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...
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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.