Liz Collins had her work cut out for her when she conceived the two 16-foot-long tapestries she showed at last year’s Venice Biennale. Both textiles feature mountain ranges whose peaks emit rainbows that twist through a dark sky, and though they were among the largest works in the Biennale, they were crafted with such elegance that they appeared effortless.

In 2022, when she began work on them at the TextielLab in the Dutch city of Tillburg, Collins envisaged the two textiles as one 40-foot weaving. She thought, “I’m just going for the mother lode. I want to make this huge.” Going for the mother lode quickly revealed itself to be no easy task, however.

Collins quickly realized that her ambitions had outstripped what was actually possible, leading her to split her planned mega-tapestry in two. After an initial trial that didn’t look quite as she wanted, she switched to a lighter yarn. She was pleased with the final product, which she brought home to New York in duffel bags, not yet aware that curator Adriano Pedrosa was interested in showing them at his Biennale.

During a recent visit to her Brooklyn studio, Collins was transparent about the difficulty of producing these textiles, titled Rainbow Mountains: Moon and Rainbow Mountains: Weather (both 2023). But despite the arduous process of making the works, she also spoke of the resulting pieces as being transcendent and transporting. She described both as representing “this monumental space of distortion” and said her mountain ranges evinced “a persistent duality for me: the idea of danger, precarity, horror—the bad things—alongside joy, euphoria, the force of life, being alive, love and community and passion and emotion. Awe and wonder are in the mountains, but they’re also in the rainbows.”

The textiles depict “the promised land—this idea of something you’re looking toward that’s always a little out of reach,” as Collins put it.

Since the 1990s, Collins has been creating fiber art that attempts to reach that promised land. She has crafted wearable garments, painting-like weavings, and performance pieces involving collaborators, many of whom have knit large textiles as a collective. She weaves queer themes into her work—rainbows and Pride flags recur throughout—and often creates textiles that have a corporeal quality, with spills of yarn that recall locks of hair or rivulets of blood.

These labor-intensive pieces have been featured at commercial galleries, art fairs, and design expos and will now be surveyed by the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, where Collins did both undergraduate and graduate work and later was a faculty member in the textiles department. The RISD survey, opening on July 19 and running through January 11, 2026, coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s iteration of “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” which features three works by her.

To create such elegant art requires physical and mental endurance (and sometimes the help of mills in Italy, Peru, and other foreign nations). The RISD exhibition’s catalog features an essay by Zoe Latta, cofounder of the clothing label Eckhaus Latta and student of Collins who participated in one of the artist’s “Knitting Nation” performances, for which Latta and others helped produce a giant red weaving using a loom in the auditorium of the Institute of Contemporary Art. “At some point,” Latta writes, “I remember that my machine was turning red and I realized my hands were bleeding from blisters popping on the handle of the carriage.” (Museum workers bandaged Latta’s wounds, and she returned to the performance thereafter.)

From such burdensome labor spring weavings in shades of deep crimson, gleaming pink, and alluring blue. The fact that Collins is able to spin pain into beauty has not been lost on her collaborators. The artist Nayland Blake, for example, once enlisted Collins to fix a beloved sock monkey torn apart by a dog and filmed Collins’s hands in close-up for a video called Stab (2013).

Kate Irvin, the curator of Collins’s RISD survey, said that for the artist, “the idea of labor leads to this idea of magic, of alchemy—of creating form or structure out of a line of fiber.” Irvin compared Collins to a trickster, saying, “She’s finding a pathway to other places that are generative and creative and safe.”

Collins herself said that the physicality of her process has helped to root her in her body—and that she even welcomes the tedium that accompanies weaving. “Either it’s boring, or you find a way for it to be transformative,” she said. “You can transcend the monotony.”

Collins was born in 1968 in Alexandria, Virginia, and spent her childhood visiting Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. “It was so much a part of my life to experience art,” she said, recalling such formative experiences as attending the National Museum of African Art, where, during one visit, she viewed a video about men who make kente cloth.

