featured project
Liz Collins, Tundra Garden
Project Team Members (The Alpha Workshops Staff): Ed Farrell, Richard Zimmer
Project Team Members (Powerhouse Arts Staff): Tommy Coleman, Jeremy Gender, Daniel Quinn
Commissioner/Funder/Presenter(s): Powerhouse Arts
Materials: Woven acrylic textile, rayon yarn, acrylic paint
Woven textiles from the Liz Collins X Pollack collection
Dimensions: Nine 56 x 108 in panels / approximately 56 in x 42 ft total
project overview
Spanning more than 190 square feet, Tundra Garden is among Liz Collins’s most ambitious wall installations to date. The work comprises nine monumental textile panels made with a custom fabric designed in collaboration with Pollack, stretched and gesturally manipulated like a painter’s canvas, then layered with fringe and hand-painted surfaces. The installation is further animated by sculptural furniture objects by New York–based maker Dune, transforming the Loft into an immersive lounge for visitors. Realized with the skilled support of the textiles team at The Alpha Workshops at Powerhouse Arts, Tundra Garden exemplifies Collins’s fusion of dynamic pattern, material experimentation, and collaborative craft.
artist biography
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 she 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.
Currently on view at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI is Motherlode, a mid-career retrospective of Collins’s work curated by Kate Irvin. The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph published by Himmer and edited by Irvin, with additional essays, interviews, and contributions from Glenn Adamson, Octavia Bürgel, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Zoe Latta, and Eileen Myles. Other recent museum exhibitions include Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke and presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Collins’s work was also featured in a field of bloom and hum, curated by Ian Berry at the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Collins has been the subject of solo exhibitions at CANDICE MADEY, New York (2024), Rossana Orlandi, Milan (2024, 2019); Touchstones Rochdale, UK (2022); AMP, Provincetown, MA (2020); the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); the Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY (2015); the Knoxville Museum of Art, TN (2005), among others. She has been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025); the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON (2024); the Venice Biennale, IT (2024); the National Gallery of Art, Washington (2024); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023); the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA (2023, 2020); Longhouse Reserve, East Hampton, NY (2023); the Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown, NY (2022); the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2021, 2017, 2014); the Drawing Center, New York, NY (2019, 2018); BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2019); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2019); the New Museum, New York (2017); the Museum at FIT, New York (2013); the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2015); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011).
Collins’s honors include an Anonymous Was A Woman Fellowship, a USA Fellowship, a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts & Artist Relief grants, Drawing Center Open Sessions and residencies at Civitella Ranieri, Siena Art Institute, MacDowell, Yaddo, Haystack, Museum of Arts and Design, Stoneleaf, and currently she is in the Two Trees Cultural Subsidy Studio Program in Brooklyn. In 2020, The Tang Museum released “Liz Collins Energy Field”, her first major publication.
Collins lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA and MFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design.
