Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan @ Claire Oliver Gallery, New York - A landmark two-person textile exhibition

Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan

Certain Restrictions Do Apply

Claire Oliver Gallery, New York

January 9 - March 7, 2026

Carolyn Mazloomi 

Madam C. J. Walker, 2025 

76 x 77.5 inches 

Cotton fabric, cotton batt, poly-cotton thread, India ink; 

printed, stenciled, hand painting, machine quilted

© Carolyn Mazloomi, courtesy Claire Oliver Gallery

Sharon Kerry-Harlan 

African American Gothic, 2025 

20 x 16 x 1.5 inches 

Acrylic paint and silk screens on rusted fabric, 

incorporating found objects, 

mounted on a black canvas-wrapped wood frame

© Sharon Kerry-Harlan, courtesy Claire Oliver Gallery

Claire Oliver Gallery presents Certain Restrictions Do Apply, a landmark two-person textile exhibition featuring new works by artists Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan. The exhibition presents 9 new artworks and celebrates decades of friendship and collaboration between the two artists; both Mazloomi and Kerry-Harlan mine the history of Black American pioneers and expand the narrative and formal possibilities of quiltmaking and textile art.

Though distinct in approach, Carolyn Mazloomi and Sharon Kerry-Harlan share a commitment to storytelling through fiber, exploring race, culture, memory, and belonging. Their works reposition quilting not as domestic craft or woman’s work but as a powerful conceptual and political practice. The two artists have also been close friends for decades, sharing conversations, critiques, and creative support that have shaped their respective journeys — making their first New York presentation together both professionally significant and personally meaningful.

“Textiles have an inherent humanity,” said Carolyn Mazloomi. “A quilt holds touch, time, labor, and story — it holds lives. The histories of the people I depict are sewn into the fabric itself. Quilts speak on behalf of those whose voices might otherwise go unheard.”

“Memory is layered,” said Sharon Kerry-Harlan. “In fabric, I find the ability to embed echoes — of family, of the past, of cultural inheritance. My work is about carrying forward what must not be forgotten, but also making space for reinterpretation.”

Mazloomi’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in textile history, social documentation and activism. She is the founder of the African American Quilt Guild of Los Angeles and the Women of Color Quilters Network, has authored numerous significant publications, and is shaping the national discourse around quilting as a respected contemporary art form. Likewise, Kerry-Harlan brings a unique material sensibility: her rust-dyed surfaces, pattern language, and incorporation of found fabrics create visual fields where ancestry and cosmopolitan rhythm coexist.

“Carolyn and Sharon are among the most important narrative textile artists working today,” said Claire Oliver, founder of Claire Oliver Gallery. “This exhibition honors not only their individual legacies, but the creative dialogue and mutual trust between them. Their friendship and artistic respect for one another amplify the power of the work, and we are proud to present this historic first joint exhibition in New York.”

Together, their works form a visual conversation, not only between artwork and viewer, but between two women who have influenced one another’s practices, celebrated each other’s achievements, and remain connected by a shared purpose: to preserve histories and affirm identity through the language of stitched and constructed cloth.

ARTIST CAROLYN MAZLOOMI

Based in West Chester, Ohio, Carolyn Mazloomi is an artist, curator, and writer. Her practice is rooted in the quilting tradition, using textiles—a personal and metaphorical material—to communicate the stories of individuals who have made significant contributions to social justice and landmark events that have shaped American history. She is the founder of the African American Quilt Guild of Los Angeles and the Women of Color Quilters Network, and a former board member of the Studio Art Quilt Associates and Alliance for American Quilters. Over the course of her career, Mazloomi has had solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries across the country including the Los Angeles Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kenyon College, Gambier, OH; Kent State University, Kent, OH; Malcom Brown Gallery, Shaker Heights, OH; University of Michigan, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Ann Arbor, MI; and Quilters Hall of Fame, Marion, IN.

Mazloomi’s work is in the public collections of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY; Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham, AL; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland, OH; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN; National Endowment for the Arts Washington, D.C.; Quilters Hall of Fame Museum, Madison, IN; The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of African American Culture and History, Washington, D.C., among others. Mazloomi is the author of several books, and has most recently published Visioning Human Rights in the New Millennium (2019), Yours for Race and Country: Reflections on the Life of Colonel Charles Young (2019), We Who Believe in Freedom (2020), We Are the Story: A Visual Response to Racism (2021), and Black Pioneers: Legacy in the American West (2022).

ARTIST SHARON KERRY-HARLAN

Sharon Kerry-Harlan (b. 1951, Miami, FL) is a visual artist living and working between Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and Hollywood, Florida. Raised in a family of artists, Harlan learned quilting from her mother and elements of design and abstraction from her uncle, an artist and designer. She integrates traditional quilting techniques with contemporary approaches to fabric manipulation to create her signature ‘rust-dyed’, monochromatic large-scale textile works for which she is celebrated.

