This profile originally appeared in Issue 15, published October 25, 2025. You can read this piece and more by purchasing a copy of or subscription to the magazine here.
After college at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Liz Collins moved to New York. It was 1991. She wanted to work in a bigger world, to be a part of the textile industry. She stayed for a couple of years, then considered a job designing fabric at a silk plantation and mill in Thailand but decided against it after visiting and observing the harsh working conditions for the women employed there. She returned to Providence—a town with its own legacy of industrial mills—and opened and closed a clothing store with a friend. “It was basically a model of make things, put them in your store, open the door, and sell them,” Collins told me. “I learned through doing that I didn’t want to have a brick-and-mortar store,” she said. “I wanted to make stuff.” So she did. She created costumes for bands like the Providence-based neo-lounge act Combustible Edison and a multicolored spandex shirt for Shepard Fairey, a peer at RISD who stuck around to establish his first print studio. His signature image of André the Giant was on the shirt. “It was hot pink, yellow, black, and orange, with a zipper,” Collins said. It was a harbinger of things to come.
Collins returned to RISD for an MFA in textiles, earning it in 1999. I was in Providence at that time too. Scant arts infrastructure existed. Artists divided up the empty mills for art studios and prized authenticity more than success in any conventional sense. You could get a sandwich or a place to sleep for a song. There was talk of New York, but the values of the Big Apple felt far off. Still, Collins got a lucky break. After her thesis show at the RISD Museum, a fashion PR company picked her up and provided representation at no cost. She spent the next four years helming her own edgy, well-regarded, and unnamed knitwear label. Then, from 2003 to 2013, she was a faculty member at RISD in the same studios and classrooms where she had twice been a student.
Installation view, “Liz Collins: Motherlode,” RISD Museum, July 19, 2025–January 11, 2026. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI.
In July, I spoke with Collins, now based in Brooklyn and an artist full-time, over coffee outside the RISD Museum on the opening day of her mid-career retrospective “Motherlode.” She wore bohemian black, her iconic bright blue hair slicked down. She had added finger-lengths of black material to the left sleeve of her T-shirt to make a shoulder pad reminiscent of her cowhide Samurai Coat that is on view inside the museum. She fashioned the coat in 2001, two years after the Wachowski sisters predicted via The Matrix that the twenty-first century would be bleak, but at least warriors would be stylishly leather-clad. Collins described herself to me as quick and sometimes restless, which I took to mean that she works fast and isn’t afraid to change directions. She also aligned her representations of things cracking and blowing up with an anti-capitalism born in reaction to 1980s politics (Reaganomics and Thatcherism). And, as with many Gen Xers, her parents divorced when she was young. As we talked, she didn’t give off any of the cockiness that can creep into the affect of accomplished artists. There was some of the college professor in how she talked, but in a good way. She was an open book. Right off, for instance, she volunteered that she pitched the idea of the retrospective to the curators at the museum whom she knew from her years bringing classes to look at the collection, and she asked me eagerly if I liked the pop-up shop she’d designed downstairs where towels are emblazoned with what appears to be a close-up of cracked ice tundra—blue like her hair—and a group of totes sport psychedelic comic-book-style signals of “pows” that would make Roy Lichtenstein smile.
Although RISD is the motherlode acknowledged in the title of her retrospective, on the day we met, Collins was feeling fortunate for her familial lineage. Her maternal grandmother, whom she never knew, owned a dress shop. Her father, a sailor, crafted his own sails. About him, she recalled, “I used to think he was a wizard because he could do anything with his hands. He could fix anything. He could build anything.” When she was growing up in Alexandria, Virginia, her mother made clothes and taught her how to use a sewing machine. “My parents always believed in me. They believed in my work,” Collins continued. “Even though they split up, they believed in me as a creative person. They saw it in me early.” Collins credits that early affirmation and support with her ability to take risks not just creatively but personally as well. “If I look at my personal life,” she shared, “I’ve blown up relationship situations because it seemed like I could, and then I did and lived with the consequences.”
