Liz Collins Finds Transcendence Through Labor-Intensive Fiber Art

Liz Collins had her work cut out for her when she conceived the two 16-foot-long tapestries she showed at last year’s Venice Biennale. Both textiles feature mountain ranges whose peaks emit rainbows that twist through a dark sky, and though they were among the largest works in the Biennale, they were crafted with such elegance that they appeared effortless.

In 2022, when she began work on them at the TextielLab in the Dutch city of Tillburg, Collins envisaged the two textiles as one 40-foot weaving. She thought, “I’m just going for the mother lode. I want to make this huge.” Going for the mother lode quickly revealed itself to be no easy task, however.

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Collins quickly realized that her ambitions had outstripped what was actually possible, leading her to split her planned mega-tapestry in two. After an initial trial that didn’t look quite as she wanted, she switched to a lighter yarn. She was pleased with the final product, which she brought home to New York in duffel bags, not yet aware that curator Adriano Pedrosa was interested in showing them at his Biennale.

During a recent visit to her Brooklyn studio, Collins was transparent about the difficulty of producing these textiles, titled Rainbow Mountains: Moon and Rainbow Mountains: Weather (both 2023). But despite the arduous process of making the works, she also spoke of the resulting pieces as being transcendent and transporting. She described both as representing “this monumental space of distortion” and said her mountain ranges evinced “a persistent duality for me: the idea of danger, precarity, horror—the bad things—alongside joy, euphoria, the force of life, being alive, love and community and passion and emotion. Awe and wonder are in the mountains, but they’re also in the rainbows.”

The textiles depict “the promised land—this idea of something you’re looking toward that’s always a little out of reach,” as Collins put it.

Since the 1990s, Collins has been creating fiber art that attempts to reach that promised land. She has crafted wearable garments, painting-like weavings, and performance pieces involving collaborators, many of whom have knit large textiles as a collective. She weaves queer themes into her work—rainbows and Pride flags recur throughout—and often creates textiles that have a corporeal quality, with spills of yarn that recall locks of hair or rivulets of blood.

These labor-intensive pieces have been featured at commercial galleries, art fairs, and design expos and will now be surveyed by the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, where Collins did both undergraduate and graduate work and later was a faculty member in the textiles department. The RISD survey, opening on July 19 and running through January 11, 2026, coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s iteration of “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” which features three works by her.

To create such elegant art requires physical and mental endurance (and sometimes the help of mills in Italy, Peru, and other foreign nations). The RISD exhibition’s catalog features an essay by Zoe Latta, cofounder of the clothing label Eckhaus Latta and student of Collins who participated in one of the artist’s “Knitting Nation” performances, for which Latta and others helped produce a giant red weaving using a loom in the auditorium of the Institute of Contemporary Art. “At some point,” Latta writes, “I remember that my machine was turning red and I realized my hands were bleeding from blisters popping on the handle of the carriage.” (Museum workers bandaged Latta’s wounds, and she returned to the performance thereafter.)

From such burdensome labor spring weavings in shades of deep crimson, gleaming pink, and alluring blue. The fact that Collins is able to spin pain into beauty has not been lost on her collaborators. The artist Nayland Blake, for example, once enlisted Collins to fix a beloved sock monkey torn apart by a dog and filmed Collins’s hands in close-up for a video called Stab (2013).

Kate Irvin, the curator of Collins’s RISD survey, said that for the artist, “the idea of labor leads to this idea of magic, of alchemy—of creating form or structure out of a line of fiber.” Irvin compared Collins to a trickster, saying, “She’s finding a pathway to other places that are generative and creative and safe.”

Collins herself said that the physicality of her process has helped to root her in her body—and that she even welcomes the tedium that accompanies weaving. “Either it’s boring, or you find a way for it to be transformative,” she said. “You can transcend the monotony.”

Collins was born in 1968 in Alexandria, Virginia, and spent her childhood visiting Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. “It was so much a part of my life to experience art,” she said, recalling such formative experiences as attending the National Museum of African Art, where, during one visit, she viewed a video about men who make kente cloth.

She described an early compulsion to make “something with the heaviness of painting.” But she eventually found herself dissuaded from taking up that medium. As part of her required foundational studies as a freshman at RISD, she tried painting, but “there was something about it that felt stressful to me—the rectangle, the rigid rectangle,” she said. She found herself gravitating toward modernists like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, and Sonia Delaunay, all of whom fluidly translated their abstractions across paintings and textiles. Those artists “really helped me know that I could do that too,” Collins said.

