At TEFAF New York 2025, fiber steps out of the domestic sphere and onto the global stage. The exhibition Wall Hangings highlights the revolutionary work of Olga de Amaral, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and Jagoda Buic, women who reimagined weaving as a powerful tool for artistic expression.
Drawing its name from MoMA’s groundbreaking 1969 show, the exhibition runs in parallel with MoMA’s current presentation, Woven Histories, underscoring the renewed interest in textile art as both medium and message.
Copyright The Estate of the Artist
This group exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery New York brings together works by pioneering female textile artists featured in MoMA’s landmark 1969 survey Wall Hangings.
Unfolding across the gallery’s stand at TEFAF New York and its nearby Upper East Side location, Wall Hangings coincides with MoMA’s current exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, (previously at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the National Gallery of Canada), echoing the museum’s commitment to showcasing the radical potential and expansive breadth of fibre art from 1969 to today.
Turning Craft into Sculpture
For centuries, weaving remained tied to women’s private labor—quiet, unseen, and undervalued. But artists like de Amaral, Abakanowicz, and Buic turned this tradition into something monumental and public.
Olga de Amaral, in her 1973 work Hojarasca Barbas de piedra, blends gold leaf and fibers to create shimmering forms that recall Andean landscapes and sacred geometry. Her tapestries go beyond decoration; they invite contemplation and occupy space with the force of sculpture.
Copyright The Artist
Jagoda Buic’s Widow (1968) brings Balkan heritage to life through raw texture and bold form. Unlike most of her early works, now housed in major institutions like the Tate Modern and the Stedelijk Museum, Widow remains available—and powerful. Its presence anchors the show in memory, ritual, and transformation.
TEFAF Making Space for Feminine Vision
Rather than following tradition, Magdalena Abakanowicz reshaped it. Her Abakans—huge organic fiber sculptures—challenge the boundary between body and environment. She used fiber to speak about vulnerability, identity, and human resilience.
These women didn’t wait for recognition. They wove their own legacies, using tactile materials to ask difficult questions about gender, space, and artistic value. Their works reject silence and invisibility, demanding to be seen, touched, and felt.
A Living History of Resistance
Textile art has always carried meaning, but Wall Hangings shows how these artists gave it voice. Through fiber, they spoke of grief, tradition, protest, and rebirth.
In choosing this medium, they didn’t just revive ancestral techniques—they repurposed them as forms of resistance. In their hands, thread becomes language, and the act of weaving becomes political.
Today, the art world embraces this shift. Collectors, institutions, and curators look again at fiber—not as craft, but as sculpture, philosophy, and storytelling. Wall Hangings reminds us that art grows from the hands of those who dare to weave memory into form.
TEFAF New York | Room 205
8 – 13 May 2025
Richard Saltoun Gallery New York
6 May – 20 June 2025