Kerry-Harlan’s textile work, mixed-media collages, paintings, and figurative objects—such as the Black Eyed Pea dolls—are deeply informed by race, history, and the socio-political landscape. Her artistic practice centers on designing her own textile patterns and fabrics, sometimes incorporating found and inherited materials into her compositions that balance geometric forms, figurative elements, and intricate patterns. Inspired by her African diasporic heritage, the rhythm of modern metropolitan life, and the interplay between historical narratives and contemporary events, Kerry-Harlan positions herself as a keeper and translator of information and histories, crafting visual narratives that convey multifaceted perspectives. Her work transcends temporal boundaries, fostering a dialogue that bridges the past and present.

Sharon Kerry-Harlan holds a BA from Marquette University and studied art at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, both located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and she has exhibited at numerous national and international institutions, including the Harn Museum (Gainesville, FL), the Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI), the Erie Art Museum (Erie, PA), the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center (Wilberforce, OH), and the California State Museum (Sacramento, CA), among others.

CLAIRE OLIVER GALLERY 

2288 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, New York, NY 10030

www.claireoliver.com

Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray @ Pace Gallery, London - "My Country" Exhibition in collaboration with D’Lan Contemporary

Emily Kam Kngwarray: My Country

Pace Gallery, London

June 6 - August 8, 2025

Alhalker Country is ours—so is the anwerlarr yam. I paint my plant, the one I am named after—those seeds I am named after. Kam is its name. Kam. I am named after the anwerlarr plant. I am Kam! -- Emily Kam Kngwarray [1]

Pace presents an exhibition of works by renowned Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, in collaboration with D’Lan Contemporary, at its London gallery. The show—titled My Country— coincides with Tate Modern’s major survey of Emily Kam Kngwarray, which will open in July. My Country traces Kngwarray’s artistic evolution from her early organic forms to her later vibrant, dot-filled color fields, culminating in the minimalist compositions that defined her mature work. To reflect her profound influence on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, as well as on women artists and the broader Australian art landscape, the exhibition will also include historical and contemporary batiks by artists inspired by Kngwarray’s pioneering practice.

Emily Kam Kngwarray (ca. 1914–96) is one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed contemporary artists. Her use of new art media began in the 1970s, when she was introduced to batik at Ankerrapw (Utopia Station homestead) in Australia’s Northern Territory. After developing a distinctive style with little external influence, she shifted from batik to acrylic on canvas in 1988, marking the start of an extraordinary eight-year painting career during which she is estimated to have created around 3,000 works.

An Elder of the Anmatyerr people and custodian of her ancestral Country, Alhalker, Emily Kam Kngwarray produced vivid, deeply personal works that express the ancestral and ecological relationships that continue to shape her land. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the term Country encompasses not only the physical terrain but also waters, skies, and all living beings, together with the cultural, spiritual, and familial responsibilities that connect them. Kngwarray’s practice was rooted in the Dreaming: a dynamic, lived worldview in which ancestral creation stories and laws animate the land, its people, and their connections. Her paintings do more than depict these forces; they embody them, giving visual form to the rhythms and energies of her Country.

The works on view at Pace, some of which have never been exhibited before, trace Kngwarray’s rapid stylistic and thematic evolution, illuminating the inseparable interior and exterior worlds that shaped her practice. Harmony of Spring (1990), included in the exhibition, exemplifies the immediate confidence of her early paintings, marked by linear compositions overlaid with fields of singular and concentric double dots. In this work, as in others from the same period, the underlying structure recalls the rhizomatic paths of the anwerlarr yam, along with its seed and seedpods—kam—from which Emily Kam Kngwarray takes her middle name. Nested within the dense interplay of lines and dots are arrow-like forms depicting the tracks left across the ground by emus. These paintings can be read as experiential maps, charting time—seasonal shifts and the life cycles of plants and animals—and space, encompassing the vast terrain of Alhalker and the networks of roots and foliage above and below the earth’s surface. Kngwarray’s paintings not only make her relationship with this living world tangible, but extend its presence, drawing work, viewer, and artist into an ongoing expression of cultural and ecological responsibility.

Between 1992 and 1993, Kngwarray’s paintings surge with stippled fields of dots that engulf the linear foundations of her earlier works. Her use of color is denser, structuring the compositions through vibrant, often unexpected flashes of contrast and harmony—as seen in Desert Storm (1992), included in the exhibition, where an effervescent patch of mossy greens and earthy reds rolls off the right edge of the canvas, returning to the meteorological energy it describes. Kngwarray’s shifting use of tools and techniques is evident throughout this transformative period: larger canvas stretchers and longer brushes allowed for an expanded gestural range, while trimmed brushes enabled her to manipulate the texture of each daub.

