A Glorious Show of Textile Art Unspools in 18th-Century New York Building

Fiber art is having much more than a moment, with increasing market attention paid to artists working in this medium as well as institutional recognition left and right. As just one prominent example, New York’s Museum of Modern Art recently opened the excellent show “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” featuring more than a century’s worth of, as the museum put it, “textile works that challenge accepted divisions between fine art and craft.”

But for a remarkable survey of what’s happening in this art form at this very moment, head downtown from MoMA to South Street Seaport, at the bottom of the island, where New York art dealers Karin Bravin and John Lee of BravinLee Programs have mounted “The Golden Thread II,” which brings together 60 artists, including 10 new site-specific installations. The show takes its title from Greek mythology, in which the three Fates, sister goddesses, spin a thread on their wheel that represents every living individual’s destiny, which they assign at the time of their birth; at the end of a person’s life, the Fates cut the thread. 

The venue, 207 Front Street, was erected in 1797 and is one of the oldest structures in the neighborhood. Added in 1972 to the National Register of Historic Places, it has some 10,000 square feet of space and provides a dramatic setting, featuring heavy timber floor framing, brightly sunlit galleries, and dramatic, wide-open spaces in the topmost floor, where you’ll find a 12-foot iron and wood wheel that was once used to hoist grain from ships into storage. At the moment, that device is home to Tura Oliveira’s Wheel of Fortune (2025), in which a giant, bloodred humanoid figure is tangled in the spokes. (The wheel also nicely calls back to the image of the Fates.)

“Titled after both the tarot card and the game show,” said the artist in a statement, “in this work the grain hoist becomes the breaking wheel of public execution, history turns like a great wheel and catches us in its spokes.” The piece’s price is on request.

It’s the sophomore outing of the show, which had its inaugural run at the same setting last year. That show, which was the building’s debut as a public exhibition space, was open for just several days, coinciding with the Frieze fair. This year, with the blessing of owner Ivan Wolpert of Seaport Associates and Belle Harbour Capital, the show remains on view for a month (including Frieze’s run, when many from the global art world will convene in New York). Prices range from a few hundred dollars for small works by Eileen Braun and Traci Johnson to the range of $70,000 for a large Karen Margolis.

Fabric art is a many-splendored thing, and I’m not an expert, so I called on Elissa Auther, deputy director of curatorial affairs and chief curator at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design—the curator that pretty much every invited artist put on their VIP list, Bravin told me—to tour the show and call out some highlights. Elevated to her current role in 2019, she had joined the museum five years before as as research and collections curator.

Textile arts span all sorts of techniques and processes, Auther told me, including needlework, embroidery, felting, wet bonding, quilting, and weaving, whether on a loom or off. And these each can lend different meanings, so the more the audience knows, the better they can understand the works. Auther proved an excellent instructor, and no wonder—she also teaches at New York’s Bard Graduate Center.

“I never thought I’d see an exhibition like this in my lifetime,” she said. “Textile art certainly isn’t a recent trend in my world, though it’s definitely gotten more visible, and many more artists are now using the material for the first time.”

After sipping on a coffee and chatting with Bravin and Lee, Auther took note of Chris Bogia’s 2022 yarn-on-wood Village Interior (Maspeth), which hangs in the entryway. The boldly colored work shows a table on which stands a candelabra made of human arms, holding shining candles against a rich black background. “He has a tremendous color sense,” Auther said, “and gives attention to the decorative borders. I’m interested in artists who embrace ‘the decorative,’” she said—a term long considered feminized and derogatory in high art. 

“When I made this piece, I was thinking about our collective period of darkness and the sources of light (candles, lanterns, the moon) that we symbolically looked to as a way to illuminate the dark mysteries of our collective predicament during the pandemic,” said the artist in a statement, adding that the framed archway in the piece, where those decorative flourishes appear, echoes those of typical homes in the borough of Queens, where the work was originally shown. The work, priced at $25,000, appears courtesy of Mrs. Gallery, which is in that borough’s Maspeth neighborhood.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Auther said in front of Morning Mourn (2024), an ambitious, five-foot-wide Halley Zien piece. “It’s a combination of painting and dimensional stuffed sculpture. That’s what’s exciting about this show. There’s always new discoveries.” The piece shows a domestic interior, with several figures, some lying in bed, seemingly involved in a wild confrontation. Lee later compared it to a scene in the classic 1971 film (where Charlie’s four grandparents are confined to a single bed), filtered through the sensibility of English photographer Richard Billingham. List price: $12,500.

