Current Threads 2026

By Angela Clarke, Il Museo Museum Director

This year the Current Threads exhibition features a record number of artists with over 32 pieces in the exhibition. This plethora of talent reveals the importance of textile artwork to this province. 

The gallery space is divided into three parts; the natural world, artistic abstractions and the human condition. The natural world portion demonstrates how well textile work lends itself to replicating the complex textures of the natural world such as the fur-like quality of moss  madeby felted fabrics; the blue-green metallic patina of age and animal camouflage created by fabric dye, foil threads and micro-sized beading. These applications to textile replicate the amazing, nuanced ability that plants and animals possess to transform themselves enabling them to blend into their surrounding environment thereby facilitating their survival.  The innate qualities of survival are ingeniously recreated by textile artists attesting to the notion that what causes the natural world to survival also evokes awe- inspiring beauty. Survival and beauty are inseparable.

The abstract portion of the gallery also defies nature. Here we can view artists breaking the boundaries of the 2-dimensional form to replicate 3-D concepts. Such as Thomas Roach in Divine Whispers where single stitches become personal mediations, and in turn the stiches become stones, which furthermore, collectively create a sacred space. Or Dawn Russell’s work which utilizes industrial bike inner tubes to recreate the traditional twill patterns of refined British tweeds. 

Finally, textile, also, makes political statements. Mary Pal’s piece Walking with Jane Jacobs,draws attention to a cultural icon, who wrote and contemplated, on the nature of human connection and how this can be perpetuated in our communities, which are building blocks of great cities. She, sadly, predicted a world where property developers were more concerned with profit than human connection, which would create bleak cities that would cease to support the creation of great societies.  Barbara McCaffrey’s work 1911 Triangle Factory Fire further embodies this notion of the need for profit over humanity.  Through her work McCaffrey recounts the grim story of Italian and Jewish women working at the Triangle factory in Manhattan, who lost their lives in this factory fire. Locked into a poorly built building by their supervisor, who worried they would steal from the factory, they died from smoke inhalation or from jumping to their deaths, knowing there was no way to escape. This installation reminds us that textile is a political statement.  Since textile is ubiquitous to all cultures it holds the capacity to reflect ourselves back to us, our culture and our natures. Whether it is abstract, a simulation of nature, or a testament of the human experience, textile always reminds us of who we are since we cannot traverse the human journey without them.  Humans have an indelible relationship withtextile, and that is the story of Current Threads 2026.