Liz Collins

CANDICE MADEY is thrilled to announce the gallery’s second exhibition with Liz Collins, Lightning Wheel, presenting a series of new textile-based works that explore the artist’s distinctive and evolving symbology through recurring patterns and forms. Collins’s abstractions verge on the fantastical or energetic, suggesting the effects of extraordinary natural phenomena and a rapidly changing environment on the artist’s interior world. The exhibition will take place in the gallery’s 1 Freeman Alley location.

As in Collins’s past work in textile, installation, drawing, and design, recent works employ a vibrant color spectrum that incorporates queer feminist sensibilities as well as references to twentieth-century abstraction in painting and in fiber. Reflecting the artist’s interest in Theosophist visual and spiritual traditions, the imagery investigates the idea that the occult movement is an esoteric predecessor of—or a link to—the origins of modern abstraction.

Central to the exhibition is a large-scale tapestry in which rainbows traverse sky and mountainscapes. The work is part of a series of woven landscapes entitled Rainbow Mountains that evoke the inner turmoil of an artist-activist in this contemporary moment–a consciousness at once hopeful, utopic, apocalyptic, and sublime. The exhibition’s title, Lightning Wheel, references one of several forms that reappear alongside lightning bolts, spheres, and cracked mirrors. Collins frequently crafts multiple iterations of her enigmatic compositions in different color combinations, materials, and fabrications in woven, embroidered, and embellished textiles, compounding and building her cosmology and iconographic vocabulary through repetition and the handmade.

Collins’s work powerfully testifies to artists’ agency in creating new worlds. By reconfiguring symbols, patterns, shapes, forms, colors, and textures, she seeks to better understand the human spirit in an uncertain and ever-changing ecosystem.

Collins’s work is currently on view in the 60th La Biennale di Venezia, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke and presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. In 2025, Collins will have a mid-career retrospective at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, with an accompanying monograph.

Collins has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Rossana Orlandi, Milan (2024, 2019); Touchstones Rochdale, UK (2022); Art Market Provincetown (AMP), MA (2020); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2015); and Knoxville Museum of Art, TN (2005), among others. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2024); National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2024); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023); Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA (2023, 2020); LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, NY (2023); Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown, NY (2022); Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2021, 2017, 2014); Drawing Center, New York (2019, 2018); BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2019); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2019); New Museum, New York (2017); Museum at FIT, New York (2013); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2015); and Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (2011).

Collins’s honors include an Anonymous Was A Woman Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts & Artist Relief grants, Drawing Center Open Sessions as well as residencies at Civitella Ranieri, Siena Art Institute, MacDowell, Yaddo, Haystack, Museum of Arts and Design, and Stoneleaf. She is currently participating in the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Studio Program in Brooklyn. In 2020, the Tang Teaching Museum released Liz Collins: Energy Field.

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