Exhibitions

British artist Lucy Sparrow has stitched and felted immersive bodegas and vegetable stands from London to Bangkok over the past decade. You know what she has yet to sew together? A U.S. museum show. That changes next summer, when Sparrow unveils “The Beginning of Convenience” at the Crystal Bridges Museum’s contemporary art hub, the Momentary.
“The Beginning of Convenience” will elaborate on Sparrow’s established practice of recreating environments entirely in felt. Here, she’s revisiting the American supermarket. The concept recalls Sparrow’s buzzy SparrowMart store, erected seven years ago in Los Angeles. This time, the subject matter nods to Crystal Bridges, owned and operated by the family that founded Walmart.
About 20,000 hand-sewn plush wares will fill this supermarket’s shelves. Earlier projects like Cornershop (2014) and 8 ‘Till Late (2017) were comparatively small, offering 4,000 and 9,000 felt products respectively. Over the years, Sparrow’s team and output have expanded significantly. This summer’s Bourdon Street Chippy offered 65,000 objects.
Lucy Sparrow’s The Bourdon St Chippy (2025) at Lyndsey Ingram, London. Photo: Alun Callender for Jo Brooks PR Ltd.
Beyond thread and felt, “The Beginning of Convenience” will utilize another medium Sparrow’s known to deftly wield—nostalgia. This supermarket will teleport guests back to the 1980s and ’90s, a time when “changing roles within the household led to the development and proliferation of quick and easy consumer goods, such as microwave dinners, frozen foods, and out-of-the-box meals,” the Momentary explained. This is also the era where Walmart grew from a small, local retailer to an international powerhouse.
Recreating these decades required research—the likes of which Sparrow has undertaken for previous projects, like Feltz Bagels (2023). This time, she’s studied Walmart’s archives, curating her new supermarket’s semi-vintage products, which will span cosmetics, household goods, and, of course, groceries.
Lucy Sparrow. Photo by Alun Callender
“There are lots of new products, and many of the ones I’ve made before have had a re-design to represent their 1980/90 branding,” Sparrow noted over email. “Products with intricate shapes and labels are always more challenging to sew and paint—Lucky Charms cereal is always a very labour intensive work because of the many layers of painting.”
Typically, Sparrow’s installations dwindle with time, as the creations she’s so painstakingly stitched together get snatched up. 8 ‘Till Late famously closed early, after its shelves went bare. “The Beginning of Convenience,” though, will look the same from start to finish. Nothing will be for sale.
The free, non-ticketed exhibition will feature two more rooms. One will recreate Sparrow’s studio, the Felt Cave, situated in an old Suffolk ambulance station. Another will screen a documentary that Sparrow made while producing the show.
Some of the sweets slated for Sugar Rush. Courtesy of Lucy Sparrow
Too excited to wait? Sparrow’s hitting the U.S. next week to debut a candy shop titled Sugar Rush at Art Miami with TW Fine Art. This 35,000-work store will feature “every candy bar you can think of,” Sparrow said, plus a pick-and-mix bulk candy section, and a wide range of framed works. It’s a far cry from her health-conscious vegetable stand at Scope Art Show last Miami Art Week, but a fitting conclusion to this year, where Sparrow came clean about her struggles with disordered eating.
“I’m a little obsessed with sweets,” she said. “We have so many packets of candy backstage in an installation—it really is the fuel that Team Felt runs on.”
“Lucy Sparrow: The Beginning of Convenience” will be on view at the Momentary, 507 SE E St, Bentonville, Arkansas, the summer of 2026 through July 11, 2027. More

One of the world’s largest and finest collections of video art is headed to Los Angeles with a project promising to bridge the divide between “time-based media” and “box office gold.” Opening February 6, 2026, “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” at the Variety Arts Theater in downtown L.A. marks the first major U.S. presentation of works from the Julia Stoschek Foundation. It expands on the city’s robust tradition of welcoming European emigres, who blur the lines between fine art and popular cinema. 
Curated by Udo Kittelmann, the show pairs video work by artists including Marina Abramović, Dara Birnbaum, Cyprien Gaillard, Arthur Jafa, Jesper Just, and Lu Yang, with historic films by Luis Buñuel, Walt Disney, Alice Guy-Blaché, Winsor McCay, and Georges Méliès. Just and Birnbaum explicitly riff on Hollywood tropes regarding romance and women’s roles, while Disney’sThe Skeleton Dance (1929) offers an example of early animation.
Lu Yang’s entry offers a genderless digital avatar, a counterpoint of sorts to the inclusion of Méliès, who brought an experimental, illusionistic approach to his medium and to science fiction narratives in particular. The works altogether span 120 years of filmmaking and promise meditations on ever-advancing technologies. 
Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978/79). Photo courtesy of Julia Stoschek Foundation.
Stoschek established her collection in 2002. In a 2017 W Magazine profile, she explained her enthusiasm for time-based media. “I try with the collection to create an image of the social and cultural changes of my generation,” she said. “We’re surrounded by all these moving images… the function is not only to generate unique images, but to seek reflection.”
Stoschek expressed admiration for post-internet artists who are creating a “totally new,” “often political” artistic language. Her collection has grown to include over 1,000 artworks by 300 artists. The foundation opened a public space in Düsseldorf in 2007 and another in Berlin in 2016. It has since staged group exhibitions on gaming, digital diaries, and alternative interpretations of zoology. It has also hosted solo shows on Mark Leckey, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and a slate of other artists hailing from around the world. 
Stoschek and Kittelmann selected a venue with its own connections to politics and performance. The six-story, 1920s Venetian-style landmark in downtown Los Angeles was once home to L.A.’s first women’s clubhouse, the Friday Morning Club, which espoused feminist and creative programming. Figueroa Playhouse, a vaudeville theater, leased the space in 1924 and brought acts including Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton to the stage. Over the years, the building hosted films, concerts, and events before falling into disrepair.
According to the press materials, “its foundations still exude an air of old glamour, and its walls reverberate with cultural memory—soon to be revived for a six-week run, reframing its legacy of social engagement and slapstick performance through contemporary moving image practices.”
The Skeleton Dance (1929). Photo courtesy of Julia Stoschek Foundation
The project brings to mind the midcentury moment when European intellectuals flocked to L.A. and developed their own unusual relationships with the world of film. Composer Arnold Schoenberg lived across the street from Shirley Temple and declined work in “the industry.” Man Ray and Buñuel collaborated on a never-realized film script called Sewers of L.A. Alfred Hitchcock hired Salvador Dalí to design a dream sequence for Spellbound (1945).
The Stoschek Foundation show promises a cinematic conversation across time and place, in the black box darkness that is especially meaningful in a city famed for its relationship to the silver screen.
“What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” is on view at the Variety Arts Theater, 940 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, February 6–March 20, 2026. More