As a senior member of her community, Kngwarray played a central role in awely— women’s ceremonial traditions encompassing song, dance, and the painting of bodies with ground ochres. Often painting her canvases while seated, her mark-making is defined by a fluid expressiveness and an ease with materials that echoes the ritual movement and touch of ‘painting up’ for awely. The striped designs of these ceremonies translated into the astonishing, austere canvases of her final years. These works—often composed of minimal, webbed structures painted over dark backgrounds—combine an assured command of linear form and the picture plane with the gestural force that defines all of Kngwarray’s work, from paintings and batiks to the ancestral, familial contact of ochre onto skin.

Alongside a 1987 batik by Emily Kam Kngwarray, this exhibition also includes textile works by Judy Greenie Ngwarai, Audrey Morton Ngwarai, Ruby Morton Ngwarai, Annie Petyarre, and Lena Pula Pwerle. Together, these works demonstrate the enduring influence Kngwarray continues to have on generations of artists working in Australia today.

Emily Kam Kngwarray (b. ca. 1914, Alhalker, Utopia, Australia; 1996, Mparntwe/Alice Springs, Australia) began painting on silk and cotton fabric in the batik style alongside the women in her community, and, in 1977, became a founding member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group. Introduced to canvas in 1988, Kngwarray’s practice shifted in part due to the adaptability of paint as a medium, which allowed her to create spontaneous, gestural marks using various implements. Kngwarray’s paintings are a continuation of the deep-rooted oral and visual traditions that inspired her batik work. When she was already in her seventies, her first painting, Emu Woman (1988–1989), debuted in the group exhibition, A Summer Project: Utopia Women's Paintings held at S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney (1989). Emily Kam Kngwarray was a prolific artist, executing an estimated three thousand paintings in an eight-year span. In 1997, she was represented posthumously at the 47th Venice Biennale. Her work is held in public collections worldwide including Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, Australia; Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and The Vatican Museums, Vatican City, among many others. In July 2025, Tate Modern, London, will open the first major survey of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s work in Europe. 

[1] Emily Kam Kngwarray quoted in Jennifer Green, “The life and legacy of Emily Kam Kngwarray” in Emily Kam Kngwarray, ed. Kelli Cole, Jennifer Green, and Hetti Perkins (National Gallery of Australia, 2023), 150.

PACE, LONDON

5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ

www.pacegallery.com

Marianne Kemp @ Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole - "Essentially Unbound" Exhibition

Marianne Kemp: Essentially Unbound 

Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole

20 September - 1 December 2024

MARIANNE KEMP

Dew, 2024

Horsehair, cotton and pins, 59 x 78 3/4 x 1 5/8 inches

© Marianne Kemp, courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

MARIANNE KEMP

Late and Soon, 2024

Horsehair, cotton, wood, canvas, and acrylic paint 

39 3/8 x 51 1/8 x 4 inches

© Marianne Kemp, courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

MARIANNE KEMP

Electric Move, 2022 

Horsehair, cotton and pins, 23 5/8 x 9 7/8 x 3 1/8 inches

© Marianne Kemp, courtesy Maya Frodeman Gallery

Maya Frodeman Gallery presents Essentially Unbound, a solo exhibition with Dutch artist MARIANNE KEMP.

Essentially Unbound, Marianne Kemp’s second solo exhibition with Maya Frodeman Gallery, finds the artist further exploring the technical intricacies of her unique chosen craft: woven horsehair. Using horsehair with varying combinations of other materials like raw plant fibers, and, most recently Korean Hanji paper and gold lurex, Kemp works with meticulous precision to create otherworldly forms that seem to organically morph, yet remain abstracted and enigmatic. The horsehair, the warp and the loom are the three fundamental elements of her practice, the starting points, and the primary and necessary tools. In weaving, a warp is a set of long, lengthwise fibers that run vertically up and down a textile, stretched in place on a loom before the weaving process begins; the weft is what is woven into the warp to create textiles, and where Kemp’s creativity takes flight. “I am a weaver because I am using a loom, and an artist, because what I do with the loom system,” Marianne Kemp says.

