Motherlode at RISD Museum
This summer, the RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, opens Motherlode - the first U.S. survey of artist Liz Collins’ expansive and genre-defying work. On view from July 19, 2025, to January 11, 2026, the exhibition presents over 80 pieces spanning three decades of creative experimentation across textiles, fashion, installation, and performance.
Motherlode is more than a retrospective: it is a bold celebration of queer feminist expression, material storytelling, and the transformative power of fiber art. Curated in close collaboration with the artist, this landmark exhibition reflects the RISD Museum’s ongoing commitment to artists who challenge and expand the boundaries of art and design.
Liz Collins is a Brooklyn-based artist and designer whose genre-defying work spans textiles, performance, fashion, installation, and activism. A graduate and former professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, she has long challenged boundaries between visual art and material design, often through the lens of queer feminist thought and environmental awareness.
Employing a wide range of materials — from natural fibers to synthetic threads — Collins creates vivid, immersive environments characterized by dynamic patterns, inventive structures, and emotional intensity. Her works often envelop the viewer in vibrating color fields, exploring the thresholds between painting, fiber art, and spatial installation. This cacophonic play of optics, texture, color, and scale reflects her experience of the world as a place of stupendous wonder and cosmic energy.
Collins’ early success as a knitwear designer led to the launch of a pioneering fashion label before she fully expanded into the visual arts. Over the past three decades, she has developed a deeply political and tactile artistic language — one that reclaims textile as a powerful tool for storytelling, resistance, and connection. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, and is held in major museum collections around the world. Motherlode is the first exhibition to present the full arc of her artistic evolution.
Motherlode is the first comprehensive U.S. exhibition of Liz Collins’ work, showcasing over 80 pieces that span her expansive and experimental career. On view from July 19, 2025 to January 11, 2026 at the RISD Museum, the show presents a rich survey of Collins’ visual language — from radical fashion and early knitwear to monumental wall hangings, fiber-based installations, protest performances, and delicate needlework.
Curated by Kate Irvin in collaboration with the artist, the exhibition not only highlights Collins’ aesthetic evolution but also her deep commitment to queer feminist thought and collective expression. A special salon-style space within the exhibition — co-curated with RISD students — presents works by queer artists across generations, further rooting Motherlode in community and dialogue.
Accompanied by a monograph published by Hirmer, Motherlode is more than an exhibition: it’s an immersive tribute to materiality, emotion, and resistance through art.
(Printed Carpet: Cave)
For the Motherlode exhibition at the RISD Museum, Liz Collins collaborated with textile innovators ZigZagZurich and 4Spaces to create two custom-designed interior works: a signature wallpaper and a specially printed carpet, both integral to the spatial and emotional experience of the show.
The Mischief wallpaper, produced in Pavilion Gray, stretches across 43 panels to create a textured, rhythmic environment — echoing Collins’ aesthetic of layered color, movement, and disruption. Paired with a fully customized printed carpet design, these pieces transform the exhibition space into a tactile landscape, inviting visitors to not only view Collins’ art but to be fully immersed in its atmosphere.
These contributions reflect the shared ethos of Collins and ZigZagZurich: bold design, craftsmanship, and the seamless fusion of art and textile.
(Wallpaper: Mischief)
More about Liz Collins and her work:
Get to know Liz Collins:
Who are you?
An artist.
Where do you live?
Brooklyn, NY.
What do you do?
Make art, friends, projects, and travel.
Who & what inspires you?
I love life and people and culture and nature. Basically being alive inspires me and my relationships with friends and lovers are as inspiring as the work of so many creative people past and present. I am often inspired by film and music and design and think a lot about energy and emotions.
What doesn’t inspire you?
Stress, political corruption, extreme violence, bad smells.
What projects have you been recently working on?
Lots of textile works, a big installation at a Queer bookstore in NYC that has a portrait show with over 90 Queer artists. I just did an art fair in March with my gallery in NYC and people loved the work. I’m having a solo show in September there so starting to envision that.
What projects in your lifetime have the most significance in both of your work?
The installations I did at the New Museum last year and at the Tang Museum 2015-2017. They were both large scale projects - immersive environments that provided space for people to linger and relax while taking in lots of art.
Where is design & art heading?
New places always.
What’s wrong with design?
Nothing. I do think that the art world could do a better job of acknowledging the design world and the robust intersections there.
Who do you think are the most influential artists & designers in recent years?
Artists: Kerry James Marshall, Yayoi Kusama, Kara Walker, Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois are always influential. Designers: India Mahdavi, Rei Kawakubo, Patricia Urquiola, Etorre Sotsass, Nathalie Du Pasquier.
What artists and designers have inspired you in your lifetime?
Jean Paul Gaultier, Issey Miyake, Junichi Arai, Janine Antoni, Andrea Zittel, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, Aligheiro Boetti, Gunta Stozl, Sol LeWitt, Lenore Tawney, Nick Cave, Anne Wilson.
What would be your best destination in the world?
Tahiti or some other exquisite tropical island.
Stuck on a desert island, three things that you couldn’t do without?
Scissors, Rope, Wine.
What is your favourite colour & why?
Red- it’s powerful.
