Sam Barsky doesn’t knit with a pattern. If you don’t knit and so don’t know, that’s a big deal—mind-blowing, really. And he doesn’t make blobby sculptures or anything, just some of the most complex pictorial sweaters that I have ever seen, all freehand.
Barsky first picked up knitting in 1999 after being diagnosed with a chronic illness and dropping out of nursing school. (I too learned to knit on medical leave, but never got nearly as good). Barsky went to the library, checked out a book, and taught himself—then quickly outdid lifelong knitters. His very first sweater has a cloudy sky, a covered bridge, and a waterfall, and he made it after knitting for only 17 months.
Barsky has been knitting sweaters ever since. Typically, they are scenic, depicting places he’s visited or wants to visit, or memories he has. Shortly before 9/11, he knitted wearable Twin Towers. Some other sites-turned-sweaters on view in his recent solo show at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin were easily recognizable: Central Park; the lighthouse in Portland, Maine; the London Bridge. The sweaters hung from the ceiling on metal wire hangers, armatures extending the arms outward, and there was one you could wear, even take a selfie in. Selfies, by the way, are part of Barsky’s process: he takes pictures wearing his sweaters, often in the locales that they depict, making them something between site-specific artworks and souvenirs. Actually, he wears his own sweaters every day, and so knits them in wool and in cotton, with long sleeves and as tanks, prepared for any weather.
View of Sam Barsky’s 2025 exhibition “It’s Not the Same Without You,” 2025, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin.
Knitting all but demands that Barsky translate his imagery into color-blocked abstractions. The way he handles this is both incredibly sophisticated and very silly. Sometimes, he introduces different textures or multicolored yarn. A sunset sweater of his could pass for Missoni, but his Hoover Dam sweater looks more like an Ellsworth Kelly painting. A waterfall sweater looks totally unique—and simply perfect.
At the moment, Barsky is more famous on the internet than in the art world: after struggling to fit in socially, he found that his sweaters and selfies were good ways for him to find community. Soon, people started messaging him and recognizing him in the wild. And it’s true that when speaking of sweaters, his humor shines: in a wall label, he calls a sleeveless military sweater “a tank on a tank,” adding “I’m no fan of war, but I do like history.”
The show that closed this week at the Kohler Arts Center was Barsky’s first museum show, and it was significant for asking viewers to appreciate his truly extraordinary craft as art, to marvel at his materials in the flesh, and to give his work a slower look than the Internet encourages. A couple months after seeing it, I’m still stunned. His sweaters figured too in “R U Still Painting???,” a sprawling and hip show recently installed in an abandoned office building in Manhattan. Among works by assume vivid astro focus, Uri Aran, and Elizabeth Neel, Barsky’s sweaters hung from the ceiling every few yards or so, punctuating the show. Levitating over the colorful paintings by cool people, they exuded effortlessness, as if daring artsy sophisticates to have some good clean fun.