Marianne Kemp uses both traditional and nonconventional weaving techniques to create her three-dimensional environments through her unique practice of molding, knotting, curling and looping the sculptural horsehair fibers. Through properties unique to horsehair and other, largely organic materials, her woven works can appear shiny and smooth, organic and wild, or flexible and stiff. “Horsehair has its own characteristics. And for 24 years, I have wanted to show it in a different way. It keeps surprising me,” Marianne Kemp says. Her practice is very much grounded in her experimentation with technique. Works in Essentially Unbound, such as Dew (2024) and Late and Soon (2024), are united by Kemp’s exuberant use of color. This has brought joy and lightness into her studio practice—a practice that can often feel weighed down by the bounds of time. Kemp’s chosen materials and tools are profoundly time-consuming. The hours upon days upon weeks that go into her works beget that every decision Kemp makes- creative or technical- is made decisively. The visual weightlessness of this body of work, especially in the face of the time and planning that goes into each piece, also lends to the exhibitions’ title. Kemp uses the warp quite minimally in many of these works. Because of this, these works are literally less bound, and more sculptural. The result is most often otherworldly forms, as with Electric Move (2022) and Breaking the Silence (2023). Kemp’s technique anchors her materials, and with increasing experimentation, the works feel less and less bound by the textile art tradition and read more as innovative and cross-disciplinary sculpture.

When creating her works, Marianne Kemp looks inward for inspiration. As she sits in her studio, her brain twinkles with possibilities. “Behind my loom, I'm in this bubble, and the ideas are just coming. I can just pluck them from the air,” she marvels. Kemp’s ideas grow and morph as she spends hours upon hours behind her looms. Her intimate knowledge of and skill in weaving enables and fuels this creative process. Kemp’s work is less about weaving as a craft and more about the process and effect of creating texture and volume, zones of interest that invite the viewer in. Kemp’s works are truly a viewing experience, and, at first, an encounter with the alien. From afar, they can resemble paintings, tapestries, or alien structures, but as the viewer steps closer, the works become an intricate, active surface. The more experimental and unconventional Kemp’s work becomes, the more technical it is. When a new idea bobs to the surface of Kemp’s mind, it follows that then each centimeter must be study and planned, and every rhythm must be calculated to bring that idea to life. Her brain is equal parts artist and engineer. Kemp’s ability and expertise enables her creativity, just as her creativity fuels her technical practice.

Marianne Kemp was born in Woerden, and began sewing at the age of 13. Kemp’s early interest in textiles led her to study art at The Royal Academy of Art and Design in The Hague before moving to London to pursue her Master of Arts from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. Upon completion of her Master’s, Kemp decided to stay in London and started working from Cockpit Arts Studios in Central London. In 2003 she returned to the Netherlands. In her studio she works with four different looms, each capable of different weaving possibilities. Kemp’s work has been exhibited in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe, as well as in Seoul, South Korea. Her work has appeared in numerous publications in her native Netherlands and abroad, including magazines World of Interiors and Metiér, and books Transmaterial by Blaine Brownell and Contemporary Textiles by Drusilla Cole. Marianne Kemp lives and works in Zutphen, the Netherlands.

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

66 South Glenwood Street, Jackson Hole, Wyoming 83001

www.mayafrodemangallery.com

Artist James Allister Sprang @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, Maine - "Each of Us Are Several" Exhibition

James Allister Sprang 

Each of Us Are Several

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland 

July 5 – August 24, 2024

James Allister Sprang 

Sunset Ripple (detail), 2023 

Woven cyanotypes, textile hardener, 

uv-resistant lacquer, wood, 27" x 18"

© James Allister Sprang / Courtesy Dowling Walsh Gallery

Dowling Walsh Gallery presents Each of Us Are Several,a solo exhibition of work by artist James Allister Sprang.

James Allister Sprang is a multidisciplinary artist who creates immersive audiovisual installations and complex woven two-dimensional works. "I make sensory poems for the spirit," he says. Similarly to how he weaves genre and instrumentation together when composing and producing musical scores, he weaves prints and watercolor into dimensional, textural works of abstraction that celebrate the sensory experience of Black life. His first exhibition with Dowling Walsh Gallery, Each of Us Are Several is a multimedia installation that includes sound, elements of text, and wall-based work. In its varied forms, James Allister Sprang's work fosters connections between the tangible and intangible nature of being human in this ever-spinning world, between past and present, the known and the unknowable.

JAMES ALLISTER SPRANG was born in Miami, FL, and received his BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, NY, and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. He is a 2022 Knight Foundation Art + Tech Fellow, a 2023 Pew Fellow, and a 2024 Young Arts Fellow. He has been an artist-in-residence at The Kitchen, New York, NY; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine, Philadelphia, PA; Baryshnikov Arts Center Space, New York, NY; and the Fountainhead, Miami, FL. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the ICA at Maine College of Art and Design, Portland, ME; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Knockdown Center, New York, NY; and The Cooper Union, New York, NY, as well as in group exhibitions throughout the United States, including at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, WA; Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL, and David Nolan Gallery, New York, NY. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and Art Papers, among others. He lives and works in Portland, ME.

Also on view at Dowling Walsh Gallery:

Jenny Brillhart, July 5 – 27, 2024

Bo Bartlett, July 5 – 27, 2024

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY 

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841 

www.dowlingwalsh.com