Textiles are the art world’s new obsession. But what, exactly, is new?
May 11, 2026
14 min read
LAST OCTOBER, I WAS walking through the 18th Quadriennale d’arte, in Rome, when my attention was suddenly snagged by a giant, glowing screen at one booth. The sound of slick techno beats that emanated from a speaker felt more product launch than art gallery. Huge letters on the screen instructed passersby to “ORDER THE KIT. . . . SPIT INTO THE FUN-NEL. . . . FROM DNA TO TEXTILE. . . . A WORK OF ART WOVEN FROM YOUR GENETIC CODE SENT DIRECTLY TO YOUR HOME.” Emilio Vavarella, the artist who created the work, told me that it was meant to be blunt, commercial even. Instead of making yet another one-off piece to hang in an exhibition space, Vavarella decided to create an artwork that would generate other artworks. Lifeweave is the result: It is a small company that operates like a self-contained factory-gallery, using lab-based DNA sequencing and custom software to translate the unique code of your genome into a woven tapestry. For US$1,500 and with a few weeks of processing through the Genomics Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, your genetic data is transformed into a visual “score.” The data are mapped to colors and other aspects, like order, repetition, and variation, are mapped to patterns, like stripes, grids, or motifs. The result is a digital design derived from your genome that is sent to a computer-controlled loom. Your DNA arrives at your door as a Jacquard textile—bands of color and pattern that are, technically, a portrait of you, although you would never recognize yourself in them. Vavarella is thirty-seven, with a long beard and black hair pulled into a bun. He is riding a wave of textile enthusiasm that has swept through the art world in the past decade. His approach makes him distinct from his fellow weavers. Where many artists engage with fiber through traditional crafts, his work has its basis in computation. Yet even as he pushes the medium forward, he roots his practice in the medium’s past, particularly the early nineteenth-century invention of the Jacquard loom, a machine often described as the predecessor to modern computing. These looms use a system of punched cards; a hole represents a 1 and a blank represents a 0, similar to the binary logic that governs many of our digital devices today. In 2020, Vavarella began exploring textiles through his project The Other Shapes of Me, which was anchored by a monumental work titled rs548049170_1_69869_TT. (The name was derived from the first line of raw text produced by genotyping his DNA.) To design it, he translated his genetic sequence into the binary instructions of a Jacquard loom. The finished piece is a vast, scroll-like tapestry and a video of his mother weaving it, accompanied by the historic loom. His genetic code appears as bands of colored thread throughout the tapestry rather than lines of data. By feeding the data of his own body into the loom, the project acts as a bridge between the biological code of life and the binary code of the loom. The Other Shapes of Me is a rigorous investigation into the nature of information storage, translation, and the glitches that occur when the organic is processed through the mechanical. Crucially, the work was woven not in a factory but by his mother. Over many months, she fashioned the massive scroll of her son’s genetic data into cloth, effectively “making him” a second time, translating the biological information she once gestated into an archive of thread. For Vavarella, the link between weaving and programming isn’t just symbolic, it’s structural. In both, structure and information are one and the same. Unlike painting and drawing, where content is laid onto a surface, in weaving, an image is generated more intrinsically, from the crossing of threads. This shares a quality with DNA, in which the message is inseparable from the molecular se-quence itself. In Vavarella’s work, the tapestry is a meeting point between the ancient Greek words techne (making), and logos (thinking)—the roots of the word “technology.” * Every few years, the art world rallies around a fresh wave to surf, a new box to tick. Collectors look for the next safe bet, galleries recalibrate to supply it, museums hurry to appear inclusive and up-to-date. Right now, the spotlight is on textiles. Fiber is sudden-ly everywhere, and the headlines spell it out: FIBER IS THE NEW PAINTING A STRING OF NEW EXHIBITIONS SHOWS THAT TEXTILE ART IS FINALLY BEING TAKEN SERIOUSLY From museums to biennials, art fairs to blue-chip galleries, it’s hard not to run into textiles these days. From 2023 to 2025, an exhibition called Woven Histo-ries: Textiles and Modern Abstraction travelled from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., Ottawa, and New York City; in 2022 the Tate Modern in London devoted a major survey to the Polish textile artist Magdalena Abakanowicz; in 2024 New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art showcased Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art. The market, predictably, has followed close behind. Humans have been following the thread for thousands of years. Fiber arts have been prominent in global culture for a very long time. In the Odyssey, Penelope weaves a shroud by day and secretly unweaves it each night to postpone her marriage to unwanted suitors. That cyclical act has become, over the centuries, a symbol of endurance, resistance, and creative deception. In Hesiod’s description of the Three Fates in Theogony, thread is no longer symbolic, it is life itself: Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis measures its length, and Atropos cuts it. Similar stories play out in history and mythology across the globe. But in this essay, I’ll keep my eye on Europe and the broader West, whose