“Motherlode,” which is on view through January 11, 2026, includes frequent expressions of togetherness with sometimes ominous undertones. Euphoria II (2016) looks fleshy and hairy. Its form suggests a gruesome scene: zigzag-adorned shields leaned up after a battle, dripping with blood. To make this piece, Collins strategically deconstructed a woven pattern. The museum label calls it an expression of passion, but the work also conveys exhaustion, a weary recognition of mortality—passion and its discontents. The more than eighty works in the show reveal Collins to be the daring risk-taker she described. Rugs, furniture, wall hangings, and collaborations with designers and fabricators display an astonishing variety of textile approaches: jacquard weaving, hand-knotting, needlepoint, and knit-grafting. Sawtooth, stairstep, and zigzag motifs appear alongside evocations of wounds, scars, and blood. Jagged mountain ranges, mazes, and other shapes seem to radiate energy—in and out. In Fat Curtain (2003) and Povera (2020), abundance seems visceral, almost overflowing. The wall hanging Power Portal (2022–2024) looks like long locks of hair spilling out from a bull’s-eye. Another wall hanging, Cosmic Explosion (2008–2018), features a hole at the center of a starburst pattern littered with glass beads, like an anus or a wall equipped with a glory hole. Bridges and electrical towers show up in works on paper like Tower 1 (2018) and Atlas Matrix Variation 2 (2020). There’s a sense of precarity in these infrastructures, of something about to change, wires too taut, cliffs at the end of the road.
Portrait of Liz Collins in her temporary studio during her summer faculty residency at Fine Arts Work Center in August 2025. Photo by Joshua Willis for Boston Art Review.
In the catalog for the show, “Motherlode” curator Kate Irvin discusses how Collins, during her graduate studies, discovered knit-grafting, a technique for combining different kinds of textiles—often, for her, found, woven, and knit—to produce, in Irvin’s words, “textiles that appear as layered, fraying, unstable, and coming apart [but] are in fact tightly structured and technically rigorous.” Irvin calls the result “a gothic blend of decay, antiquity, and punk apocalyptic futurism built from Collins’s technical innovations.” Take Lumberjack Goddess Dress (2005), an early work on view in the first gallery of “Motherlode,” where a flannel shirt cinched at the waist meets a skirt of a dozen or so other flannels that become like ruffles descending to the floor. Of the dress, Collins says, “I wanted a lesbian butch reference—the iconic flannel shirt as a dyke signifier—yet with a femme treatment.”
Although her career has been far from predictable or calculated, strikingly, her compositional tendencies haven’t changed radically over time. There’s a consistency to her imagery and approach. The works in the show span from 1989—her student days—to the present, where she’s often now working with production facilities. The largest gallery of the exhibition at RISD is the last one. Here, the furniture, rugs, and wall works have space to interact in an exhilarating and sophisticated display of asynchronous combinations, rhythm, and repetition. For example, the low, wide, purple-striped, divan-style Dynamic Directional Sofa (2019) sits on Liquid Sky Rug (2021), a nighttime Ms. Pac-Man-like coterie of orbs and triangles digitally printed on polyester and nylon pile. On the wall, behind this scenario, the threads in Worst Year Ever (2010–2017) evoke fresh bleeding gashes. You get a whiff here of John Waters kitsch or what it might be like on set for a culture mash-up video by Ryan Trecartin (also a RISD alum). I’m reminded of the artist Harmony Hammond and her “wrapped sculptures” of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Hunkertime (1980) includes a group of ladders wrapped in painted fabric. Hammond has talked about these sculptures as hunkering together, leaning on each other, suggesting women depending on each other, becoming a community—different but related—hanging around, being themselves with others. Maybe Collins’s works can also be said to hunker down and hang around.
After an introductory gallery at RISD featuring Collins’s clothing, there’s one focused on Knitting Nation, an extensive performance project represented through documentation and various artifacts that took Collins to Boston, Los Angeles, Croatia, and back to New York and Providence. The performance and installation project, an extension of her time as a teacher, sought to reveal the often gendered labor involved in making knit and stitched textiles, the physical demand of this type of work, and, in Collins’s words, “the dance that humans do with machines.” Her 2007 manifesto described the project as “committed to exploring, deconstructing, and reconstructing important cultural symbols and artifacts that manifest in textile forms,” while also acknowledging “the ongoing, extreme excess of material goods that flood the global consumer marketplace.”
From 2005 to 2016, Collins staged fifteen different iterations of the project, which she called phases, to suggest the overall development of one central group of ideas. Knitting Nation Phase 7: Darkness Descendswas commissioned for the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston by the curator Helen Molesworth in 2011. For the piece, five women dramatically spotlit in white jumpsuits ran knitting machine needle pushers across their needle beds, relentlessly repeating their actions over long shifts, hours at a time. Contributing to the construction of a central red blanket, they wielded precision tools that doubled as percussion instruments—evocative and transportive like rain sticks perhaps, but much more grating, emphasizing the beauty and fateful brutality of textile production.
Liz Collins, Veins-Darkness, 2022. Liz Collins’s studio. Photo courtesy of Liz Collins.