She described an early compulsion to make “something with the heaviness of painting.” But she eventually found herself dissuaded from taking up that medium. As part of her required foundational studies as a freshman at RISD, she tried painting, but “there was something about it that felt stressful to me—the rectangle, the rigid rectangle,” she said. She found herself gravitating toward modernists like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, and Sonia Delaunay, all of whom fluidly translated their abstractions across paintings and textiles. Those artists “really helped me know that I could do that too,” Collins said.

When she became a textiles major in her second year, she finally found her purpose. She learned to weave using a warp board and found the experience of running yellow yarn through it “so special and new and perfect for my body,” as she says in the RISD catalog.

Yet even the textile program left something to be desired: She wanted to create clothes, and all her teachers were fiber artists or designers. “I wanted to work with Jean Paul Gaultier, who could take my magical fabric and turn it into a magical garment,” she told me. Despite being unable to find a Gaultier-like mentor on RISD’s faculty, Collins followed her own intuition. When she was assigned to create a “political piece” for one class, she took camouflage-print fake fur and slashed it. She has since continued to produce weavings with gashes in them.

After graduating with an MFA in 1999, Collins launched a knitwear company that briefly made her a fixture within the world of fashion. “I had this meteoric rise to visibility and recognition, because my work was very unusual,” she said. “I was breaking rules. I was hand-making things with knitting machines, not using factories, and making these very unusual constructions that people hadn’t seen.”

Many of those constructions aspired toward liberation. A tight-fitting bustier from 1999 that appears in MoMA’s “Woven Histories,” for example, features red veins that run across the torso and over one shoulder; sheer dresses donned by runway models featured dangling red threads and gaping holes. “I came out as a queer person through my clothing,” Collins said. “It was a raw expression of my emotional landscape, my sexuality, my anxiety, my repression.”

Her clothes entered the mainstream, with the rapper Lil’ Kim wearing a pink silk and wool top designed by Collins in a 2000 music video. Some in the art world gained appreciation for them, too, including the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, a longtime friend who dedicated her 2017 book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, to Collins. “When I want to feel at my most fierce, protected, and glamorous, that’s when I choose to wear a Liz Collins garment,” said Bryan-Wilson, whose wedding dress was designed by Collins. “They are witchy and eye-catching. They’re statement pieces. People are always, like, ‘Oh, my God, what is that you’re wearing?’”

But Collins began to feel burnt out by the business of fashion. She wasn’t making enough money, and she had grown exhausted by customers who placed specific demands on her, not realizing all that went into the production of her clothes. Collins knew she could not make it on her own anymore, so she applied for work with other designers, including Donna Karan. But when she came across a position in RISD’s textile department, “everything shifted for me,” she explained. She recalled having “slowly segued” out of fashion while continuing to take on projects with designers such as Gary Graham, with whom she crafted the Pride Dress (2003), which was made from a tattered American flag.

Bryan-Wilson herself donned the Pride Dress for Knitting Nation Phase 1: Knitting During Wartime (2005), the first in a series of performances that helped cement Collins’s place within the art world. Staged on Governors Island, Knitting During Wartime involved many collaborators working together to knit an American flag that was then laid on the ground, trod upon, and defaced. Collins intended the piece as a response to Sunny A. Smith’s The Muster, a series of artworks interrogating Civil War reenactments. Smith aspired to answer the question “What are you fighting for?” Knitting During Wartime appeared as many Americans were asking something similar of themselves while the United States continued its conflict in Afghanistan. Bryan-Wilson recalled Knitting During Wartime as a “ruckus” highlighted by the loud noises of knitting machines and said she understood the piece as a “critique of wartime nationalism and the feminized labor of knitting.”

Future “Knitting Nation” performances involved producing Pride flags and heaps of red fabric. Collins said that, with these performances, she was “focused on telling a story about the physical labor of making fabric and laying bare this medium that I thought was like alchemy, taking a spool of yarn and then putting it through this machine.”