When she became a textiles major in her second year, she finally found her purpose. She learned to weave using a warp board and found the experience of running yellow yarn through it “so special and new and perfect for my body,” as she says in the RISD catalog.

Yet even the textile program left something to be desired: She wanted to create clothes, and all her teachers were fiber artists or designers. “I wanted to work with Jean Paul Gaultier, who could take my magical fabric and turn it into a magical garment,” she told me. Despite being unable to find a Gaultier-like mentor on RISD’s faculty, Collins followed her own intuition. When she was assigned to create a “political piece” for one class, she took camouflage-print fake fur and slashed it. She has since continued to produce weavings with gashes in them.

After graduating with an MFA in 1999, Collins launched a knitwear company that briefly made her a fixture within the world of fashion. “I had this meteoric rise to visibility and recognition, because my work was very unusual,” she said. “I was breaking rules. I was hand-making things with knitting machines, not using factories, and making these very unusual constructions that people hadn’t seen.”

Many of those constructions aspired toward liberation. A tight-fitting bustier from 1999 that appears in MoMA’s “Woven Histories,” for example, features red veins that run across the torso and over one shoulder; sheer dresses donned by runway models featured dangling red threads and gaping holes. “I came out as a queer person through my clothing,” Collins said. “It was a raw expression of my emotional landscape, my sexuality, my anxiety, my repression.”

Her clothes entered the mainstream, with the rapper Lil’ Kim wearing a pink silk and wool top designed by Collins in a 2000 music video. Some in the art world gained appreciation for them, too, including the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, a longtime friend who dedicated her 2017 book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, to Collins. “When I want to feel at my most fierce, protected, and glamorous, that’s when I choose to wear a Liz Collins garment,” said Bryan-Wilson, whose wedding dress was designed by Collins. “They are witchy and eye-catching. They’re statement pieces. People are always, like, ‘Oh, my God, what is that you’re wearing?’”

But Collins began to feel burnt out by the business of fashion. She wasn’t making enough money, and she had grown exhausted by customers who placed specific demands on her, not realizing all that went into the production of her clothes. Collins knew she could not make it on her own anymore, so she applied for work with other designers, including Donna Karan. But when she came across a position in RISD’s textile department, “everything shifted for me,” she explained. She recalled having “slowly segued” out of fashion while continuing to take on projects with designers such as Gary Graham, with whom she crafted the Pride Dress (2003), which was made from a tattered American flag.

Bryan-Wilson herself donned the Pride Dress for Knitting Nation Phase 1: Knitting During Wartime (2005), the first in a series of performances that helped cement Collins’s place within the art world. Staged on Governors Island, Knitting During Wartime involved many collaborators working together to knit an American flag that was then laid on the ground, trod upon, and defaced. Collins intended the piece as a response to Sunny A. Smith’s The Muster, a series of artworks interrogating Civil War reenactments. Smith aspired to answer the question “What are you fighting for?” Knitting During Wartime appeared as many Americans were asking something similar of themselves while the United States continued its conflict in Afghanistan. Bryan-Wilson recalled Knitting During Wartime as a “ruckus” highlighted by the loud noises of knitting machines and said she understood the piece as a “critique of wartime nationalism and the feminized labor of knitting.”

Future “Knitting Nation” performances involved producing Pride flags and heaps of red fabric. Collins said that, with these performances, she was “focused on telling a story about the physical labor of making fabric and laying bare this medium that I thought was like alchemy, taking a spool of yarn and then putting it through this machine.”

Collins staged the last “Knitting Nation” performance in 2016 and has since produced a range of dreamy textiles. In 2017, working on commission for the Little River Cafe in New York, she produced Inheritance, a group of hanging white textiles that dangle over the heads of diners. (These were an allusion to the sails of boats like the one manned by Collins’s father when she was a child.) That same year, for a New Museum show called “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Collins made Cave of Secrets, an installation bathed in bluish lighting that included two chairs of differing heights yoked together by violet fibers.

These days, Collins said, she is experiencing a “strange color moment” in which her work often features clashing hues. She pointed out a new weaving from a series called “Zagreb Mountains,” which showcases jagged, zigzagging lines in a range of colors, from raucous yellow to soothing cerulean. “Left on my own, I can come up with some wacky shit like this,” she said.

Read more of our Pride Month coverage here.