Visit the Thread Count online viewing room here

Anne Samat, Antonio Santín, Brent Wadden, Christina Forrer, Desire Moheb-Zandi, Forcefield, Hope Wang, Jacqueline Surdell, Jim Drain, Kenny Nguyen, LMRM x Abraham Cone, Malaika Temba, Meg Lipke, Mia Weiner, Molly Haynes, Matthew Logsdon, Natasha Das, Noel W Anderson, Rachel Mica Weiss, Rebecca Ward, Samantha Bittman, Sarah Zapata, Shinique Smith, Victoria Manganiello and Qualeasha Wood.

The Hole is pleased to present Thread Count, a fiber-focused group exhibition curated by Charlotte Grüssing. Bringing together emerging and established artists working with textile today, the show foregrounds form, process, and tactile sensibility through the lasting influence of Anni Albers—her Bauhaus foundations, her writing, and her insistence that material and construction are the true engines of invention.

Fiber practices may be having a cultural moment, yet they remain widely misunderstood. Thread Count invites a slower kind of looking: attention to surface, texture, knots, dyes and the physical logic of how things are built. Unlike painting, the “value” of the artwork sits far from the pictorial. The title plays on the familiar metric of bed-sheet “thread count”—a reminder of how inadequate such quality measurements are for describing the complexity of textile work.

Anni Albers (1899–1994) was the 20th century’s most influential textile artist. Trained at the Bauhaus and later teaching at Black Mountain College, Albers fused weaving with modernist abstraction and produced a body of writing, especially her 1965 book On Weaving, that remains the primary manifesto of the field. Her retrospective now on view at Zentrum Paul Klee affirms how deeply her ideas continue to shape contemporary practice.

Albers warned that construction was becoming less inventive even as technology expanded. At its simplest, every fabric is defined by two elements: material and structure. Thread Count highlights how artists push those fundamentals today. Kenny Nguyen tears silk into hundreds of strips, dips them in acrylic and adheres them to canvas. Meg Lipke cuts, sews, paints and stuffs canvas forms into towering sculptural paintings. Jacqueline Surdell and Matthew Logsdon work with rope and utility cord, emphasizing knots—one of humanity’s oldest technologies. Anne Samat merges Southeast Asian Pua Kumbu weaving with dollar-store plastics and denim, while Malaika Temba constructs a cowrie-patterned Lady in Red inspired by Tanzania’s vibrant, ornamented trucks and buses.

Several artists engage the clear grid of warp and weft. Brent Wadden embraces repetition and Bauhaus geometry; Victoria Manganiello uses dyed threads to investigate the grid with scientific precision; Christina Forrer inflects the Bauhaus legacy through fantastical figuration; and Samantha Bittman fuses painting with hand-woven structure, emphasizing the mathematics of pattern. Collaborative works such as LMRM x Abraham Cone and the Forcefield “Shroud” underscore the communal labor inherent to weaving and the wearable activation through performance.

To limit the loom as “domestic,” as Jerry Saltz recently observed, ignores its historical and technological force—one of the earliest machines capable of complex computation, and a precursor to digital logic. While Albers’s own entry into weaving was shaped by gender restrictions at the Bauhaus, fiber art extends far beyond domesticity or craft debates.

Technology and identity surface in Qualeasha Wood’s pixel-rendered tapestries, which merge screenshots, craft and the Black femme body. Hope Wang’s buttered tongue chokes the sky rewards close inspection of the woven substrate. Rebecca Ward deconstructs canvas to reveal its skeleton, literally pulling threads, while Jim Drain’s Big Boy invites a 360° geodesic reading of color and construction.

Albers wrote of “the event of a thread” as a structure without beginning or end. That sense of open possibility animates Rachel Mica Weiss’s woven screens, rendered in subtle color-field gradients, and Shinique Smith’s Gathering Stars, which binds indigo cloth, clothing, and performance remnants into a constellation held together by thread.

“Much of the potency of textile art has been lost in centuries of efforts to produce woven versions of paintings,” Albers wrote. Instead, weavers think structurally, more like architects than image-makers. Works by Molly Haynes, Noel W. Anderson, Mia Weiner, Sarah Zapata, Natasha Das, and Antonio Santín reassert textile’s physicality, daring viewers to feel its depths with their eyes.

Thread Count offers not a single thesis but a linguistic field of approaches—a celebration of process, structure, and the ingenuity that emerges when form and material meet their limits.

Charlotte Grüssing is a curator and gallerist by day and soft sculptress by night. She is currently Administrative Director at The Hole, where she has curated shows including Title IX and Twinks, Twunks, Hunks and Dad Bods at The Hole and The Politics of Pink at The Hood Museum of Art. Dedicated to championing emerging artists she is the founder and curator of Tombolo’s artist residency program and previously ran The Other Art Fair in Brooklyn and Chicago. Her own fiber forward practice is heavily informed by the work of Anni Albers. Originally from London, she holds a degree in Art and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from Dartmouth College.

Special thanks to all the participating artists, The Albers Foundation, consigning galleries: Broadway, CARVALHO, Luhring Augustine, Marc Straus, Pace, Peter Blum Gallery, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Sundaram Tagore and Wentrup, as well as the Team at The Hole for their tireless work on this show.