Mabelmade: Mabel Johnson at the Haw Contemporary
Mabel Johnson started sewing at her mother's side, watching curtains and old bedsheets become something unrecognisable from what they had been. That practice of salvage and reinvention has never really left her work. Mabelmade, her exhibition at the Haw Contemporary, fills the entire first floor of the gallery with over twenty-five garments and patchwork pieces that feel continuous with that origin — not nostalgically, but in the way that a genuine method persists.
Mabel Johnson, (Mabelmade), Hourglass, 2026.
The techniques are demanding ones: hand pleating, embroidery, piecing, the patient incorporation of repurposed cloth. Johnson works from the fabric outward, reading its weight and drape before committing to a silhouette. Colour follows. Composition follows that. It is a process more akin to responsive making than design in any conventional sense, and the garments register this. They have the quality of things discovered rather than resolved.
Mabel Johnson, Improv Quilt, 2022.
Her references: The quilts of Gee's Bend, those rigorously improvisational works produced by generations of women in rural Alabama, sit alongside the flattened, colour-saturated paintings of Milton Avery and the geometric play of Paul Klee. What connects them is not a shared aesthetic so much as a shared commitment to working within limits and finding in those limits something generative. Johnson's patchwork carries a similar logic: fragments of fabric that have already lived one life, reordered into something that could not have been planned in advance.
Mabel Johnson, Mabelmade. Installation view. Photo: Haw Contemporary Gallery
She launched Mabelmade at fifteen, has sold hundreds of pieces across the United States and internationally, and in 2025 collaborated with Ace & Jig on a capsule collection made from their handwoven cloth. The awards she has received, among them the Lydon Emerging Artist Prize and the Susan Lordi Marker Award of Excellence in Fiber, speak to a practice that has been building steadily and with real purpose.
Mabel Johnson, Stripe Ruffle Top, 2025.
The pleating and volume carry traces of historical costume without tipping into reconstruction. The patchwork draws from quilt traditions without settling there. Johnson has described each garment as a collage of things she is drawn to: colours from daily life, illustrations, paintings on the wall, and pieced together, they produce silhouettes that are both recognisable yet wonderously dreamlike in equal measure.
For anyone with an interest in how garments carry meaning — in material, in memory, in the patient logic of repurposed cloth — this show is worth the visit.
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Further Information:
MABELMADE is on show until the 27 May 2026 at the Haw Contemporary, 1600 Liberty Street, Kansas City, MO 64102
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Image Credits:
Lead: A Dress for Lulu Dress, Mabel Johnson (Mabelmade).
All further images as credited in photo captions.