Fiber Art Has Officially Taken Over New York’s Museums and Galleries

Sonia Delaunay, the French modernist best known for her gloriously colored abstractions, once said, “For me there is no gap between my painting and my so-called ‘decorative’ work.” You can easily imagine those very words being spoken by just about any of the participants in this show, which first debuted in 2023 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The exhibition explores how artists across the past century have collapsed any division between paintings and textiles. Fiber works from the 20th century by Delaunay, Anni Albers, and Gunta Stölzl figure early on, enlisted as clear guides for the show’s grande dame, Rosemarie Trockel, a German painter responsible for 10 works featured here. (A veteran of the 2022 Biennale, Trockel is also this week’s grande dame in New York, with a two-venue solo spanning Gladstone Gallery and Sprüth Magers.) Trockel’s Passion (2013), featuring white threads gently daubed with red and yellow acrylic, remakes the monochrome in wool, then undermines the purity that artists like Kazimir Malevich held in such high regard. Fiber became Trockel’s tool for revisiting—and defying—modernism’s supremacy. Many others have followed in her footsteps.

But the further the show moves from modernism, the more its tightly knitted threads fray. The exhibition is unclear about the ties that bind many of its artists: what, for example, links an abstract painting from the ’70s by Jack Whitten and a raffia net from the ’60s by Ed Rossbach? They use nets as corollaries to the modernist grid, apparently, though that is only explained in the catalog and largely brushed over within the galleries themselves. The exhibition also stumbles when presenting artists awaiting canonization such as Yvonne Koolmatrie, a Ngarrindjeri weaver who makes sinuous sculptures from sedge, a type of grass. These works are awkwardly lumped together with baskets by Indigenous artists, an awkward, reductive gesture that makes them feel like an afterthought.

The crux of curator Lynne Cooke’s thesis—that modernist subversion birthed fiber fever—is demonstrably true, but the nuances of her argument are less neatly outlined. Yet even if “Woven Histories” unfortunately feels insignificant, its mere existence is important, since it acts as a surefire sign that fiber art has hit the mainstream.

At 11 West 53rd Street, Floor 3, through September 13.

“Woven Histories” has already birthed New York shows for some of its participants, including this astonishing US debut for an artist already famous in her home country of Spain. Teresa Lanceta has been weaving since the ’70s, but she didn’t have her breakthrough moment until the mid-’80s, when she acquired a handira, or a traditional Moroccan wedding blanket. Of its maker, Lanceta once said, “I felt she was a real person; I sensed an existence, an individualisation, and I felt that this woven object connected us somehow.” Her own brilliantly colored weavings continue that line of thinking, showing how multicultural sampling can function as a kind of solidarity. It would all feel problematic if Lanceta weren’t so forthright about her inspirations: one memorable work by her in “Woven Histories” includes four of her own textiles alongside the Moroccan pillowcase that inspired them.

One of the weavings at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, LLUVIA EN SEVILLA (1987), features shuddering cerulean lines above a pile-up of orange forms. The work was made using techniques learned from Berber women in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, but the piece’s focus, as evidenced by its title, is something closer to home: the city of Seville, where Lanceta once lived. Later works in the show appear less steeped in North African tradition. Her ongoing “El Raval” series (begun in 2019) is closer in style to modernist abstraction, with sewn-up painted swatches reminiscent of the color blocks in Hans Hofmann’s paintings. The patchwork aesthetic of these pieces suggests it is still possible to cut up the fabric of history and stitch it back together, forming new bonds in the process.

530 West 22nd Street, through May 17.

Leonardo’s Last Supper regularly draws crowds, and so too should this Brazilian artist’s take on Christ’s final meal. On its face, her untitled 1965–76 embroidery depicts nothing unusual—just a bunch of people seated along a banquet table. But Madalena Santos Reinbolt has turned some of the 12 disciples Black, demarcating her Last Supper from just about any other preceding it, and her medium was acrylic yarn, not tempera paint. If art history denied representation to Black people like Santos Reinbolt, she has sought to remedy that, doing so with one of the most sacred Christian images. Using scraps of wool and burlap sourced from those who employed her as a live-in cook, she remade the world around her in fiber.

Santos Reinbolt has been claimed by some as a core figure in the history of arte popular, which has often been set apart from the history of modern art in Brazil. This retrospective, which first appeared at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo in 2022, shows that, though Santos Reinbolt was self-taught, she knew exactly what she was doing.

She began as a painter before moving on to what she called her “wool pictures,” whose zigzagging stitches lend these works a jittery energy. Gradually, the gleaming suns, top-hatted men, and soaring birds that she embroidered inched closer and closer to abstraction. By the time of her death in 1976, she had parted ways with figures altogether. An untitled piece finished that very year features an array of pom-pom–like wool balls beneath a set of concentric squares. As the eye is led inward toward the center, one gets the sense that Santos Reinbolt was envisioning the birth of a new universe.

At 2 Lincoln Square, through May 25.