“My work explores the dissonance between idealized exterior appearances and the psychologically charged realities of internal experience,” says Zien in a statement. “Inspired by traditions that use performative masks to dislodge the spirit, exaggerated figures use their distortion to telegraph hidden emotional truths.”

Looking at Sharp Edge of the Sky (2022) by Julia Bland, Auther enumerated various techniques: weaving, braiding, painted canvas that seems to have been dismantled and sewn back together, and tie dye. With a palette of oranges and browns, the abstract work, standing nearly 10 feet high, is based on several interlocking triangles. Courtesy of New York gallery Derek Eller, it goes for $32,000.

“This piece is a meditation on the ‘face to face’ encounter described in the moral philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, during which a person’s intimacy and otherness are simultaneously felt,” said the artist’s statement. 

An Intangible Sanctuary of Ocean and stars II (2023), an eight-foot-high piece by Ruby Chishti, combines found men’s overcoats with other fabric, as well as thread, wood, metal wire, paint, and other materials into an overcoat for a giant. Auther quipped that it was the opposite of a work by Charles LeDray, the artist known for creating sculptures of miniature clothing. “But she’s created a landscape,” Auther pointed out.

“Magnified by the sheer scale of the structure, it distorts perspective—like a little girl gazing upward at a monumental, unreachable guardian, as abstract and fleeting as God,” said the artist.

Ali Dipp’s Concession No. 3 (Trumbull, Capitol), from 2024, reproduces a familiar scene—artist John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence (1817–18), showing the Founding Fathers presenting that document’s first draft to the Second Continential Congress. It’s made from hand-stitched thread on denim jeans the artist located in Salvation Army stores in El Paso, Texas, near the Mexican border. In a statement, the artist said that “On the border, I see how America is still in the making—where those who work, aspire, and believe there is more to see, more to build, and more to imagine remember that emancipation comes from the Latin word for hand.” Auther pointed out that it’s “a good example of how materials can relate directly to a place, and to communities.”

Tumultuous Heart (2017), a six-foot-square rug by Walter Robinson based on a “spin” painting of his own making, served as a spot for Auther and Lee to talk technique, about tufting and weaving and knotting and texture—and to reminisce about the widely beloved late artist and critic. Robinson famously made paintings with a spinning technique starting in 1985, years before Damien Hirst made a mint on similar works. New York Times critic Holland Cotter observed that Robinson’s works combined action painting and a hippy aesthetic. BravinLee Programs has been commissioning rugs from artists for years; also on display are examples by Willie Cole, Rashid Johnson, Deborah Kass, Thomas Nozkowski, and Christopher Wool.

Lee and Robinson often talked trash about sports in text messages, the dealer recalled, asking, mournfully, “So when am I going to get a text from him?” 

Terri Friedman, standing before her work RE-fresh (2022), in an array of greens and other earthy tones, enthused to Auther, “I’ve always wanted to meet you!” This work, she explained, engages in a more muted palette than past work, and is at a more mural-like scale (it stands eight feet high). The piece draws inspiration from nun and self-taught artist Sister Corita Kent, as well as protest posters and affirmations. She draws the work on an iPad, she said, which is a fairly new development, while asking, “How can I create a painting out of fiber?” The technology has been a game-changer, she said. 

Several works in “Golden Thread” explore social and political hot-button issues. There are Natalie Baxter’s Warm Guns (2016–25), soft versions of assault weapons, and the same artist’s 2016 People Will Think You’re Making a Trump Flag (a yuge one), that reproduces the Stars and Stripes in Trumpian gold. There’s Diana Weymar’s American Sampler (2020–25), from her Tiny Pricks Project, needlepoints that include quotations from political discourse on various subjects. There’s Jennifer Cecere’s WH (2025), showing the White House, always a locus for contested notions of America.

“I just came from teaching a class teaching about protest art,” said Auther, adding that fiber art has long lent itself well to political commentary. The curriculum included artists like Ellen Lesperance, who has made sweater designs from historical photographs of protesters; the Ribbon International, a 1985 anti-nukes protest involving a large decorated cloth that stretched from the Pentagon into Washington, D.C.; the AIDS Memorial Quilt; and the Social Justice Sewing Academy. 

In all, though she has long thought about and investigated the plentiful ways artists have used this medium over many decades, even Auther was amazed at how many artists in the new show were unfamiliar to her.

“The field is expanding beyond the capability of keeping up,” she said. “And that’s a good thing.”

“The Golden Thread II” is on view from BravinLee Programs at 207 Front Street, New York, New York, April 11–May 16, 2025.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com