tapestry and textile histories underwrite the way the Euro-American culture industry understands fiber arts. As the Renaissance dawned in Europe, weaving achieved new heights. In the early sixteenth century, tapestry was the most prestigious and expensive artistic medium on the continent, more so than painting or sculpture. When we think of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s ceiling tends to dominate. It is hailed as the chapel’s crowning glory, the pinnacle of Renais-sance artistry and craftsmanship that everyone cranes their necks to see. Yet the space’s true jewel is one most people will likely never see. Hidden from the throngs of tourists are ten monumental tapestries designed by Raphael. In the sixteenth century, they were the ultimate prestige pieces, with a budget five times that of Michelangelo’s frescoes. But today, they rarely hang on the walls for which they were designed. Instead, they are preserved in climate-controlled chests in the Vatican Museums. (Reproductions fill a room at the recent show of Raphael at the Met.) In 1515, a thirty-two-year-old Raphael received one of the most ambitious commissions in the Church’s history. Pope Leo X, eager to cement his legacy, asked him to design a series of tapestries depicting the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, woven from wool and silk threads enriched with gold and silver. They were not meant for daily viewing, but to be ceremonially unrolled and hung only on the most important feast days and solemn occasions. To design them, Raphael had to adapt his working method, creating cartoons that were inverted and flipped as if mirrored, so that the woven tapestries would appear correctly when viewed from the intended perspective. Raphael was working in the shadow of Michelangelo, his rival and idol, who had completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling just a few years earlier. Raphael received roughly a thousand ducats for his cartoons, but the weaving itself, entrusted to Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s elite workshop in Brussels and carried out over several years by dozens of artisans, cost about fifteen or sixteen thousand ducats—an enormous sum for the time, enough to buy multiple grand palaces. The Vatican went into debt to cover the bill. Though younger and assigned to what might have seemed like a secondary, decorative space, Raphael’s commission carried greater symbolic and financial weight. More than a century later, in France, Louis XIV built the most prestigious tapestry collection in Europe, the works proclaiming royal grandeur wherever they were unrolled and displayed. His sets drew on designs by leading painters of the day such as Rubens, Vouet, and Le Brun, translating biblical, historical, and mythological scenes into cloth reserved for royal residences and exceptional public showings. They were produced in the finest workshops of northern Europe. In February this year, the Grand Palais in Paris reunited thirty-two of the ninety-two monumental carpets Louis commissioned to cover the 442 square-meter floor of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie in 1668, putting the works on display for the first time in more than three centuries. The French tapestries, hand-woven in wool, crimson silk, and threads of gilt metal, took a long time to make, but their materials produced effects no other medium at the time could match. In the dim, candlelit interiors of the 1700s, the metallic threads caught and scattered light so that their surfaces seemed to glow and flicker, shifting as viewers moved, making the images feel alive. While men dominated the production and design of grand tapestries in palaces and chapels, everyday textile work across early modern Europe largely fell to women. From a young age, women learned to spin, sew, darn, and weave at home, producing and maintaining most of the fabric used in daily life—clothing, bed linens, tablecloths, household cloth of every kind. In urban workshops and rural cottage industries, women also made up a large, often poorly documented share of the often unpaid textile workforce. Over time, this division of labor cemented the idea that textiles were “women’s work,” a label that would later be used to dismiss the medium as inferior. The details of old tapestries are almost impossible to reproduce today—some of the techniques involved in their production have been forgotten, and in some cases lost to time—but artists like Analia Saban are inspired by traditional tapestry techniques. For her Copper Tapestry series (begun in 2018), Saban studied the threads of antique tapestries, focussing on how gold wire was wrapped around them to generate the shimmering vibrations of the Renaissance and Baroque creations. She then programmed a computerized Jacquard loom and substituted gold with copper wire to create tapestries that imitate the patterns of early printed circuit boards. As Saban puts it, “the gold of the past is the copper of today.” When the Industrial Revolution took hold in Britain in the 1760s, textile production was mechanized, allowing them to be mass-produced. This innovation came, however, at the cost of craftsmanship, cultural traditions, and humane labor conditions. Popular understanding of textiles shifted, and knowledge such as the time they took to produce or the skills they required began to dwindle. In European and U.S. markets, artists who continued to work with fiber and weaving were increasingly seen as old-fashioned, or working in the lesser realm of crafts, and were treated as outliers rather than as participants in fine art. * Textiles were confined to a crafts-shaped nook until the 1960s, when feminist art criticism began to dismantle patriarchal hierarchies. By using textiles and so-called “women’s work” as tools of critique, women artists carved out space as creative agents within, and against, many of the systems and institutions that had historically excluded them. Artists such as Faith Ringgold and Judy Chicago turned to quilting, embroidery, sewing, and even tableware to demonstrate the supposed divide between high art and domestic labor, and how systems keep certain people out. In parallel, the fiber art movement—largely made up of women across Europe and the U.S.