Return, Revision, Repeat: Threaded Currents at the PAFA
In Philadelphia this winter, pattern takes the long view. At Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Threaded Currents unfurls across the second floor of the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building like a set of signals. Seven-foot banners, each carrying a hand-pulled screen-printed repeat balances rigour with risk, and precision becomes the very condition for invention. Organised with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, the exhibition brings together 20 artists connected to both institutions, mapping the charged space between atelier tradition and experimental workshop.
Margery Cercado
The premise is deceptively simple: what happens when artists schooled in life drawing, painting and sculpture submit their instincts to the mechanics of the screen? The answer, across more than 30 works, is neither polite nor predictable. Repeat becomes a method of enquiry. A motif migrates across cloth and begins to behave architecturally; a figure dissolves into pattern and reconstitutes itself through rhythm; a painter’s tonal subtlety meets the graphic clarity of ink pressed through mesh.
Anthony Folks
The banners, printed during the artists’ time in FWM’s Apprentice Training Program—form the exhibition’s spine. Their scale shifts the language of textile from intimate to declarative. Standing before them, the body registers pattern physically: the eye tracks recurrence, the mind anticipates variation. Each repeat carries the trace of its making—the calibrated pull of the squeegee, the decision to overlay or withhold, the acceptance of the slight mis-registration that gives a surface its pulse.
Jill Adler
Crucially, Threaded Currents refuses the myth of the seamless finished work. Sketchbooks, mylar screen drawings, colour tests and trial prints are installed alongside resolved pieces, exposing the iterative thinking that underpins them. Pillows and soft sculptural forms extend the conversation into three dimensions, suggesting that repeat need not remain on the wall; it can inhabit space, accrue weight, acquire volume. Pattern, here, is both image and structure.
The roster of artists spans generations of PAFA alumni and students. Works made before and after their apprenticeships reveal subtle but telling shifts: compositions grow bolder in scale, colour relationships more adventurous, materials more assertive. The collaborative ethos of FWM, founded in 1977 by Marion “Kippy” Boulton Stroud as a site for material experimentation, is evident in this confidence. Techniques are shared; authorship becomes porous; process is foregrounded rather than concealed.
Veronica Hanssens
Founded in 1805, PAFA has long championed rigorous training and close looking. What Threaded Currents proposes is not a break from that lineage but an expansion of it. Tradition operates as a kind of repeat—returned to, revised, sometimes disrupted. Each iteration holds memory, but also the possibility of divergence.
For readers attuned to the politics and poetics of cloth, this exhibition offers more than visual pleasure. It stages a dialogue between hand and institution, between discipline and experiment. And in doing so, it reminds us that repeat is never mere duplication; it is a strategy for thinking, a way of building meaning through return.
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Further Information:
Threaded Currents, Organised with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, is on now until April 12 2026 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Heather Raquel Phillips. Nip, Tuck, Paint, Pluck, 2022. Pigment on bleached cotton yardage. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.
All further images as credited in captions.