
Liz Collins works fluidly between art and design, with emphasis and expertise in textile media. Embracing abstraction, optics, and extreme material contrasts, Collins explores the boundaries between painting, fiber arts and installation, intuitively laying bare expressions of energy, emotion, and the viscereality of existence.
Collin’s solo exhibitions and installations have been exhibited in New York at the Museum of Arts and Design and the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs; AMP, Provincetown, MA; and the Knoxville Museum of Art, TN. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at MoMA, the New Museum, Leslie Lohman Museum, Museum of FIT, the Drawing Center, BRIC, and Smackmellon, all in New York as well as Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, CA, and Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, MA. Collins’ honors include a USA Fellowship, a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts & Artist Relief grants, Drawing Center Open Sessions and residencies at Siena Art Institute, MacDowell, Yaddo, Haystack, and Museum of Arts and Design. Collins is a Queer Art Mentor, on the Advisory Board of Fire Island Art Residency, a member of the Exhibitions Committe at Leslie Lohman Museum, and is currently in the Two Trees Cultural Subsidy Studio Program in Brooklyn. The Tang Museum has just released Liz Collins Energy Field, her first major publication.
Liz Collins
Power Portal, 2022
Silk, rayon, polyester and wool
85 x 52 x 4 in.
Liz Collins
Pathway, 2022
Silk, linen and wood
66 x 61 x 2.5 in.
Liz Collins
Multi-Mountain, 2019
Silk, polyester, lurid, wood
61 x 91 in.
Liz Collins
Royal Embrace, 2019
Acrylic on canvas, yarn, PVC
30 x 78 x 1.5 in. (as seen, dimensions variable)
Liz Collins
Nightrider, 2022
Acrylic fabric and yarn, gesso, flashe, nails and wood
68 x 48 x 4.5 in.
Liz Collins
Conjoined Checkers, 2022
Acrylic paint, canvas, rayon and wood
52 x 24 x 2 in.
Liz Collins
Love Portal, 2022
Linen, rayon, acrylic paint and wood
53 x 16 x 3 in.
Liz Collins
Magic Portal, 2022
Linen, rayon, acrylic paint and wood
54 x 21 x 3 in.
Liz Collins
Heartbeat, 2019
Silk, linen, polyester
60 x 61 in.
Liz Collins
Memphis 2, 2019
Sunbrella acrylic yarns, cotton mesh
17.5 x 24 in.
Liz Collins
Upstairs/Downstairs, 2022
Cotton, silk and wool
28 x 7.5 in.
Liz Collins
Compass Rose, 2019
Wool, mohair, cotton mesh
21 x 21 in, framed
The gallery is pleased to announce that Liz Collins is participating in a group exhibition in New York, Goodnight Room, inspired by children's book, Goodnight Moon. For the exhibition she created a softsculpture interpretation of a fireplace as well as a floor rug. Her brightly-colored pieces are shown alongside other artists working within the home decor, design and art communities. The vibrant work is getting a lot of attention from press from Smithsonian Mag to Wallpaper. Appointments are available via Fort Makers, the artist collective behind the exhibition.
The gallery is pleased to announce First Look: Dynamic Expansion, a virtual opening for Liz Collins' new installation located at the Ligne Roset flagship store located at 250 Park Avenue South in New York. Created in collaboration with Ligne Roset Contract, Pollack, and Sunbrella Contract, Collins' installation features 7 new paintings and will be accessible daily during store hours (Mon-Sat 10am-6pm and Sun 12-5pm) through November.
The virutal opening will offer a behind the scenes look at Collins’ latest idiosyncratic and unconventional textile-based artwork - a surrealist lounge where the art and furniture are literally cut from the same cloth of vibrating geometric patterns. An intimate conversation between the artist and Curator and Writer Glenn Adamson will follow.
The gallery is pleased to announce that Liz Collins will be in conversation with Stonewall National Musuem & Archives Executive Director Hunter O’Hanian about her recent book Energy Field.
The gallery is pleased to announce that the Tang Teaching Museum will host a virtual gathering to celebrate the publication of Energy Field and Liz Collins’ birthday! Liz will be the guest of honor with a performance by Mike Albo and other special guests.
Register here. For questions about this event, please contact Olivia Cammisa-Frost at ocammisa@skidmore.edu.
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.”