Moon Landing: an immersive textile and musical collaboration
Through August 31, 2025
Canterbury Cathedral
Cathedral House 
11 The Precincts
Canterbury, CT1 2EH
United Kingdom
https://www.canterbury-cathedral.org/whats-on/events/moon-landing

This summer, the medieval splendour of Canterbury Cathedral will complement a stunning free-to-view modern art installation inspired by the little-known story of the women who wove the integrated computer circuits and memory cores which enabled the 1969 moon landing. The breathtaking installation moon landing – a duo work created by British textile artist and designer of woven textiles, Margo Selby, and award-winning composer, Helen Caddick – comprises a vibrant 16-meter hand-woven textile suspended from the ceiling near the Cathedral’s Trinity Chapel, created in response to the moon landing score, an original musical piece scored for strings. It is a celebration of the mathematical and technical possibilities of weaving and the crossovers of pattern, tone and rhythm found in both music and woven textiles.

Digital Weaving Norway
From August 12 – 15, 2025
Solgaard Skog 132, 1599 
Moss, Norway
https://digitalweaving.no

Lia Cook’s work will be featured in the exhibition of Digital Weaving – Innovation Through Pixels in Norway — a conference and exhibition celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the TC-Looms with Digital Weaving Norway (August 12–15). 

Banners of History: An Exhibition of Original Revolutionary War Flags
Through August 10, 2025
Museum of American Revolution
101 South Third Street
Philadelphia, PA
https://www.amrevmuseum.org/exhibits/banners-of-liberty-an-exhibition-of-original-revolutionary-war-flag

A significant use of fiber throughout the world is in the creation of flags. In preparation for the 250th Anniversary of the birth of the United States, the Museum of the American Revolutionary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has mounted an expansive exhibition of flags from the early part of the Nation’s history. The exhibition, dispalyed in the Museum’s first-floor Patriots Gallery, features the largest gathering of rare and significant Revolutionary War flags in more than two centuries. This one you see online!

Willow Woven
Through August 6, 2025
Studio Gallery
Hennebery Eddy Architects’
109 N Rouse 
Bozeman, MT
https://downtownbozeman.org/summer-art-walks

Willow Woven, by Christine Joy, part of Bozeman, Montana’s Art Walk is on view in the window of Hennebery Eddy Architects’ Studio Gallery until August 6th, 2025.

On public display in the studio’s storefront window, the gallery is about making connections — with neighbors, friends, clients, and colleagues. The alternating exhibits at the Studio Gallery feature curated staff and visiting artist displays that spark new ideas and promote a shared sense of place.

Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread
Through February 1, 2026
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives (BAMPFA)
215 Center Street 
Berkeley, CA
https://bampfa.org/program/lee-shinja-drawing-thread

Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread at BAMPFA in Berkeley, California is the first North American survey of the captivating work of the under-recognized Korean artist Lee ShinJa (b. 1930, Uljin, South Korea; lives and works in Seoul). Lee ShinJa worked throughout the five decades of contemporary fiber arts’ history, from the 1950s to the early 2000s, the exhibition showcases the artist’s bold innovations in fiber through 40 monumental textile works, woven maquettes, and preparatory sketches. Like artists from Eastern Europe working in that time period, Lee’s artworks from the 1950s incorporate everyday objects and found materials, such as grain sacks, mosquito nets, and domestic wallpaper; notably, she used yarn salvaged from secondhand sweaters and bedding to make her earliest tapestries

Kunstbygningen/Vrå Udstillingen
Museum for Contemporary Art in North-Jylland
Højskolevej 3A
9760 Vrå, Denmark
Through July 27 – August 31, 2026
https://www.kunstbygningenvraa.dk/vraa-udstillingen]

Jane Balsgaard will hang a several-part relief in an exhibition at the Vrå-Udstilligen in North Jylland, Denmark through August 31st. The opening party is July 26 at 2:00 pm. The exhibition is supported by the Danish State Art Foundation.

