This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
During an art residency last year in a former castle in the Umbrian countryside, the textile artist Liz Collins sat in her temporary studio stitching a needlepoint. She was surrounded by long bulletin boards, on which she had tacked dozens of her gem-colored watercolor works and ink drawings, along with images of shapes that inspire her. On her worktable lay swatches of the silk and Lurex she would soon use to render her paintings and drawings into textiles.
Though American, Collins, 55, has made Italy a habit for more than a decade. Her time in the residency program at Civitella Ranieri came amid weeks of traveling among the various high-end textile mills around Lake Como, where she routinely commissions small runs of intricate weaving made to her specifications. She later transforms those textiles in her Brooklyn studio, scissoring and pulling artfully at loose threads to shape a new creation.
“She deconstructs it, and ends up with something yet more complex and amazing,” explained Lynne Cooke, a senior curator for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., who organized the group exhibition “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” that opened last month (through July 28) at the museum whose lawn was a teenage hangout for Collins while growing up in suburban Virginia.
Cooke’s description helps explain how Collins made “Heartbeat” (2019) — the most recent of six creations that span her career and will be among the 160 works by more than 50 artists at the exhibition.
“It’s one of the many goals of this show to bring to visibility certain artists who I think have been overlooked,” Cooke said. And she counts Collins among them. Indeed, “Woven Histories” positions the artist alongside Anni Albers, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Rosemarie Trockel, Sheila Hicks, Sonia Delaunay — all known for their textiles — as well as stars of abstraction in other media like Kandinsky, Klee and Yayoi Kusama.
