After decades on the margins, fiber and textile art is finally receiving the critical and institutional attention it deserves. Museums are mounting major shows that reconsider the medium’s history and contemporary potential, while the market is beginning to take it seriously. When future art historians and critics reflect on this shift, the contributions of artists like American artist Liz Collins will stand out. Collins, who has long pushed the boundaries of textile practice, is now having a major moment of recognition.
In Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, the sweeping survey “Liz Collins: Motherlode” traces the artist’s multi-decade career, the first dedicated to the artist in the United States. Curated by Kate Irvin of the RISD Museum’s Costume and Textiles Department, the show brings together an unparalleled range of work from across Collins’ career.
Collins’s landmark survey marks a pivotal moment in the rising institutional and critical recognition of fiber and textile art, tracing her multifaceted career from fashion to fine art and recent cross disciplinary experimentation. As the medium gains renewed interest, Collins emerges as a vital figure whose experimental, boundary-defying practice challenges conventional divisions between design, craft, and contemporary art—offering a model of possibility and evolution for the field at large.
Liz Collins. Photo: Joe Kramm.
Institutional Recognition
“Motherlode” coincides with Collins’ inclusion in the groundbreaking traveling group show “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” in its final stop at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, solidifying her place within the canon of medium. The show premiered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in late 2023 and was subsequently shown at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, making it one of the largest and most attended exhibitions dedicated to medium.
“’Woven Histories’ has really helped establish my contributions to a particular lineage of making and working that I feel very happy about now because it took a while,” Collins said.
Liz Collins, (2008–18). Photo: 4 Scotts Photography. Courtesy of Tyler and Stacey Smith.
With “Motherlode,” however, visitors are offered a deep dive into Collins’ work and practice to date as it brings to light the comprehensive arc of Collins’ career, and offers a glimpse at what’s to come. Collins, who lives and works in Brooklyn, is a double RISD graduate, receiving her BFA from the school in 1991 and MFA in 1999—with her MFA thesis project being a knitwear clothing line that launched her fashion label, which she ran through 2004.
As well as studying at RISD, between 2003 and 2013, she was a professor of textiles at RISD and has intermittently worked with the school or museum on various bases since. Collins’s longstanding and formative relationship with both institutions makes the present exhibition feel like a homecoming—perhaps even a triumph
“This survey show came out of my connection to these two institutions, the museum and the school,” Collins described on a video call. “I think it would be a different show somewhere else. The reason it’s called ‘Mother Lode’ is because these two institutions were part of what formed me as a creative person. I didn’t become the creative person I am now in a vacuum—I had a lot of influences, I was exposed to a lot, and while not all of it came from RISD, some very important moments of epiphanies and mentorship came from this place.”
Selections from knit-focused collections (1993–2003) by Liz Collins. Courtesy of the artist.
Broad Strokes
Curating an exhibition on such a diverse career was no easy feat, with Collins describing initially approaching the project in “broad strokes,” matching the spaces of the museum with largely categorical bodies of work. Plans for the show began roughly three years ago, but already there was an organizing element, one that balanced creative trajectory with medium or project. “It’s a lot of different categories coming together to represent the breadth of my work,” Collins said.
One such category is dedicated to the artist’s early work in fashion—which, despite it being the reason she initially found a place on many people’s radar, is largely unknown to those who discovered her work through more traditional art-centric spaces. Despite looming large in her career history and creative development, now that roughly two decades have passed, the period Collins devoted to fashion is comparatively dwarfed by her subsequent pursuit of visual art.
Liz Collins, (2006). Courtesy of the artist.
Collins described looking back at this time in her career as both generative and revelatory. “It was over 20 years ago that I was doing my fashion label,” said Collins. “It stands out to me as this time when I was doing some amazing work. I’m looking at it with fresh eyes as something really incredible. It was a very special time, but it was not a long period of time.”
Situated within the context of her greater oeuvre, the show highlights less a break from fashion so much as an evolution. Fashion, of course, leverages the vocabulary of textiles, fibers, and other materials in many of the same ways as visual art. Looking at pieces like the otherworldly (2006), created for an exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design, visual and textural parallels can be seen with works such as (2022); her fashion practice did not cease so much as transform, while retaining much of the same lexicon.