Liz Collins: Motherlode
Through January 11, 2026
RISD Museum
20 North Main Street
Providence, RI
https://risdmuseum.org/exhibitions-events/exhibitions/liz-collins

On July 19, the RISD Museum will open the first U.S. survey of artist Liz Collins’ genre-defying work. As the Museum explains, “For more than three decades, Collins has moved fluidly among the realms of fine art, fashion, and design, pushing material and technical boundaries to create works that evoke a depth of emotion, energy, and individual expression. The exhibition, titled Liz Collins: Motherlode, will feature more than 80 objects, capturing for the first time the full arc of Collins’ career from the 1980s to the present day. Motherlode includes important examples of her immersive textile installations and wallworks, intricate and monumental woven hangings, fashion, needlework, drawings, performance documentation, and ephemera. In keeping with the RISD Museum’s commitment to centering makers and broadening perspectives, the exhibition vividly showcases the trailblazing nature of Collins’ work as well as the artist’s deep commitment to illuminating Queer feminist creative practice and environmental activism.” Liz Collins: Motherlode will remain on view at RISD Museum through January 11, 2026. The exhibition is curated by Kate Irvin, RISD Museum’s department head and curator of costume and textiles.

State Fair: Growing American Craft
August 22 – September 7, 2026
Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, NW
Washington, DC
https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/state-fairs

Polly Adams Sutton‘s work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and will be featured in the Smithsonian’s upcoming exhibition, State Fair: Growing American Craft, which includes exceptional examples of American craft, highlighting personal stories and regional and cultural traditions.

We Will Sing
Through November 2, 2025
1A Aldermanbury
Bradford, UK
https://bradford2025.co.uk/event/we-will-sing

We Will Sing is a work of memory and imagining. Drawing on the origins of the textile processes that once filled the huge Salts Mill textile works built in 1853, a site-responsive installation by Ann Hamilton weaves together voice, song and printed word in a material surround made from raw and woven wool sourced from local textile companies H Dawson, based at Salts Mill, and William Halstead, which celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2025. We Will Sing is the first major work created by Hamilton in the UK for more than 30 years, and the first time all three spaces on the vast top floor of Salts Mill have been combined to present a single artwork. (We’ve been big fans of Hamilton’s immersive installations since she transformed our neighborhood museum, the Aldrich, in the 1990s.)

Human Affects
Through October 4, 2025
Visions Museum of Textile Art
2825 Dewey Road
Suite 100
San Diego, CA
https://vmota.org/human-affects

Human Affects is a one-person exhibition at the Visions Museum of Textile Art featuring work by 
Laura Foster Nicholson. From 2020-2023, Nicholson made three related bodies of work about climate change: flooding in Venice, container ships, and the landscape and architecture of industrial agriculture and energy. A selected grouping of these themes comprises the exhibition at VMOTA, plus a few that focus more on the hope of renewable energy, careful farming, and a less destructive way of life.

And continuing:

Olga de Amaral
Through October 12, 2026
Institute of Contemporary Art
61 NE 41st Street
Miami, FL
https://icamiami.org/exhibition/olga-de-amaral

ICA Miami, in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, presents a major retrospective of the work of Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, bringing together more than 50 works from six decades, and featuring recent and historical examples, some of which have never been presented outside of her home country.

Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
Through September 2, 2025
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
San Francisco, CA 
https://www.sfmoma.org/exhibition/ruth-asawa-retrospective

This first posthumous retrospective presents the full range of Ruth Asawa’s work and its inspirations over six decades of her career. As an artist, Asawa forged a groundbreaking practice through her ceaseless exploration of materials and forms.

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
September 13, 2025
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
New York, NY
https://press.moma.org/exhibition/woven-histories

An in-depth exhibition featuring 150 works that delves into the dynamic intersections between weaving and abstraction.

Magdalena Abakanowicz – Everything is made of fiber
Through August 23, 2025
TextielMuseum
Goirkestraat 96
5046 GN Tilburg, the Netherlands
https://textielmuseum.nl/en/exhibitions/Abakanowicz

The complete story of Abakanowicz’s work, life and legacy will be told at three locations in Brabant this spring. Abakanowicz was fascinated by the texture of textiles and the structure of natural fibres. She used this fascination as a basis for her weavings, but also to depict the human body.

Almost too many to choose from — fiber art continues its time in the spotlight!

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We travelled to Washington, D.C. this past weekend in search of art and archival info. 

We had some delicious meals — Indian (The Bombay Club), Latin Fusion (Mercy Me), lox and bagels, (Call Your Mother) and returned to Shashuka (Tatte), a dish we first discovered in South Africa.

We did some great walking — DC is a very pedestrian-friendly town. 

We scheduled the trip as a celebration of textiles. We visited three exceptional exhibitions — Subversive, Skilled, Sublime at the Renwick, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery, Irresistible: The Global Patterns of Ikat at the George Washington University and The Textile Museum, and did some research on artists and art history at the Archives of American Art. (We’ll cover exhibition specifics in upcoming posts on arttextstyle.)

