“Weaving is a slow medium, a discipline of gradually accumulated structure. But what if you could wield it like an action painter does a brush, or a punk musician plays a guitar? Something like this is at work in the art of Liz Collins, which has a gestural freedom and energy unlike anything else in textiles.”
— Glenn Adamson, 2020
Objects: USA 2020 exhibition catalogue
Liz Collins is well-known for pushing the boundaries of art and design in innovative and experimental work in fabric, yarn, and other materials and techniques associated with textile media.
Although Collins embraces a language of abstraction, bold colors, patterns, and symbols allude to queer and feminist references, sourcing further inspiration from interpersonal and environmental forces such as electricity, volatility, connectivity, and energy exchange.
Whether in the form of textile, painting, drawing or installation, Collins frequently explores the dichotomy of structure and entropy—qualities inherent to textile that speak to the fissures present in broader architectural, political, and social structures. Processes of slowly cutting, unbinding, revealing, and rearranging subtly nod to the destabilization that takes place when small but organized acts aim to undercut rigid systems.
Collins’s current and forthcoming exhibitions include the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. In 2025, Collins will have a mid-career retrospective curated by Kate Irvin at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, with an accompanying monograph.
Collins has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; Touchstones Rochdale, Rochdale, UK, among others. She has been featured in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the New Museum, New York, NY; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, among others. In 2020, the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery released Liz Collins — Energy Field, the artist’s first major publication.
Collins lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA and MFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design.
—
Image credits: Promised Land, 2022, Silk and polyester, 144 x 420 x 144 inches. Photo by Harry Meadley (banner); Liz Collins in her Brooklyn studio in 2018. Photo by Vincent Dilio (above).
La Biennale Di Venezia 2024
Collins is included in La Biennale di Venezia’s 60th International Art Exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque — Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art. The exhibition presents two sections, Nucleo Contemporaneo, which foregrounds queer, outsider, folk, indigenous, and activist artists, and Nucleo Storico, which considers modernisms in the Global South. Part of Nucleo Contemporaneo, Collins’s work is the subject of an essay in the exhibition catalogue by Lex Morgan Lancaster, assistant professor of art history at The Cooper Union. Foreigners Everywhere is on view through November 24, 2024.
Collins is presenting two new large-scale textiles in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini, alongside the artist Aloïse Corbaz (b. Lausanne, Switzerland, 1886 – 1964).
Rainbow Mountain Weather, 2024
Woven textile (cotton, linen, mohair, nylon, polyester, wool)
123 x 198 inches
Photo by Patty van den Elshout
“Liz Collins works fluidly between art and design to produce a wide range of works that are activated by vibrant optical energy and queer feminist sensibilities. Incorporating fiber arts, painting, drawing, video, performance, and design forms, her work encompasses multiple processes and associations: hand-made and mechanical, familiar and abstract, playful and political.”
— Lex Morgan Lancaster, 2024
Foreigners Everywhere exhibition catalogue
Rainbow Mountain Moon, 2024
Woven textile (cotton, linen, mohair, nylon, polyester, wool)
123 x 199 inches
Photo by Patty van den Elshout
—
Image credits: Liz Collins and Aloïse Corbaz, Foreigners Everywhere, 2024 (installation view), La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (banner).
Woven Histories: Textiles And Modern Abstraction
Collins is included in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, an exhibition curated by Lynne Cooke, senior curator in the department of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition brings together work by over 50 international artists to challenge 20th century canonical hierarchies of media by presenting the histories of modern abstraction and textiles as inextricably linked.
Venues
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
September 17, 2023 – January 21, 2024
National Gallery of Art, Washington
March 17 – July 28, 2024
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
October 25, 2024 – March 2, 2025
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
April 20 – September 13, 2025
“Collins's work aligns with boro, a revered Japanese tradition wherein worn textiles are pieced and stitched together - part of a cycle of salvaging, recuperation, and sustainable care. Although Collins associates her mending practice with trauma and healing, she does not disavow the aesthetic refinement that is an integral part of the finest boro.”
— Lynne Cooke, 2023
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
—
Image credits: Liz Collins and Rosemarie Trockel, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, 2023 (installation view), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Image courtesy of LACMA (banner); Liz Collins and Gary Graham (GRIZ), Pride Dress, from the Seven Deadly Sins series, 2003, RISD Museum, Providence, RI. Photo by Erik Gould (top); Liz Collins, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, 2023 (installation view), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Image courtesy of LACMA (middle); Liz Collins, Walking Wounded, 2011, Digitally printed silk with knit cotton and rayon, 104 x 48 inches, Helen M. Danforth Acquisition Fund, RISD Museum, Providence, RI. Photo by Joe Kramm (above).
Milan Design Week 2024: Sunbrella x Liz Collins
For their latest collaboration, Collins and textile manufacturer Sunbrella presented the installation (re)Material Culture at Galleria Rossana Orlandi as part of Milan Design Week 2024, April 16 – 21. The installation immersed the viewer in a vibrant and tactile environment made from upcycled selvedge previously used in a 2019 collaboration between Collins and the brand. Using the same fabric, Collins designed a collection of (re)Material pillows, bags, and throws included in the installation.
“There is a strong intention here for people to be able to have recycled material in their lives... a reminder of care and attention to the transformation of existing materials versus always working with new.”
