Chicago City Wire

The Art Institute of Chicago will present the exhibition "On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival" from September 6, 2025, to March 15, 2026. The show features over 100 objects from various cultures and time periods, primarily drawn from the museum’s own collection. The exhibition explores how textiles are used to support spiritual beliefs, understand death, process grief, honor those who have died, and recover from trauma.

The exhibition is organized around four main themes. The first theme, “Death and Mourning,” examines how textiles play a role in dealing with loss through items such as funeral hangings, burial cloths, mourning samplers, and works by contemporary artists. “Transition of Realms” focuses on spiritual beliefs about life and death that are expressed in textiles like Indonesian palepai (ship cloths) and a Taoist priest’s robe. “Care and Repair” looks at material losses through textile fragments while highlighting the practice of textile conservation as a form of care. The final theme, “Resistance and Survival,” presents textiles as symbols of defiance and cultural persistence.

“I encourage visitors to take in these wide-ranging works so that they, hopefully, find resonance with the textiles as vessels of remembrance, resilience and cultural continuity,” said Melinda Watt, chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles. “We hope the exhibition will provide our audiences with the opportunity to look closely and discover the stories each individual work tells.”

The curatorial team consists of Isaac Facio (associate conservator at the Art Institute’s Conservation department), Nneka Kai (artist and educator), L Vinebaum (scholar and associate professor), all connected to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Fiber and Material Studies department; Anne Wilson (artist and professor emeritus); with Melinda Watt serving as senior museum advisor.

A fully illustrated catalog will accompany the exhibition.