The joy of Hellen Ascoli’s work is that it is so unresolved and so ambiguous. Consider the case of Interpreting Ana (2025), which features a dangling web of raffia and an appropriated corte skirt sourced from the Guatemalan town of Colotenango. The work’s title could refer either to an attempt to depict Ana, a person who goes unrepresented here, or to Ascoli’s work as an interpreter in the US, helping to translate for immigrant youths from Central and South America who have found themselves entangled in the US’s harsh prison system. The piece suggests garments without a wearer—and a wearer whose body has disappeared.

Born in Guatemala, Ascoli makes her weavings using a back-strap loom that yokes her art to her body. But she is also just as interested in the bodies of others, noting that “weaving is never an individual activity.” Accordingly, an entire wall of this show is devoted to collaborative works. Another raffia net can be found in Hidden Pedagogies (2025), which was produced with students at both the Maryland Institute College of Art and the nearby Charles H. Hickey, Jr. School Detention Center. Strips of purple and green hang down from this lung-like form, and if one of them were yanked, the whole thing might come apart. The piece itself, like the assortment of individuals used to produce it, implies a fragile alliance.

At 1040 Metropolitan Avenue, through August 1.

All the weavings in Hana Miletić’s New York debut revolve around the notion of recycling, with the exhibition’s checklist noting the works involve repurposed linen, polyester, and yarn. That befits the process behind these textiles, which are replicas of objects that Miletić encountered on city streets. She pays homage to that which appears to be refuse—bits of yellow caution tape, grids of duct tape stuck to storefront windows—but she never treats her detritus as waste. (That source material is not made obvious within the show itself, but it is cataloged, with accompanying photography, in a zine called Detours.)

Born in Zagreb, in what is now Croatia, and based currently in Brussels, Miletić has been producing these weavings since 2015 as part of a series called “Materials.” The series has commonly related digital imaging technologies to weaving, and she returns to those themes once more in a new work, also titled Materials (2025). Miletić took a snapshot of an X-shaped area of crossed tape reading “TRAINS NOT STOPPING · WORK IN PROGRESS,” then imported it to Photoshop, where she used a generative AI tool to expand her image beyond its original frame. She then handwove the result, UV-printing the AI-generated gibberish onto her linen, cotton, and wool. In four places, Miletić adds woven strips to her piece, as though she were applying Band-Aids to wounded flesh—a heartwarming act of care for what some might consider to be garbage.

At 149 Canal Street, through June 21.

When I visited Tanya Aguiñiga during the installation of her latest show this week, she told me that she had recently spent her days envisioning the tall portal at Albertz Benda as a birth canal. She has treated the gallery like one big femme body, setting spills of knitted wool over that entryway and allowing their droops to stand in for the pubic hairs surrounding a vagina. Presiding over the delivery taking place is a septet of gorgeous sculptural works that Aguiñiga has dubbed the “Seven Sisters.” Each has knots of cotton rope and hair-like tufts of flax, and each represents an aunt that raised the artist during a childhood lived along the US-Mexico border.

In more senses than one, the focus here is labor. Aguiñiga and the members of her studios have dyed her ropes using the extracts of cochineal insects—a difficult process, she said, given that her materials do not naturally take to these purple acids (to which she has added materials such as iron, resulting in different colorations). But the amount of effort required is in part the point, and it is obvious in the knotting, clearly the result of multiple pairs of hands tinkering at once, with some areas hanging tight while other parts are left slack. Aguiñiga takes the concept of “women’s work” and renders it as, well, just that—and beautifully so. Accordingly, nearly all her assistants are femme-identifying; it is no coincidence, either, that cochineal dye comes exclusively from female insects.

At 515 West 26th Street, May 8–June 21.

In 2019, outside A Gentil Carioca, the Rio de Janeiro gallery that she cofounded, artist Laura Lima staged Balé Literal, a performance in which bound-together knickknacks were trotted out for street-goers via pulleys. For a 2023 retrospective at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, she brought her performance indoors; she has now restaged it yet again within gallery walls, this time in New York. The focus of her Tanya Bonakdar show is costume-like objects formed from fabrics of all kinds: beekeepers’ suits adorned with cowrie shells, suspended mesh-like fabric that suggest tutus, and braided threads that look like torn-up dresses. Although performers are on hand to operate the pulleys via an exercise bike, there are no dancers, just the clothes they might have worn, which hang in a backroom that functions like a closet.

The exhibition might appear twee, but its backstory is hardly that. Lima has said that Balé Literal was initially a response to the “very oppressive” environment of Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Seen in that light, the work becomes a call for resisting the stasis that authoritarian regimes seek to institute—as timely a topic as any right now. And in relying so heavily on tulle, nylon, and fabric, Lima is showing us that fiber can be one tool in the fight for liberation. Appropriately, one of the new works in the show is Balé Literal; Bandeira LGBTQIAPN+, a Pride flag. When mounted to pulleys and hauled out before visitors, the satin ribbons attached to Lima’s flag shake with life.

At 521 West 21st Street, through May 30.