Liz Collins, (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
A Collaborative Gesture
At both the physical and metaphoric heart of the show, in the RISD Museum’s Skylight Gallery (perennially underused as it also houses a stairwell), is a facet of the exhibition collaboratively conceived of and curated by a class taught by Collins during the 2025 spring semester for the occasion. Here, the gallery was devised as a moment of respite, “a queer social space” in the tradition Collins has established with other earlier installations she’s created.
A show within a show, the title of this gallery space is entitled “Homecoming,” a reference to both individual returns made to home, family, or community, but also an invitation to those who may not be able to return home based on their identity. Featured are dozens of works made by queer-identifying RISD students, staff, faculty, and alumni, which are complemented by a selection of works drawn from the RISD Museum collection.
The class that undertook “Homecoming” was comprised of six students, who when Collins first proposed the idea had no way of knowing who they would be, necessitating a lack of expectation and a focus on collaboration. The group that ultimately came together—Callie Coccia, Farnaz Dastranj, Xiao Guo, Cindy Li, Kati Lowe, and Mary Mitchell—brought with them a diverse range of skills and interests; all Collins described as being driven, dynamic, and dedicated to the project.
“To have this space that is a gesture that students got to create with me … That makes me feel incredibly happy,” said Collins. “I wouldn’t have wanted to do the show without it, to be honest. I love all the textile work that I make and can keep making, but an important and meaningful part of my practice that I can’t abandon is creating social space. I need this to be part of my work.”
On the walls is a wallpaper designed by Collins with a pattern that has undergone several iterations. Made by a Zurich-based company that the artist has collaborated with for years, the first version was created in 2018 inspired in part by the natural landscape of Saratoga Springs where she undertook a residency at Yaddo coupled with a pattern drawn from a chart published by that illustrated the change in temperature of the Earth over the course of a century. Originally titled (later going by a different manufacturer’s name when it was put on the market), the evolving pattern has become a type of throughline in Collins’s practice, with various iterations being used in other solo shows such as her retrospective “Mischief” at Touchstones Rochdale in England in 2022.
Liz Collins, Zagreb Mountain Rug (2022). Courtesy of Liz Collins Studio.
Career in High Gear
The largest gallery space, rightfully, focuses on Collins’ diverse work with textiles and simultaneously her ability to deftly move from one style and methodology of work to another. On the gallery floor is the hand-knotted (2022). Behind it hangs the multimedia tapestry (2008/2018), composed of mohair, acrylic, lurex, glass, crystal, and wood. Nearby are the opulent embroidery work (2024) and the monumental woven textile (2024).
Liz Collins, (2024). Courtesy of Liz Collins Studio and Candice Madey, New York.
The shifts between material and format in her work speak to an unburdened experimentalism, and disregard for traditional classifications of art-making. To fully grasp Collins’s practice, one must let go of fixed boundaries—between design, art, and craft, as well as between materials and methods. Whether she’s working with weaving or embroidery, wool, or crystals, Collins treats them all as part of a unified visual language.
Despite “Motherlode” heralding a career highpoint and reflecting decades of prodigious output, it by no means indicates Collins is slowing down, and she could still very much be described as explosive an artist as she was in her early days as a fashion designer keeping up with the onslaught of new seasons. What has become apparent is a sleekening of her process, allowing her to undertake more ambitious projects.
Liz Collins, (2024). Photo: Kunning Huang. Courtesy of the artist and Candice Madey, New York.
“I just love to make work and find ways to do it and to keep working as much as possible,” she noted, “but also some of the means that I use now don’t mirror what I was doing then.”
For instance, Collins now regularly works with industrial textile mills as fabricators, allowing for her to achieve larger scales efficiently. It also offers her the ability to more quickly revisit, revise, or experiment with myriad patterns and designs, resulting in new work that pushes the farthest boundaries of abstraction.
Considered holistically, “Motherlode” not only delves into Collins’s past and recent bodies of work but offers an invaluable idea: possibility. “A takeaway for other creative people is the realm of the possible, and the evolution of work over time … there’s something of the interconnectivity of a creative person through different contexts. For people who already understand textiles, they can discern differences and methodologies. And it exposes those who don’t to a huge assortment of ways of making things that are different but can be interrelated.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