In addition to catching up with artists, curators, and friends at Sublime, we learned something interesting about the Renwick. The building was completed in 1874 and opened as DC’s first art museum, housing William Wilson Cochran’s collection of European and American art, In 1899, the building was comandeered by the Court of Claims. In the 1950s, the Court proposed demolishing the building. Happily, it was saved by First Lady, and tireless patron of the arts, Jacqueline Kennedy in 1963. President Lyndon Johnson transferred the building to the Smithsonian Institution for use as “a gallery of crafts, art, and design.” It was renovated in 1972 amd again in 2013. Between 2016 and 2023, 176,000 people have visited.

We also visited the National Gallery, East Building to see Woven Histories which has traveled from LACMA in California and which will arrive at MoMA in New York in 2025. We’ll share images and info about Woven Histories in a future post.

The National Gallery is a delight — an inspired building — widely considered I.M. Pei’s most ambitious architectural design. (Side note: David Ling, the architect behind the renovation and addition to browngrotta arts’ home/barn/gallery, worked for I.M. Pei.) The East Building houses the National Gallery’s collection of modern and contemporary art and temporary exhibitions. From the Alexander Calder sculpture in the lobby to the massive Urula von Rydingsvard wood sculpture and the striking Theaster Gates work on the 2nd floor mezzanine, to the permanent collection itself (500 works), there is much to see. Hard to pick just a few highlights but we wlll. They include: 45 Calder sculptures and paintings, a choice selection of works from the Washington Color School of the 50s and 60s, including Kenneth Noland and Alma Thomas, and an impressive collection of Mark Rothko paintings (who is a major influence for several artists who work with browngrotta arts).

Our last stop was The Textile Museum at George Washington University for Irresistible…(Watch this space in future weeks for more on that ikat exhibition.) The Museum’s collection is truly remarkable — 21,000 objects in all, Rugs and Textiles from the Islamic World, East and Southeast Asian Textiles, African Textiles, and Indigenous American Textiles. In 2016, the Museum began collecting textiles from the 20th and 21st centuries to showcase textiles as a “vibrant medium of contemporary expression.” The contemporary collection includes works by Ed Rossbach, Lia Cook, Helena Hernmarck, Cynthia Schira, James Bassler, and Polly Barton. 

The Museum also houses one of the most significant textile study collections ever assembled. Nearly 4000 fragments from around the world are housed in the Cotsen Textile Traces Study Collection, compiled by philanthropist and collector, Lloyd Cotsen, who was also a patron of browngrotta arts.

One of the great things about museum hopping in DC — so many of them are free!! We just scratched the surface in the three days we were there.

The National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of African American History and Culture and National Museum of Women in the Arts are our first stops for our next trip. (If Rhonda hadn’t been there twice already, The International Spy Museum, would be high on the list, too — it’s great fun.)

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Washington, D.C.
Connections: Contemporary Craft
at the Renwick Gallery
On view – indefinitely
Connections is the Renwick Gallery’s dynamic ongoing permanent collection presentation, featuring more than 80 objects celebrating craft as a discipline and an approach to living differently in the modern world. The exhibition explores the underlying current of craft as a balancing, humanistic force in the face of an evermore efficiency-driven, virtual world. The installation highlights the evolution of the craft field as it transitions into a new phase at the hands of contemporary artists, showcasing the activist values, optimism, and uninhibited approach of today’s young artists, which in some way echoes the communal spirit and ideology of the pioneers of the American Studio Craft Movement in their heyday. Includes artist Lia Cook, Toshiko Takaezu, Ed Rossbach, John McQueen, Peter Voulkos.
Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum 

Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street NW, Washington, DC. (212)(202) 633-7970 https://americanart.si.edu

Boston, Massachusetts
Women Take the Floor 
On view through May 3, 2020
An exhibition of more than 200 works that challenge the dominant history of 20th-century American art by focusing on the overlooked and underrepresented work and stories of women artists – advocating for diversity, inclusion, and gender equity in museums, the art world, and beyond. Includes Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks, Olga Amaral, Kay Sekimachi, Toshiko Takaezu. 
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115
Phone: (617) 267-9300 mfa.org

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Off the Wall: American Art to Wear
On view through May 17, 2020  Delight in the astonishing inventiveness and techniques of a generation of mixed-media artists who pioneered a new art form designed around the body. Coming of age during the dramatic cultural shifts of the 1960s and 70s, the artists in this distinctively American movement explored non-traditional materials and methods to create adventurous, deeply imaginative works. Includes Norma Minkowitz and Katherine Westphal 
Philadelphia Museum of Art 
2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130
Phone: (215) 763-8100
https://philamuseum.org