— Liz Collins on (re)Material Culture, 2024
(re)Material Culture, 2024 (installation view)
Galleria Rossana Orlandi, Milan
Photo by Daniel Trese
—
Image credits: (re)Material Culture, 2024 (installation view), Galleria Rossana Orlandi, Milan. Photo by Daniel Trese (banner); Liz Collins in (re)Material Culture, 2024, Galleria Rossana Orlandi, Milan. Photo by Daniel Trese (middle).
Available Work
In addition to Collins’s immersive textiles and installations, she has an ongoing body of needlepoint works whose smaller scale engage the viewer more intimately. In 2021, CANDICE MADEY presented Stairs, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition with Collins, which put geometric embroidered works by the artist in dialogue with Gabrielle Shelton’s steel stair sculptures. Johanna Fateman aptly described this body of work in her review of Stairs in The New Yorker: “tessellating patterns familiar from a host of textile traditions are given a queer, psychedelic twist.”
“From her early career as a cutting-edge fashion designer who launched her own celebrated label in 1999 to her performances with knitting machines to her recent large-scale installations referencing ecological crises, Collins has pursued textiles for their ability to convey both power and intimacy.”
— Julia Bryan-Wilson, 2022
Liz Collins: Mischief at Touchstones Rochdale
Cracked, 2022
Cotton, mohair, and wool
18 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches (unframed)
24 1/2 x 26 3/4 inches (framed)
$15,000
Memphis, 2019
Acrylic
12 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches (unframed)
17 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches (framed)
$9,000
Plaid Chevron, 2023
Acrylic, cotton, silk, and wool
11 x 11 1/2 inches (unframed)
17 x 17 3/4 inches (framed)
$6,500
—
Image credits: Stairs, 2021 (installation view), CANDICE MADEY, New York. Photo by Kunning Huang (banner).
In The Studio
Liz Collins sat down with the National Gallery of Art to discuss her studio practice and inspirations in concurrence with the exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, on view at the National Gallery of Art through July 28, 2024.
“I have this love affair with yarn. When I first started making these pieces that were like painting with yarn showers, part of it was because I wanted to find some way to have this material that felt so versatile and liquid in texture and color, like this carrier of color.”
— Liz Collins interviewed by Svetlana Kitto
BOMB Magazine, March 2018
Drawing of Liz Collins’s artistic influences
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon exhibition catalogue, 2017
Published by the New Museum
Photo by Liz Collins
—
Image credits: Liz Collins in her Brooklyn studio in 2021. Photo by Joe Kramm (banner); Liz Collins installing her commissioned work in Meta’s office in the James A. Farley Building in 2022. Photo by Bradford Devins/OWLEY (above left); Liz Collins in her Brooklyn studio in April 2024 (above middle and right).
Creating Social Space
“[Collins has] created a myriad of abstract and collaborative environmental installations that arrest with the magnitude of production and envelop viewers in lush color fields and chevron patterns, inviting them to enter electrified social spaces. Her site-specific works follow a feminist tradition of inserting craft- or textile-based forms and materials into a gallery context, challenging hierarchical genres of creative work and affirming ambiguities in form and practice.”
— Eileen Isagon Skyers, 2017
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum, exhibition catalogue
Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, 2017 (installation view)
New Museum, New York
Photo by Jake Naughton for The New York Times
“Figured in textile materials are the skill of assemblage and a means of holding things together. When partnered with the family, as in Collins’s work, the metaphorical approach of textile art can disrupt the norms of this social organization by undermining its nuclear model with a renewed and creative version — a queerified version.”
— Benoit Jodoin
Esse, Winter 2023
—
Image credits: Power Point, 2022 (installation view), Pearl Street Triangle, New York. Image courtesy of the artist (banner); Cast of Characters, 2018 (installation view), Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, New York. Cast of Characters was a salon-style exhibition of portraits by 100 queer artists organized by Liz Collins. Photo by Regan Wood (above).
Design
Since receiving her BFA and MFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design, Collins has produced a prolific body of work that investigates the boundless nature of the textile medium. She rejects a dichotomy of art and design and instead allows herself to work fluidly between the two. Whether in the context of an institutional installation or a brand collaboration, design thinking is integral to Collins’s practice. Just as the fashion designs of her early career, the design elements of her current work yield an intimate immersion in the work that the act of looking alone cannot access.
“An exhibition within the exhibition, Queer People, Places and Things, exhibits work from significant LGBTQ+ collections, including from Juan Yarur’s AMMA Foundation, as well as items curated from the Rochdale Borough collections by a group of Rochdale locals and presented through a queer lens. These diverse pieces are Installed amid Collins’s dynamic upholstery designs and rugs, creating an environment meant to foster conversation and exchange.”
— Julia Bryan-Wilson, 2022
Liz Collins: Mischief at Touchstones Rochdale
Energy Field, 2015 (installation view)
Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery
Saratoga Springs
Photo by Arthur Evans
Goodnight House, 2021 (installation view)
Fort Makers, New York
Image courtesy of Fort Makers
Photo by Joe Kramm
—
Image credits: Energy Field, 2015 (installation view), Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs. Photo by Arthur Evans (banner); Liz Collins: Mischief, 2022 (installation view), Touchstones Rochdale, Rochdale. Photo by Harry Meadley (top).
“I’ve been an artist all my life. I’m one of those people who was making art since I could put my hands in paint as a little kid. I’ve always been an artist and a designer and been able to move my ideas from one context to the other.”
— Liz Collins in conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson and Ksenia M. Soboleva
Brooklyn Rail video talk, November 2022
—