Museum of International Folk Art November 17, 2024 – November 17, 2025. Santa Fe, New Mexico Foregrounding artists’ voices, Weaving Meanings shares histories of the wire medium in South Africa, from the 16th century uses as currency to the dazzling artworks wire weavers create today. From beer pot lids (izimbenge) to platters and plates, from […]

Afterlives explores the many lives of objects and what happens to textiles after they enter the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection. From a child’s feed sack dress lovingly crafted and then saved on a family farm to an intricate robe from Turkmenistan that traveled halfway around the world, material things carry traces of people and things […]

Earth and Sky: Carpet Cultures of Asia presents some of the largest and oldest handwoven carpets in the Nickle Galleries collection from across Asia. It is through the shared ‘carpet culture’ in which weavers, their families and communities, remain connected and rooted. Immigrants frequently mention how carpets evoke some of their earliest memories of home—tactile, acoustic, […]

Featuring forty-two textile works and oil paintings, Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets is the first comprehensive survey of Santos Reinbolt’s art ever presented, and the first-ever solo museum exhibition organized outside her native Brazil. Best known for her large-scale quadros de lã(“wool paintings”) made from hundreds of vibrant colored threads, the exhibition […]

Exploring craft's collaborative practices, Craft Front & Center: Conversation Pieces brings pioneering twentieth-century craft artists into dialogue with contemporary artists who are rethinking craft techniques and materials. The exhibition draws from MAD's permanent collection and includes more than sixty historic, recently acquired, and commissioned works in a range of artistic media; most prominently, the central craft materials […]

This exhibition spotlights the rich artistic traditions of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia during the late 1800s and early 1900s, through a display of elaborate textiles and fine jewelry in the Museum’s collection, many on view for the first time. These works introduce the specialized skills of North African artists, both Amazigh (Berber) and Arab, Muslim […]

Craft in America. Feather Adornments: Boris Huang. Through April 26, 2025. Los Angeles, California. Virtual Gallery Boris Huang is a master of the laborious Hawaiian featherwork technique having apprenticed with the Hawaiian Feather Lei Master, Aunty Mary Lou Kekuewa. In traditional Hawaiian culture, leis and other feather adornments represent welcoming and compassion as well as […]

Earth and Sky: Carpet Cultures of Asia presents some of the largest and oldest handwoven carpets in the Nickle Galleries collection from across Asia. It is through the shared ‘carpet culture’ in which weavers, their families and communities, remain connected and rooted. Immigrants frequently mention how carpets evoke some of their earliest memories of home—tactile, acoustic, […]

Confluence of Nature: Nancy Hemenway Barton features twelve textile wall sculptures and five works on paper by artist Nancy Hemenway Barton (1920–2008), each an exploration of the stunning locations from around the world that informed and inspired her artistic process. Hemenway traveled the world, experiencing rich colorful cultural traditions from the Andean weavers in Bolivia to […]

In 2023, the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired thirty-five quilts from the collection of Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi. In 1981, Mazloomi founded the African American Quilt Guild of Los Angeles, and then, in 1985, she founded the Women of Color Quilters Network, fulfilling the desire of isolated makers to connect and continue Black textile traditions. The […]

This exhibition celebrates one of the world’s most admired garment, the Japanese kimono, an instantly recognizable robe with a tall “T” form. The word kimono, meaning “a thing that is worn,” refers to many different types of robes, from ornate silk wedding uchikake to simpler cotton summer yukata. Worn in Japan by both women and men for well over […]

Ubuhle Beads is a collective of female beadwork artists founded in 1999 by Bev Gibson and master beader Ntombephi Ntombelaon a sugar plantation in South Africa that empowers and changes the perspective of African women. The organization has allowed for women artists of South Africa to have a platform to use their generational talents for […]

There is a continuum where beauty and function blend and diverge in the hands of the contemporary artist. Even when traditional materials such as thread, fabric, wood, reed, and paper are used, these artists combine skill, imagination, and vision to meld their materials into compelling and beautiful art, which resonates in today’s world. Art Evolved: […]