Collins staged the last “Knitting Nation” performance in 2016 and has since produced a range of dreamy textiles. In 2017, working on commission for the Little River Cafe in New York, she produced Inheritance, a group of hanging white textiles that dangle over the heads of diners. (These were an allusion to the sails of boats like the one manned by Collins’s father when she was a child.) That same year, for a New Museum show called “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Collins made Cave of Secrets, an installation bathed in bluish lighting that included two chairs of differing heights yoked together by violet fibers.

These days, Collins said, she is experiencing a “strange color moment” in which her work often features clashing hues. She pointed out a new weaving from a series called “Zagreb Mountains,” which showcases jagged, zigzagging lines in a range of colors, from raucous yellow to soothing cerulean. “Left on my own, I can come up with some wacky shit like this,” she said.

Read more of our Pride Month coverage here.

Ching Ho Cheng used to say he was working with paper, instead of on it. Forever experimenting, the Chinese-American artist (1946–89) created spiritual works from his home studio in Suite 903 of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, constantly playing with these humble sheets. “Paper breathes,” Cheng explained. “So I prefer to say that I work with paper.”

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His collaboration with paper took many forms. Cheng’s early works, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were at first psychedelic, then realistic and two-dimensional. He then experimented with torn-paper works, and by the end of his career (cut short due to his death from AIDS-related complications) his pieces were monumental, oxidized, and sculptural.

A selection of his airbrushed gouache works from the mid to late 1970s, of sunlight pouring through his apartment’s windows and onto its walls, are now on view in a solo show at Bank gallery’s New York outpost. Cheng made these transitional works after a period of deeply detailed compositions and before his more minimalist works, but they’re all tied together by themes of impermanence and transience. Here, he was also trying to depict illumination. “Through his delicate work you are able to perceive a cosmic infinity,” says Bank gallery founder Mathieu Borysevicz.

Indeed, the current show is part of a revival of interest in Cheng’s work. Apart from his current solo show, on view through June 14, the Shanghai-based Bank gallery presented Cheng’s work at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023 and Art Basel Hong Kong last year. He also had a solo presentation at David Zwirner’s New York location in the autumn of 2021. His papers and artifacts held at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art were digitized in 2024, making it easier to access materials such as his sketchbooks, photographs, and correspondence.

Cheng’s work was shown and collected in his lifetime by institutions such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Cleveland Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and NYU’s Grey Art Museum. Since his death at age 42, his legacy and estate have been stewarded by his sister, Sybao Cheng-Wilson (who now lives in her brother’s Chelsea Hotel apartment). Still, Cheng is not as well known as some of his contemporaries. Part of the reason is that he didn’t have an easily identifiable signature style. He was also out of sync with the movements of his time, for example working in gouache at a time when conceptual art was king.

Cheng’s work will also be included in the “Sixties Surreal” group show opening this fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art (which has four of his works in its collection), and he will have his first major institutional retrospective at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts, in early 2027. Coinciding with the retrospective, the Addison and Visual AIDS will also be co-publishing a monograph on Cheng. “I believe that [this retrospective] will launch a watershed moment in terms of interest in the work and life of Cheng,” says Borysevicz.

Cheng was born in Havana to Chinese parents while his father was a diplomat for Chiang Kai Shek’s government. After the Chinese Revolution the family moved to Queens, New York, where Cheng grew up. The artist’s earliest works were intricate psychedelic paintings, inspired by Taoist teachings about life and death cycles as well as Tibetan tantric art. These works, sometimes large scale, were painstakingly created over long periods and included details such as flames, tubular forms, orbs, sperm, teeth, and lips.

After a few years, Cheng moved on to hyper-realistically painted domestic scenes and everyday objects such as lightbulbs, cigarette butts, and beer cans.“He would take something very mundane and make it sacred,” the artist’s sister, Cheng-Wilson, shared in a recent panel talk at Bank gallery. “That was his point.”