—innovated with the medium, with figures like Lenore Tawney turning weaving into sculpture and other formats that broke it out of the role it had been consigned to. On the other side of the Berlin Wall, Magdalena Abakanowicz was reimagining tapestry for an Eastern Bloc audience. These feminists reinforced the link between wom-en and textiles. They emphasized that women’s art and textiles had both been devalued. Their key intervention was to politicize the hierarchy of the art world—a hierarchy that they argued mirrored the structures of gender, race, sexuality, and class so prevalent in other parts of society. They did not want the history of art to be reduced to a single, gendered narrative. (It was not all “women’s work.” Several influential male artists, like Mike Kelley, also played a critical role in legitimizing textiles within contemporary art.) The narrative of—and fetishization of—redis-covery is rooted in the ruptures of the sixties and seventies, when the art historical canon was exposed as a fortress built by and for white men. As feminist, postcolonial, Black, and Indigenous scholars began to dismantle these walls, the art world scrambled to do damage control. Textiles became the perfect mortar for this reconstruction. Because the medium sits at the intersection of gender, labor, and race, it ticks every box of institutional inclusion. From the reclamation of “women’s work” to the assertion of Black modernism and Indigenous sovereignty, thread binds these urgencies together. This is the true myth of the textile boom—a fairy tale in which a racialized, feminized, “minor” craft is suddenly elevated by a benevolent art world that claims to have “discovered” it, offering the textile not just as a commodity, but as the belated cure for its own history of exclusion. By the end of the 1970s, weaving had become a victim of its own success. Macramé had become a punch line in New York art circles. The mass popu-larization of weaving through hobby culture, interior decoration, and amateur crafts led many critics and institutions to treat textile work as a decorative or minor art, stripping it of its avant-garde charge. In her 1984 book The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker argued that embroidery and textile work had been used to construct and reinforce femininity. Within the context of Euro-American art history, this very association was weaponized to deny the medium serious critical attention. “To know the history of embroidery,” she argues, “is to know the history of women.” As the U.S. and European art markets shifted toward spectacle and painterly representation through the 1980s, textiles were derided as difficult to hang— and therefore difficult to sell—and artists shifted to other media. The Lausanne Biennial, which had been the preeminent international showcase for textile art since 1962, held its final edition in 1995. It wasn’t until the late 2000s that the situation changed and the globalized art world increasingly emphasized work by women and people who had long been excluded from the mainstream Western art historical discourse. Today, there is a growing tendency among critics to read textile works through the lens of social identity. Doing this creates new hierarchization, and reinforces strictures that ignore non-European and U.S. artists, many of whom work within traditions where textiles are treated differently and have never suffered the same degradation in value. In Andean, Mesoamerican, African, and Asian communities, for example, textile practices have long held great cultural, spiritual, and symbolic significance. For Indigenous American communities such as the Navajo, whose ancestral homeland is in the South-western United States, textiles are woven expressions of cosmology, land-based knowledge, and collective memory. The Navajo artist Marilou Schultz carries this tradition forward, bridging ancestral weaving practices with the language of contemporary art. The art world’s recent surge of attention in the work of artists like Schultz, whose work is grounded in knowledge passed down over centuries, is often framed as a rediscovery. But Schultz’s practice stands as evidence that nothing is being rediscovered within these communities. Their practices have been continuous. What is shifting is the canon of the capital A, capital W Art World, which long marginalized such practices and is only now beginning to acknowledge it. * The readings that emerged from the 1960s were crucial for acknowledging the inadequacies of a past in which textile making was denigrated. But fiber art is not inherently more radical than other forms of art. They are simply different media, chosen for what they allow artists to achieve. Unfortunately, the art world is driven by hype and trends—newness sells—and many art critics have been unable to look beyond such cycles. They have emphasized the medium as subject instead of the distinct formal, conceptual, and sensory possibilities it offers. Many artists are now reactivating and transform-ing the politicized legacy of textiles into new visual and conceptual languages. Eric N. Mack, for example, works with salvaged fabrics, garments, and everyday materials to probe the hierarchy between fashion and fine art. His draped assemblages hang from walls and mobile-like structures, suspending fabric as if they were paintings loosened