

Africa Fashion opens at the Portland Art Museum after acclaimed runs at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. This first-of-its-kind exhibition, making its only West Coast stop at PAM, honors the irresistible creativity, ingenuity, and unstoppable global impact of contemporary African fashions. Garments and textiles dating from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, contextualized by a range of cultural touchstones such as Drum magazines, Fela Kuti and Miriam Makeba record albums, and studio photography from Sanlé Sory, celebrate the transformative and liberatory power of self-fashioning. The New Yorker’s art critic Hilton Als called Africa Fashion a “vital and necessary exhibition.”

The exuberance and cosmopolitan nature of the contemporary African fashion scene unfolds through more than 50 outfits designed by over 40 designers hailing from 21 countries, who are shifting the geography of the global fashion world. Elegant minimalist garments by Mmusomaxwell, Katush, and Moshions push back on stereotypes that African fashions are exclusively colorful and brightly patterned; knitwear by Maxhosa echoes traditional Xhosa beadwork patterns; shimmering silk and layers of raffia combine in a fuchsia pink couture outfit by Imane Ayissi; and striking ensembles by Selly Raby Kane and Bull Doff reference Afrofuturism.

“Africa Fashion means the past, the future and the present at the same time,” said fashion designer Artsi, founder of Moroccan design house Maison ArtC. “The joy of life and the joy of colour is completely different and very particular to the continent. It’s a language of heritage, it’s a language of DNA, it’s a language of memories.” 

Design by Chris Seydou 

© Nabil Zorkot

Kofi Ansah 'Indigo' Couture 1997 - Narh & Linda 

Photo © 1997 Eric Don-Arthur www.EricDonArthur.com

Alchemy collection, Thebe Magugu, 

Johannesburg, South Africa, Autumn/Winter 2021 

Photography: Tatenda Chidora

Styling + Set: Chloe Andrea Welgemoed

Model: Sio

Africa Fashion employs a cross-cultural and cross-continental approach throughout the exhibition galleries, centering multiple and varied African voices and perspectives. Starting with the African independence and the liberation years that sparked a radical political and social reordering across the continent, the exhibition explores how fashion, alongside music and the visual arts, formed a key part of Africa’s cultural renaissance, laying the foundation for today’s fashion revolution. A section on textiles presents vintage woven kente cloth alongside printed kanga cloths and Dutch Wax cottons, showing how the making and wearing of traditional textiles in the moment of independence became a strategic political act.

During this period, groundbreaking designers worked fluidly both on the continent and internationally. Garments included in the exhibition by vanguard creatives Alphadi (b.1957), Kofi Ansah (1951-2014), Naïma Bennis (1940-2008), Shade Thomas-Fahm (b.1933), and Chris Seydou (1949-1994), embody the artistic expression of the cultural renaissance.

“I feel like there’s so many facets of what we’ve been through as a continent that people don’t actually understand,” said South African designer Thebe Magugu. “Now more than ever, African designers are taking charge of their own narrative and telling people authentic stories, not the imagined utopias.”

'Chasing Evil' collection, IAMISIGO, Kenya, 

Autumn/Winter 2020

Courtesy IAMISIGO 

Photo: Maganga Mwagogo

DAKALA CLOTH ensemble, 

'Who Knew' collection, 

Abuja, Nigeria, Spring/Summer 2019

Image courtesy Nkwo Onwuka 

© Kola Oshalusi

The sophisticated fashions at the heart of Africa Fashion simultaneously celebrate long-held traditions of cultural self-expression through clothing and the significant contributions of contemporary designers of African descent to the international fashion scene.

Portland’s creative community also takes a turn on the catwalk for this presentation of Africa Fashion as well. Togo-born designer Komi Jean Pierre Nugloze of N’Kossi Couture is included in the exhibition, showcasing two of his contemporary designs. And Portland-based LEVER Architecture collaborated with the Museum on an innovative exhibition design, including a single organic display platform that welcomes visitors to admire the contemporary garments from all angles.

Africa Fashion is accompanied by a catalog published by V&A Publishing.

Africa Fashion - Exhibition book

Christine Checinska (Editor)

Published by V&A

224 pages

ISBN : 9781838510275

Curated by the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Christine Checinska, Ph.D., Senior Curator of African and Diaspora Textiles and Fashion, with Project Curator Elisabeth Murray; curated for Portland by Julia Dolan, Ph.D., The Minor White Senior Curator of Photography.

PORTLAND ART MUSEUM

1219 SW Park Avenue Portland, OR 97205

www.portlandartmuseum.org

Savoir-faire textiles en Méditerranée @ CCR du Mucem-Belle de Mai, Marseille

Savoir-faire textiles en Méditerranée

Mucem-Belle de Mai, Marseille

16 décembre 2022 - 7 avril 2023

Savoir-faire textiles en Méditerranée

Affiche de l'exposition, Mucem - CCR

Monique Roussel de Fontanès

Filage de la laine, Grèce, 1957 

Mucem 

© Mucem / Monique Roussel de Fontanès

Monique Roussel de Fontanès

Femme utilisant un métier à tisser, Grèce, 1957

Mucem 

© Mucem / Monique Roussel de Fontanès

La révolution industrielle, dont l’avènement a profondément bouleversé nos modes de vie, a commencé par le textile. La production artisanale, ses gestes et ses savoir-faire ont progressivement cédé la place à la mécanisation et à la standardisation. À cet éloignement technique s’est ajouté l’éloignement géographique causé par la mondialisation ; les vêtements que nous portons étant de plus en plus souvent confectionnés à l’autre bout du monde.

Comme d’autres phénomènes émanant des sociétés préindustrielles, les savoir-faire textiles traditionnels et leurs témoignages matériels ont été minutieusement étudiés, documentés, photographiés et collectés par des ethnologues dont le travail est aujourd’hui conservé au sein de musées comme le Mucem. Ces savoir-faire sont également au cœur de la démarche de l’association Itinérance Méditerranée qui a pour objectif de préserver ce patrimoine immatériel en participant à sa transmission dans une logique locale et environnementale.

L’exposition « Savoir-faire textiles en Méditerranée », conçue par le Mucem et Itinérance, met en évidence ce que le patrimoine, matériel comme immatériel, peut apporter à la création contemporaine. Pour ce projet, des jeunes créateurs de l’École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs se sont confrontés aux collections d’ex-voto méditerranéens du Mucem afin de réaliser une collection textile dans le cadre de leur formation ; tandis que des élèves de l’école Casa Moda de Casablanca (Maroc) se sont inspirés d’objets et de rituels liés aux cérémonies de mariage traditionnelles. L’exposition poursuit son voyage en Méditerranée par la Tunisie et la Grèce, sur les traces des ethnologues ayant étudié ces savoir-faire textiles et à la rencontre des artisanes qui les pratiquent encore aujourd’hui, s’efforçant de les faire vivre et de les transmettre.

 

Commissaires de l'exposition :

Raphaël Bories, conservateur du patrimoine, responsable du pôle croyances et religions au Mucem

Caroline Perdrix, directrice artistique de l’association Itinérance Méditerranée

MUCEM - BELLE DE MAI

CCR - Centre de conservation et de ressources

1 rue Clovis Hugues, 13003 Marseille

www.mucem.org