PRESENTATION: Liz Collins-Motherlode

Over her three decades of creative practice, Liz Collins has explored the complexities of power, energy, intimacy, and mind-body sensations. Her radical experiments with fiber vibrate with animated shapes, zigzagging lines, tangled surfaces, and spinning orbs. Collins’s drive to capture and express both the dynamism of interior emotions and the vitality of natural phenomena has led to a body of work that cannot be defined as any one thing, but rather encompasses it all—fashion, performance, textile design, and fine art.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: RISD Museum Archive

The exhibition “Motherlode” features more than 80 objects, capturing for the first time the full arc of Liz Collins’ career from the 1980s to the present day. “Motherlode” includes important examples of her immersive textile installations and wallworks, intricate and monumental woven hangings, fashion, needlework, drawings, performance documentation, and ephemera. In keeping with the RISD Museum’s commitment to centering makers and broadening perspectives, the exhibition vividly showcases the trailblazing nature of Collins’ work as well as the artist’s deep commitment to illuminating Queer feminist creative practice and environmental activism. Collins’s creative process has yielded a spectacular abundance of work that runs the gamut from the raw and experimental to refined design collaborations, and to monumental fine art installations—an oeuvre that plots an adventurous course to a motherlode of multisensory well-being. She has always been a fearless innovator, seamlessly moving between disciplines to create work. The exhibition follows Collins across her many shifts and evolutions in pursuit of her aesthetic and conceptual vision, from the success of her knit-focused label to her early forays into installation works, to her performances with knitting machines inspired in part by her time teaching at RISD, and through to her ongoing engagement with issues of personal and communal meaning across a vast array of media. Throughout every turn, Collins has sought new generative space for experimentation and maintained a keen sense of humor and mischief. As discussed in Irvin’s insightful introductory essay in the accompanying book, Collins has been the ever-changing trickster, stretching the possibilities of her materials and upending expectations of how her work should look, feel, and communicate to audiences. This is especially evident in her deep engagement with yarn, fabric, and textiles. Her radical approach has firmly asserted the power of these elements to hold and convey meaning, dismantling notions of textiles as “lesser art.” Itfeatures a dynamic range of Collins’ textile works, including examples from her fashion label such as “Lumberjack Goddess Dress” (2005) and “Samurai Coat” (2001), wall pieces and installations like “Euphoria II” (2016), “Veins-Darkness” (2022), and “Power Portal” (2024), monumental woven hangings like “Rainbow Mountain Weather” (2024) and “Zagreb Mountains” (2022); and more intimate wall-works such as “Specimens” (2000/2017) and “Worst Year Ever” (2010/2017), among numerous others. The exhibition also includes seminal works on paper, as well as ephemera and documentation from her “Knitting Nation” project, which through live performance-installations produced large-scale textiles that protested the Iraq War, examined the rainbow flag as a symbol of gay pride, and spoke to numerous other ideas and issues. Inspired by a range of subjects and references, from personal emotional states to communal experiences, and to contemporary politics, Collins leverages the tactility of fiber to unravel, deconstruct, combine, reimagine and create anew the structures of our inner and outer lives. Through time, Collins’ practice has extended to fine needlework and drawing, which also factor strongly in Motherlode, as the exhibition courses through the incredible range of Collins’ oeuvre. The results are a depth of works that serve as intricate studies in materiality, the aesthetics of abstraction and optical illusion, and the power of art to evoke a deep humanness. In keeping with Collins’ career-long commitment to instigating and celebrating Queer community and creativity, “Motherlode” also includes a salon-style exhibition of works by Queer artists curated by a group of RISD students in collaboration with Collins. The exhibition-within-the-exhibition offers an immersive and inclusive social space—an environment meant to foster conversation and exchange. Developed in close partnership with the RISD Museum, the project reflects our commitment to co-creating spaces where multiple perspectives shape how stories are told. The students are exploring works from the museum’s collection and dozens of artists drawn from RISD alumni, students, faculty, and staff.

Photo: Liz Collins, Rainbow Mountain Weather, 2024. Photograph by Patty van den Elshout. Image courtesy of The Artist and CANDICE MADEY, New York. © Liz Collins.

Info: Curator: Kate Irvin, RISD Museum, 20 North Main Street, Providence, RI, USA, Duration: 19/7/2025-11/1/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, https://risdmuseum.org/