Chicago, Illinois
Weaving beyond the Bauhaus
On view through Feb 17, 2020
Presented on the centenary of this foundational organization, Weaving beyond the Bauhaus traces the diffusion of Bauhaus artists, or Bauhäusler, such as Anni Albers and Marli Ehrman, and their reciprocal relationships with fellow artists and students across America. Through their ties to arts education institutions, including Black Mountain College, the Institute of Design, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Yale University, these artists shared their knowledge and experiences with contemporary and successive generations of artists, including Sheila Hicks, Else Regensteiner, Ethel Stein, Lenore Tawney, and Claire Zeisler, shaping the landscape of American art in the process.
Art Institute Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603-6404
(312) 443-3600
https://www.artic.edu

Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe
On view through March 7, 2020
This series of four exhibitions explores Lenore Tawney’s (1907–2007) life and impact, offering a personal and historical view into her entire body of work. Read more about the Tawney exhibits in our earlier blog here: http://arttextstyle.com/2019/12/18/lenore-tawney-gets-her-due/  
John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC)
608 New York Avenue, Sheboygan, WI 53081
Phone: 920.458.6144
jmkac.org

Racine, Wisconsin
It’s Like Poetry: Building a Toshiko Takaezu Archive at RAM 
On view through July 26, 2020
RAM’s archive now numbers over 30 works, including Toshiko Takaezu’s (1922-2011) most expansive grouping, the installation comprised of 14 “human-sized” forms, the Star Series. Significantly, the museum’s holdings span the range of Takaezu’s working career—with a double-spouted pot from the 1950s being the earliest and the Star Series (1999-2000) being the latest. 
Open Storage: RAM Showcases Ceramic, Fiber, and Regional Archives 
On view through August 30, 2020
Arranged as a series of artist solo showcases, Open Storage also highlights the earliest kinds of work given to RAM—textiles and works on paper. While ceramic works and art jewelry currently number as the two largest types of contemporary craft represented, examples of textiles, prints, drawings, and works on paper were among the very first gifts of artwork to the museum in the 1940s. This exhibition features the work of 12 artists—Sandra Byers, Gibson Byrd, John N. Colt, Theodore Czebotar, Lillian Elliott, Joseph Friebert, Ed Rossbach, Kay Sekimachi, Jean Stamsta, Merle Temkin, Murray Weiss, and Beatrice Wood—through multiple examples of their work. 
Racine Art Museum
441 Main Street, Racine, WI 53403
Phone: (262) 638-8300
https://www.ramart.org

New York, New York
Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019
On view through January 2021
The exhibition foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. This exhibition provides new perspectives on subjects that have been central to artists, including abstraction, popular culture, feminist and queer aesthetics, and recent explorations of identity and relationships to place. Together, the works demonstrate that craft-informed techniques of making carry their own kind of knowledge, one that is crucial to a more complete understanding of the history and potential of art. Drawn primarily from the Whitney’s collection, the exhibition will include over eighty works by more than sixty artists, including Ruth Asawa, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelley, Liza Lou, Ree Morton, Howardena Pindell, Robert Rauschenberg, Elaine Reichek, and Lenore Tawney, as well as featuring new acquisitions by Shan Goshorn, Kahlil Robert Irving, Simone Leigh, Jordan Nassar, and Erin Jane Nelson. More on this exhibition in our previous post: http://arttextstyle.com/dispatches-making-knowing-craft-in-art-1950-2019-at-the-whitney/
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014
Phone: (212) 570-3600
https://whitney.org

New York, New York
Taking a Thread for a Walk
On view through April 19, 2020
True to its title, this exhibition takes a thread for a walk among ancient textile traditions, early-20th-century design reform movements, and industrial materials and production methods. Featuring adventurous combinations of natural and synthetic fibers and spatially dynamic pieces that mark the emergence of more a sculptural approach to textile art beginning in the 1960s, this show highlights the fluid expressivity of the medium. More about this exhibition in our earlier blog: Dispatches: Textiles Take Center Stage at the New MoMA, New York, NY
Museum of Modern Art, New York 
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 708-9400
https://www.moma.org

Los Angeles, California
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985
On view through May 3, 2020 Featuring approximately fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. This is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Includes artist Lia Cook. 
Museum of Contemporary Art
Grand Avenue
250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Phone: (213) 626-6222
https://www.moca.org 

Please check with each art institution for directions and hours.          

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