Larsen Salon Series: Liz Collins & Julia Bryan-Wilson (February 27)

About Liz Collins

Liz Collins is well-known for pushing the boundaries of art and design in innovative and experimental work in fabric, yarn, and other materials and techniques associated with textile media.

Although Collins embraces a language of abstraction, bold colors, patterns, and symbols allude to queer and feminist references, sourcing further inspiration from interpersonal and environmental forces such as electricity, volatility, connectivity, and energy exchange.

Whether in the form of textile, painting, drawing or installation, Collins frequently explores the dichotomy of structure and entropy–qualities inherent to textile that speak to the fissures present in broader architectural, political, and social structures. Processes of slowly cutting, unbinding, revealing, and rearranging subtly nod to the destabilization that takes place when small but organized acts aim to undercut rigid systems.

Collins’ exhibitions include the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. 'Liz Collins: Motherlode' a mid-career retrospective, will open in at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, in July 2025 with an accompanying monograph.

About Julia Bryan-Wilson

Julia Bryan-Wilson (PhD, UC Berkeley, 2004) is Professor of LGBTQ+ Art History and core faculty in Columbia's Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, theories of artistic labor, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices.

She is the author of four books: Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize); and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale, 2023).

The Larsen Salon Series, offered by LongHouse Reserve in honor of its founder Jack Lenor Larsen (1927-2020), carries on a tradition of conversations, presentations, and lectures by designers, architects, and artists working at the intersection of art, architecture, design, and craft. We offer these salons in Manhattan, at various spaces, to engage all of us in important dialogues of meaning in our complex world.