from their stretchers. They are conceived as “paintings in an expanded field,” as he puts it, textured compositions that test how far the category of “painting” can bend while still holding its formal concerns. He is interested in how viewers project their own experiences onto the work, and how the familiarity of textiles in everyday life triggers unexpected associations. The French artist Marie Hazard uses weaving techniques largely replaced by computerized and mechanized systems. She works on a manual wooden loom and a plain weave so that the slowness and duration of the process of creation are the defining elements of her practice. Weaving is slow, repetitive, and demanding; it requires patience and can engender a near-meditative state in those who do it. Within the contemporary art field, Hazard notes a striking lack of understanding about weaving and textiles: Art professionals have asked her on more than one occasion to produce large handwoven works in just a few months, revealing how unaware they are of the labor and time required to make such pieces. “For me, what is radical is to have patience, be refined, and to think about the long run,” Hazard told me when we spoke in New York, in November 2025. Sheila Hicks, a U.S.-born artist, has been working with textiles for more than six decades. Though she is widely recognized for her innovations in fiber art—expanding the sculptural potential of thread, in particular—her practice is deeply rooted in the study of Indigenous and ancestral weaving traditions. Early in her career, she traveled to Chile on a Fulbright scholarship and became fascinated by pre-Columbian South American textiles. There, and later in Mexico, she studied the craftsmanship of local weavers, founding textile workshops along the way. She also travelled to India where she collaborated with textile craftspeople. She translated these encounters into a vocabulary of vivid color bundles, compact four-selvedge weavings, and monumental fiber installations that weave together techniques and motifs from many textile traditions. Hicks also studied at Yale under Josef Albers, whose teachings on color left a lasting mark on her. Albers believed that we almost never see color in isolation, that we perceive it through its relation to neighboring colors. Such a way of thinking became, for Hicks, a way to think about how textiles live in the world, not as isolated objects, but in a state of constant juxtaposition. When I met Hicks, in late 2025, she encouraged me to observe how shifts in textiles and color unfold around me. She suggested I begin noticing which scarf I pair with which sweater, which cushion I place against which blanket. By playing with these everyday combi-nations, she said, I could begin to quietly train my eye. When I asked her why textile art was getting so much attention, she said “threads are everywhere.” * Textiles and fiber art mutate, develop, and return in altered guises. In the contemporary art market, textiles are having a boom. But the story often attached to that boom—that this is the sudden rise of a democratic and new medium—is false. In fact, what we are seeing is the revival under new terms of something that has always been there. During my research for this piece, I found it useful to contrast contemporary practices and explore the dialogue between them. Take, for example, Emilio Vavarella and Marilou Schultz, both of whose work pushes the boundaries of weaving. Vavarella, as an artist and researcher, appears to be forging into the future. But beneath his innovation is a practice rooted in the historical relationship between weaving and computation. Schultz, on the other hand, is a seven-ty- one-year-old fourth-generation Navajo weaver and mathematics teacher. At first her work appears to inhabit the space of the past: She works on a traditional upright loom, sometimes using hand-spun Navajo-Churro wool. Yet Schultz pushes against inherited conventions by depicting computer chips and digital diagrams through Navajo weaving structures. Schultz created her first technology-inspired woven artwork in 1994, when she was commissioned by Intel Corporation to create a gift for the American Indian Sci-ence & Engineering Society. Specifically, she was asked to create a woven replica of Intel’s Pentium processor. Faced with the image of the chip, a chaotic, asymmetrical city of silicon that defied the geometric laws of tradition-al rugs, she approached it as a mathematician, breaking the design down into 64ths, progressively halving it to develop a precise textile map. The resulting work, Replica of a Chip, is a mas-terpiece of technical precision. The programmer Ken Shirriff has noted that the weaving is so accurate that one can identify specific logic gates within the fiber. Although some Navajo people have questioned why Schultz departs from customary rug designs, she doesn’t see herself as changing it. Instead, she sees her work as expanding its possibilities, pushing its boundaries to reflect the world we live in today. And in doing so, she reveals a deeper truth: The Navajo upright loom has always been a binary machine. Just like a computer processor, the loom operates on a strict organizational order of discrete choices—over or under, active or inactive. Schultz argues that Indigenous American people conceived of the algorithmic logic of the transis-tor centuries before the invention of the computer chip. Through weaving, she was able to simply translate it into her own language of fiber. The complex and often painful interaction between U.S. tech companies and Indigenous communities is the focus of much of Schultz’s work. Between 1965 and 1975, Fairchild Semiconductor, the pioneer of the integrated circuit, ran a large assembly plant on the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, New