Drop, Cloth
4 December 2025 — 31 January 2025
Proudly co-presented by Susan Inglett Gallery and Hollis Taggart,
Drop, Cloth is a group show that presents a 50-year lineage of
draping in contemporary art, both in the literal sense in which the
substrate of the canvas is activated, and in the representational sense,
where textile forms are depicted. Curated by Glenn Adamson and
Severin Delfs and spanning two Chelsea gallery spaces, the exhibition
will also navigate the social implications of textile and drapery as a
feminist intervention and a method of identity exploration. An opening
reception will be held on Thursday, 11 December at both galleries from
6 to 8 PM. The exhibition at Susan Inglett Gallery will be on view
through 31 January 2026, while Hollis Taggart’s exhibition will be on
view through 10 January 2026. The gallery will be closed for the winter
holidays starting 21 December 2025, and will reopen 2 January 2026.
The exhibition is accompanied by a physical catalogue with
illustrations of works and essays by both Adamson and Delfs.
Featuring approximately 30 works by 25 artists,
Drop, Cloth embodies
both visual pleasure and conceptual rigor. It takes as its starting point
the myriad ways artists have engaged with drapery throughout art
history, recognizing how fabric often assumes a freely expressive,
proto-abstract quality.
Drop, Cloth stages the double resonance of fabric: formally through its folds, patterns, and
articulation of surface and space, as well as symbolically through its rich actions of hiding, presenting, revealing, and
representing. Keeping in mind the recent resurgence of attention paid to contemporary fiber art–a genre which
flourished in the 1960s and ‘70s but was consigned to obscurity until recently–this exhibition traces the evolution of this
amorphous genre.
The artists in
Drop, Cloth offer radically different ways of negotiating with the possibilities of cloth and fabric. It features
pioneering artists like Sam Gilliam who played a key part in the revolutionary expansion of fabric as an avant-garde
material in the ‘60s, as well as Lynda Benglis who investigated the flexibility and mobility of fabric using non-fabric
materials, like poured resin and cast metal. Contemporary artists like Kennedy Yanko carry these legacies forward in her
work which, as noted by Severin Delfs in his catalogue essay, “performs a kind of material alchemy: pigment becomes
skin, skin becomes drapery, and drapery becomes spatial movement.” The artists featured at Susan Inglett Gallery
include Lynda Benglis, Liz Collins, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Rosemary Mayer, Beverly Semmes, Greg Smith, Leslie Wayne,
Kennedy Yanko, and Nina Yankowitz. Artists featured at Hollis Taggart include Adela Akers, Chellis Baird, Paige Beeber,
Lynda Benglis, Jenny Brillhart, John Chamberlain, Lia Cook, Anna Fasshauer, Sam Gilliam, Al Held, Kenichi Hoshine,
Suchitra Mattai, Jenny Morgan, Catherine Murphy, Elaine Reichek, Nicola Stephanie, Leslie Wayne, Betty Woodman, and
Kennedy Yanko.
As curator and art historian Glenn Adamson writes in his catalogue essay, “This exhibition is about the relationship
between painting and textile, two disciplines that have always been closely tied. Since the seventeenth century, most
paintings have had a woven canvas substrate; long before that, cloth was already a pervasive presence in art. . . Across
the length and breadth of art history, drapery has served many concurrent purposes. Our exhibition is intended to be
similarly multivalent, taking on all these guises and adding others that are coming into being. What better metaphor
could there be for the great fabric of aesthetic possibility, after all, than fabric itself, which yields new shapes so readily–
just a fold here, a tuck there, and a flick of the wrist?”
Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian based in New York and London. He has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and
Design and Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dr. Adamson’s publications include
Thinking Through Craft (2007);
The Craft
Reader (2010);
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion (2011, with Jane Pavitt);
The Invention of Craft (2013);
Art in the Making (2016, with Julia
Bryan-Wilson);
Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018);
Objects: USA 2020; and
Craft: An American History (2021). His most
recent book,
A Century of Tomorrows, was published by Bloomsbury in December 2024. Dr. Adamson is Artistic Director for Design Doha, a
biennial in Qatar; curator at large for the Vitra Design Museum; and editor of
Material Intelligence, a quarterly online journal published by the
Chipstone Foundation. His current curatorial projects include
Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within for the Isamu Noguchi Museum and
Nike: Form
Follows Motion for the Vitra Design Museum. He received his PhD in art history at Yale University.
Severin Delfs is Director of Development at Hollis Taggart and legacy steward of the Audrey Flack Foundation and Estate. He holds a BA
(honours) from the Catalyst Institute for Creative Arts & Technology in Berlin, Germany. His curatorial and administrative work includes exhibitions
at the Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, NY) and the LongHouse Reserve Sculpture Garden and Museum-Reserve Landscape (East Hampton,
NY). He also co-curated the project “John Graham Comes Home” with Glenn Adamson at 1 Sidney Place, Brooklyn.
The exhibition will be on view at Susan Inglett Gallery located at 522 West 24th Street, Tuesday to Saturday 10 AM to 6 PM, and Hollis Taggart
located at 521 West 26th Street, Tuesday to Saturday 11 AM to 5 PM. For additional information, please contact Susan Inglett Gallery at 212 647
9111 or info@inglettgallery.com.
BEVERLY SEMMES,
Bow (Blue Curtain), 2016