MAD to Present Liz Collins' 'KNITTING NATION Phase 15: Weaving Walls' This March

On Sunday, March 6, 2016, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) will present KNITTING NATION Phase 15: Weaving Walls, a time-based installation and live labor performance by textile artist and designer Liz Collins.

From 10:00 am to 4:00 pm, Collins and a "factory crew" of six professional weaving artists and designers will transform the Museum's atrium and lobby into a knitting and weaving factory, creating a continuous soft wall that will climb the Museum stairwell as the day progresses. The performance explores the dynamic relationship between textile and architecture, performance and collectivity, and considers apparel manufacturing and human labor.

KNITTING NATION Phase 15: Weaving Walls is presented in conjunction with the current film and installation exhibition In Time (The Rhythm of the Workshop), which explores industrial manufacturing and the ways it shapes materials, bodies and value. Both the performance and the exhibition comment on workers' interaction with machines and explore the interwoven themes of global manufacturing and trade.

Concurrently, MAD will hold its drop-in Studio Sunday craft program for all ages, focusing this month on a weaving workshop where visitors will create textiles of their own after observing Collins' performance.

The live event will mark the 15th and final iteration of the KNITTING NATION series, as well as the 11th anniversary of the project, which debuted on Governors Island in 2005. "This performance is special because it has long been a dream of mine to do a KNITTING NATION at MAD, and a recent dream to weave the staircase, thereby engaging with site-specific architecture in such a direct and integrated manner," Collins says. The artist has enacted these installations in a variety of locations, including museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA; academic institutions like the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, and Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY; and a number of public spaces.

KNITTING NATION Phase 15
Sunday, March 6, 2016
10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Barbara Tober Grand Atrium
Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019
Free with Museum admission.

Liz Collins is a New York City-based artist and designer who has exhibited her work across the United States and abroad. Places that have hosted her solo exhibitions include the Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY); Heller Gallery and the Textile Arts Center (New York, NY); AMP Gallery (Provincetown, MA); AS220 (Providence, RI); and the Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, TN). KNITTING NATION, along with other works, has been shown at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (New York, NY), the Museum at FIT (New York, NY), MoMA (New York, NY), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), the Tang Museum and the ICA Boston. Collins has received many honors for her work, including a United States Artists Target Fellowship, a Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship and a CEC ArtsLink grant. She has also participated in residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle, ME), Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), Occidental College (Los Angeles, CA), AIR Alaska (Anchorage, AK) and MAD. Collins has held positions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD), Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY), and Rhode Island School of Design where she also received a BFA and MFA in Textiles.

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) champions contemporary makers across creative fields, presenting artists, designers and artisans who apply the highest level of ingenuity and skill to their work. Since the Museum's founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all facets of making and the creative processes by which materials are transformed, from traditional techniques to cutting-edge technologies. Today, the Museum's curatorial program builds upon a rich history of exhibitions that emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design, and reveals the workmanship behind the objects and environments that shape our everyday lives. MAD provides an international platform for practitioners who are influencing the direction of cultural production and driving 21st-century innovation, fostering a participatory setting for visitors to have direct encounters with skilled making and compelling works of art and design.