Mexico. The company specifically recruited Navajo women, fetishizing their “nimble fingers” and claiming that a cultural history of craft made them naturally suited to the microscopic, repetitive work of chip assembly. (In reality, they used this explanation to justify low pay and hazardous working conditions.) Schultz’s work responds to this history, exposing the exploitation embedded in its foundations, while honoring her people not just as manual laborers but as contributors to the digital age. If Vavarella’s work represents data inhabiting the space of the loom, Schultz’s work represents the loom’s move into the digital world. What unites them is technology, not as an external force, but as a mirror of the world we inhabit. But what science cannot show—what must be felt—is the power of craft and stories to speak across generations. When I spoke with Schultz last October, she told me the Navajo story of the Spider Woman. According to one tradition, a spiritual being appeared when the Navajo were in crisis, wandering and lost, to teach them the art of weaving. The being told them that her husband had built the loom from the very elements of the cosmos—sky and earth for the frame, sun and rain for the loom, sacred stones, and sheet lightning for its moving parts—so that every motion of the weaver would restore balance, order, and harmony into the world. The Spider Woman was the deity who gifted weaving to the Navajo people. She is the reason why, if you look closely at one of Schultz’s works, you will find a small spider hidden between the geometries of the woven microchip. It sits there not merely as an homage to Navajo culture, but as a coded reminder that weaving is not merely decoration, but the very act of creation itself. * What gives fiber art its staying power? Beyond market cycles, institutional programming, and curatorial trends, textiles have an advantage that much other work, designed to be hung on a wall and never handled, does not: tactility. In the technologically saturated environment we inhabit, where touch is increasingly replaced by screens and distance, textiles are not simply complimentary to the digital: They provide an alternative. The brain scans the texture, weight, and softness of a piece of fabric, filling in the sensation through memory and association. We don’t just see textiles, we feel them. Humans have long understood that touch is one of the most powerful sensations. Aristotle argued in On the Soul that it is the most basic of the senses, shared by all animals, and therefore the one that forms the foundation of sentient life. Centuries later, in his landmark work Phenomenologies of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that touch grounds us in the world more immediately than sight or sound. More recently, the artist Lygia Clark treated touch as a route into the psyche, using sensorial objects and therapeutic contact to access feelings and memories that lay beneath conscious awareness. Neuroscience has confirmed these intuitions. Several studies in the last decade have advanced our understanding of how different sensory systems—vi-sion and touch, for example—work in coordination, not isolation. Just looking at a textured surface can activate the brain’s somatosensory cortex, suggesting that our eyes can “feel” and remember touch. In a 2016 study, three scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that simply looking at images of glossy and rough surfaces activated a region of the brain normally associated with pro-cessing tactile stimulation. When they ran a control experiment where participants were explicitly asked to imagine touching surfaces, the same activation pattern was not produced. In 2018, another fMRI study on texture learning found that when people learned to distinguish fabrics by touch, later simply seeing images of those fabrics activated early visual regions in ways that reflected this tactile training, suggesting a shared, multisensory representation of texture in the brain. The Italian artist Isabella Ducrot is ninety-four years old, and she has dedicated her life to working with textiles. On a recent visit to Ducrot’s studio in Rome, she told me how the tactility of fiber is key to her practice. She sees fabric as inseparable from the human body. For her, cloth marks the key stages of life: from swaddling at birth to the garments we wear daily for warmth, identity, and ritual, and, finally, to the shrouds that accompany us in death. For her, fabric is a kind of second skin. It absorbs our scent, traces of our bodies, and quietly carries the imprint of our existence. At her studio, tucked inside the courtyard of one of Rome’s historic palazzi, she showed me a small shard of terracotta bearing the faint imprint of a textile from long ago. It was a fragment given to her by her close friend Tatiana Franchetti Twombly during a trip to East Turkey in the 1980s. When she invited me to touch it, my young hands, with purple nail polish and big rings, met her older fingers, marked by decades of
use. Together, we traced the surface of something no longer there, joined in the same quiet effort to rebuild it through our senses. We were both reconstructing the fabric’s weight and weave. The absent cloth felt alive again, briefly, between our fingertips, binding us for a moment in the same tactile memory.
This article derives from the research project The Thread of Abstraction, supported by the Directorate-General for Contem-porary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture for the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025). As part of this research project, the author will further develop and present this research through a series of lectures at Magazzino Italian Art (New York), the Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), and MADRE (Naples).