For our S/S 2021 issue: TLmag35: Tactile/Textile/Texture, TLmag featured six contemporary artists who are using the traditions of weaving to create groundbreaking and innovative work.

From an early age, New York-based artist and designer Liz Collins was drawn in by textiles, fibre and weaving as tools that connected to her artistic expression. After starting her own knitwear brand in the mid 1990s, Collins naturally moved into other creative fields including interiors and contemporary art. Her diverse body of work includes installation, sculpture, performance, textiles, commissions and collaborations with design brands, but no matter the project at hand, there is an underlying dynamic energy and vibrancy to her work that conveys her distinctive artistic vision

The brainchild of trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort and her business partner Philip Fimmano, New York Textile Month surveys a vast array of talents and collective initiatives looking to revive and innovate age-old fiber and fabric craft traditions.

Over the past decade, Liz Collins has emerged as a prominent figure in the fiber art and textile design worlds. From fashion to site-specific installations, the Brooklyn-based heavyweight has worked across innumerable mediums and applications. 

New York-based Liz Collins is a queer feminist artist and designer who’s known for her use of bold abstract patterns, inventive materials, and experimentation with fiber. Through a playful sense of color and evocation of gendered labor, Collins creates her own disruption of the boundaries found between art, design, and craft. Currently she has her first European solo exhibition, Mischief, on display at Touchstones Rochdale through January 18, 2023.

American contemporary artist and designer Liz Collins is the latest artist to leave her mark, with a newly installed colorful and dynamic mural on the public plaza to accompany the colorful iconic umbrellas she designed for the triangle months earlier.

Guests attending Wednesday night's opening party for the 2022 Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse gave rave reviews to the creativity, furnishings and artowrk which trabnsformed a historic Heights townhouse into a showcase of modern interior design. Artist Liz Collins is one of the artists whose work hangs on the Showhouse's walls. "I love interior designers and I want them to see my work and imagine it in that context," she said. 

Meta’s new office picks up right where Moynihan left off, infusing three lobbies and a central atrium across 700,000 square feet with ambitious site-specific artworks by such emerging and established artists as Baseera Khan, Liz Collins, and Matthew Kirk. Visible to passersby in the Moynihan Train Hall’s waiting area is Liz Collins’ vibrant ode to New York roadways and street signage. The Brooklyn fiber artist mined patterns from the chaotic cityscape to create zigzag-striped textiles created on a Jacquard loom, a 19th-century weaving apparatus considered a predecessor to modern computing.

When Meta workers move into their sprawling new Manhattan office complex in the historic James A. Farley Building in a few weeks, they will pass large-scale art installations including a painted mural of various ecosystems by artist couple Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Heidi Howard, bright textile swaths inspired by New York’s streetscapes by Liz Collins and an intricate, symbol-filled multi-panel painting by Matthew Kirk. 

In the building’s “Ring Lobby”, which is visible from the  waiting area of the Moynihan train hall, Brooklyn-based artist Liz Collins has applied her signature, vibrantly-colorer textiles to create Every Which Way, a sprawling  installation across four walls spanning more than 100 feet in length.

Meanwhile in the Farley Building’s Ring lobby, which is visible from Moynihan Train Hall, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Collins contributed Every Which Way, a work composed of 29 upholstered padded panels in her signature vibrant textiles that span over 100 feet and depict geometric patterns found in New York street signage. 

Last summer, with art fairs on indefinite hold and museums shuttered, former art fair director Helen Toomer saw an opportunity to bring together the art community safely in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, where she and husband Eric Romano run the Stoneleaf Retreat artist residency in Eddyville. Last year, the inaugural Upstate Art Weekend invited visitors to explore 23 art spaces throughout the region. This year, there are 61 participants, ranging from Storm King and Dia Beacon toward the south up to galleries in Hudson and Art Omi in Ghent, furthest from the city. Stoneleaf is presenting solo exhibitions from Hiba Schahbaz and Liz Collins, plus site-specific projects by Lizania Cruz, Macon Reed, and Rebecca Reeve.

Liz Collins surrounds the viewer in vibrating color fields to explore the boundaries between painting, fiber arts and installation. The cacophonic play of optics, texture, color and scale, recreates her wavering experience of the world as a place of stupendous wonder and cosmic energy.

When I set out to write this piece on women fiber artists in the Hudson Valley, I didn't recognize the brazen naivete of my quest. Fiber is not like paint—it is not a single material. It is terrycloth and leather, polyester batting and velvet, microfiber, fur, wool roving, cotton thread, raw silk, muslin, burlap, tulle. And that is just a sampling of what artists in this "medium" are working with to create sculpture and three-dimensional drawings, site-specific installations, and wall-mounted works. I tried to find a through line with the historical aspect of women's fiber and textile crafts, but some were rejecting it, some were carrying the torch, and some were indifferent. So rather than try to find a neat container that encompasses this beautiful gamut of creators, I would rather simply say: Behold these splendid, talented artists creating utterly distinctive and beautiful work that makes use of fiber. 

I have always been an artist, but have moved across disciplines while maintaining a persistent interest in material, pattern and engagement with industrial processes. Curating works of other artists has become a strong component of my work with love for my community and peers. I do this work with a spirit of inclusivity and generosity.

 Knitting is often thought of as quiet and contemplative. For textile artist and designer Liz Collins, it is anything but. Bustling, bright, and even loud, Collins’s work connects fabric with architecture, performance, and installation. With her punky blue hair and a vibe that’s equal parts freewheeling and meticulous, she says, “It’s rewarding for me to be able to be both an artist and a designer. The work can coexist and be in dialogue.”