A rumination on some of the exploitative practices and frustrating realities of the fashion industry, Knitting Nation is “not an answer project,” but “a question project,” Collins told me. The historian Glenn Adamson has called it “an activist parody of an assembly line.” It emerged from Collins’s struggles with the contradictions of fashion. When we talked, she reflected on the physically demanding labor involved in producing incredible fabrics and all the beauty, possibility, and cacophony she has observed in weaving mills and knitting factories. Following a lightning-fast series of “only in New York” successes with her fashion label, Collins found that the handmade quality that contributed to her work’s originality was difficult to scale up. “I didn’t have the right manufacturing resources,” she explained to me. “I didn’t know about making things in Peru, where they do all kinds of amazing things. I subsequently went there and was able to train people to do my specialized work, but at the time, I didn’t know.” These experiences shaped her pedagogy at RISD, where she taught a seminar on contemporary production, encouraging students to research and think through the challenges they might face after graduation and the vicissitudes of global manufacturing—an industry that often appears concerned only with fast-moving mass consumption, not durability, human experience, or collective futures.
Collins and I mulled over the popularity of textiles in the art world these days, which seems at least in part related to the growing understanding that we should know more about how the objects we use are made and about the impacts of industry on the earth. Collins shared with me that she loves the rain, storms, and nature’s surprises. She often visits remote and open spaces to recharge, but she’s concerned about rising water levels and fears that the open spaces in places she cares about, places like Alaska and Provincetown, are threatened. Outside the RISD Museum, she said, “I’m feeling a new level of alarm because I used to feel like, ‘Yeah, everything’s falling apart and scary, but there are still these big expanses of space where everything’s OK.’” Even those spaces are not OK.
In conjunction with “Motherlode” and as a demonstration of solidarity with queer communities, Collins collaborated with six student co-curators to create a salon-style companion exhibition for the museum, including art by queer-identifying artists connected to RISD. Works by current students and locals (only a couple are textiles) hang alongside those by prominent artists—faculty members like Angela Dufresne and alumni like Nicole Eisenman. Eisenman’s painting Mono Rail Over No Man’s Land (1994) shows female nudes clumped together on an outcropping of rock at the edge of a sci-fi-looking city and shares a spirit with Collins’s work. The women are in various states, ranging from amorous to isolated. This clump of loving experience in a potentially dangerous space is what José Esteban Muñoz in his 2009 book Cruising Utopia declared “the realm of potentiality that must be called on, and insisted on, if we are ever to look beyond the pragmatic sphere of the here and now, the hollow nature of the present.”
Liz Collins, Rainbow Mountain Weather, 2024. Liz Collins Studio. Photo by Patty van den Elshout. Image courtesy of the artist and Candice Madey, New York.
With “Motherlode,” Collins returned to RISD to chart the arc of her career. Never far from discourses on textiles, the influential twentieth-century artist Anni Albers loved how fabric can provide so much—privacy, shelter, and warmth—how it is lightweight, pliable, easily lifted and stored, and how it serves as clothing, tents, bedding, bags, and curtains. Adding to the Albers formulation, Collins’s work underscores that we share fibers. They are often created and used collectively. Indicating our common interests and codes, they become our flags. In an interview also in the exhibition catalog, Collins recounted for her friend, the historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, how working with textiles feels for her like alchemy. “As I got deeper into weaving and learned about what are called complex structures, it felt as if a galaxy of possibilities opened up. Layers of constructed fabrics made through structured repetition became not just a system to follow,” she said, “but also to break with or to transcend.”
Displayed in that main grand gallery at RISD, two Conversation Chairs & Ottoman (2015) that Collins made in collaboration with furniture designer Harry Allen are woven together with excesses of regal red fabric resembling elegant octopus tentacles or fastidiously shredded twin capes. Destined to always be a set, the chairs face the final work in the show, the large-scale angora, linen, mohair, nylon, polyester, and wool tapestry Mountain Weather (2024), which was included in the Venice Biennale last year. Collins views the piece as a reflection of queer utopias out of reach. A space-ship-like disc seems to battle or emit rainbow rays above a ghostly mountain range. Utopia or no utopia, Collins seems especially herself lately, as if the retrospective helped her make enough sense of her life to take comfort and inspiration from her expertise, reframe her past discoveries, and begin again. She’s switching between her characteristic styles and ways of working like a versatile dancer comfortable in ballroom and club, swerving from fuchsia to orange, neon stripe to red-blue braid, toothy lightning bolt to zipper pattern—the gestalt evocative of structures and possibilities outside of the hollow nature of the present.
“Liz Collins: Motherlode” is on view through January 11, 2026, at RISD Museum, 20 N. Main Street, Providence, RI.
