Beyond Memorial: Textiles as Agents of Survival and Resistance
Visitors entering On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival at the Art Institute of Chicago soon understand they are stepping into something closer to a story than an exhibition. This is not a show about textiles as decorative objects. It is about what people do with cloth when ordinary language fails—when grief has no words, when memory must be held in the hand. Drawn primarily from the museum’s collection, more than a hundred pieces spanning cultures and millennia gather here to show how textiles carry mourning: sustaining belief, guiding the dead, soothing the living, and stitching together the frayed edges of personal and collective trauma.
bout 1810. Made at Mary Balch’s School, Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Commemorates the deaths of Nicholas (1767–1797) and Mary Bullock (died 1802). Silk on silk embroidery.
The journey begins with objects at the threshold of life and death. In the Death and Mourning gallery, a Rhode Island sampler from around 1810 hangs beside funeral hangings and burial cloths. Its silk-on-silk embroidery—tiny stitches, trumpeting angels—feels intimate, more like a whispered letter than public remembrance. The museum attributes it to Mary or Louisa Winsor, daughters memorialising their parents. Standing before it, you sense not an era’s formality but young hands working through loss, thread by thread.
19th century. Paminggir people, Lampung area, South Sumatra, Indonesia.
Rounding the corner, the tone shifts from mourning to metaphysics. The textiles in Transition of Realms—Indonesian palepai ship cloths and a Taoist priest’s robe—map belief systems through pattern, proportion, and symbol. Here, cloth becomes a guide, charting passages between earthly and spiritual terrain. These works speak of orientation: how the living situate themselves, and how the dead are shepherded into unseen worlds.
For the Paminggir aristocracy, the palepai ship cloth functioned as a vital companion during rites of passage—marriage, death, or the ascent to a higher rank. Such moments were considered thresholds, unstable intervals where danger gathered. The cloth’s ship imagery, directional cues, and careful geometry offered protection and cosmological order, helping its wearers navigate the peril of transition.
bout 200-500. Nazca, South coast, Peru
In Care and Repair, fragments carry the quiet drama of decision-making. A frayed edge left untouched; a seam reinforced; a conservator’s delicate intervention. Each choice reveals what someone hoped to preserve, and what they allowed to remain as evidence of rupture. Conservation is positioned here as care: a continuation of a textile’s life that honours rather than obscures its history.
Contemporary Chief Set (Three Miniatures), 2024. Barbara Teller Ornelas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Don F. and Jean F. Stuck Endowment Fund
The narrative widens again in Resistance and Survival. Here, the Noqanchis collective of Andean weavers and Diné (Navajo) weaver Barbara Teller Ornelas show how cloth can hold defiance. These works insist on cultural presence. Their threads affirm survival where erasure has long been attempted.
Early-mid-20th century, Iwo Yoruba, Nigeria
Contemporary voices continue this thread. Carina Yepez’s 2023 quilt Mujeres (Women) (lead image), which was made with her mother and aunt, transforms a vintage photograph of seamstresses from Guanajuato into layered appliqué. It is both portrait and homecoming, a return to the women who taught her to sew. “These powerful women have forged a lasting legacy,” Yepez notes.
Curated by Isaac Facio, Nneka Kai, L Vinebaum and Anne Wilson, On Loss and Absence represents an understanding that textiles carry stories not always visible at first glance. Threads soften where they were touched most; colours fade in patterns that hint at ritual use; repairs reveal the priorities of the hands that made them. The exhibition doesn’t merely present textiles of mourning; it tunes itself to the whispered conversations they have been holding for centuries, and invites visitors to do the same.
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Further Information:
On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival is on now until 15 March 2026 at the Art Institute of Chicago
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Image Credits:
Lead: Mujeres (Women), 2023. Carina Yepez. Made in collaboration with Maricela Herrera (auntie) and Lula Yepez (mom) and in gratitude to Amalia Martínez from La Haciendita, Guanajuato, Mexico. Collection of the artist.
All further images as credited in photo captions.