One of his better-known works from this period, Waterfall, Chelsea Hotel, New York (1978), depicts his own bubblegum-pink shower wall covered with water droplets, with peeling paint above symbolizing disintegration and decay. A detail you could almost miss in all the pink is a single hair on one of the tiles, rife with potential for narrative. “Cheng would often hide something very personal in his artwork,” Cheng-Wilson said. “He painted one little black hair of [his lover] Gregory Millard’s, or he would put his thumbprint. Sometimes you wouldn’t see it, but he knew it was there.”

After moving through the psychedelics and the domestic scenes, Cheng started working on the airbrushed gouach paintings, exploring the effect of light and shadows so realistically that viewers weren’t sure if they were real or painted. He had an “ability to take these things that we wouldn’t necessarily focus on and to really live with, engage with the shadow in this profound way and to render, with such care, every peeling bit of paint, every dent in the wall,” observes Gordon Wilkins, curator of American art at the Addison and of the museum’s upcoming Cheng retrospective.

After these shadow paintings, Cheng shifted to torn-paper works, which grew from his tendency to destroy artworks he was unhappy with. Looking at these destroyed works anew, he came to view tearing as a “spontaneous gesture which can never be exactly duplicated,” he later noted. The torn works coincided with a time when he was mourning many friends lost to the AIDS epidemic, and often included blue and green, which he viewed as symbolic of rebirth.

Cheng’s final body of work, in the late 1980s, were “alchemical” pieces that he made by soaking rag paper in water for days or weeks, adding acrylic paint and gesso to harden it. This transformed the paper into sculptural, three-dimensional forms that he molded into organic shapes. He’d then add copper or iron dust, which oxidized when put back in the water. This phase culminated in Cheng’s last major work, The Grotto (1987)—seven panels creating a 10-foot-tall arc spanning 25 feet, with textures and earthy tones that resembled caves he’d seen while traveling in Turkey. Originally installed at the Grey Art Gallery in 1987, it will be on view in the upcoming Addison retrospective.

Each of Cheng’s four phases may seem self-contained, but to him they were all connected. “My work all says the same thing; I only keep trying to say it in a new way, a way it was never said before,” said Cheng. “None of it is really new, however; they’ve said it again and again, and it’s as old as the hills. All I can claim is that mine is a way of seeing I’ve never encountered anywhere else.”

Read more of our Pride Month coverage here.

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.

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Justin Vivian Bond is a star of the stage and a powerful singer and interpreter of songs. They are also a multivalent force of personality in and around the art world, with performance-oriented and visual work featured in institutions including the New Museum in New York, the alternative art space Participant Inc, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 2024 the MacArthur Foundation awarded one of its prestigious “genius grants” to Bond (who has not been sheepish since about adopting the “genius” mantle) for “working in the cabaret tradition and weaving cultural critique and an ethic of care into performances that center queer joy.” In May Bard College awarded Bond an honorary degree in tribute to (in the Foundation’s words) a “decades-long journey across the landscape of gender [that] has both informed their artistic practices and played a significant role in ongoing conversations around gender identity and LGBTQ+ rights.”

During Pride Month in June, Bond will perform a series of stage shows at Joe’s Pub, a lower-Manhattan cabaret haven that has long served as a sort of home. They are also acting as the venue’s Vanguard Resident for the 2025–2026 season, curating a series of shows by other artists. For a set of performances in London in July, Bond will resurrect (with pianist Kenny Mellman) the beloved duo Kiki & Herb, for which Bond takes on the persona of a drink-swilling, pill-popping, elderly doyenne who has seen better days.

To take stock of their ongoing flurry of activity, ARTnews spoke with Bond (at home, in front of a giant Joan Crawford shower curtain hanging on a wall) about the current cultural climate, their evolving political activism, and their outlook on the survival of marginalized communities.

ARTnews: You’re performing the last part of a run of shows at Joe’s Pub soon. How will it end?

Justin Vivian Bond: “Well, Well, Well” is the third of a three-part series. “Oh Well” was last fall. “Well, Well” was in May. And “Well, Well, Well” starts June 18 [and runs through June 29]. I’ve been thinking for years that I should do a show of just great lesbian singer-songwriters. The fashion designer Erdem did a collection that he showed last fall based on The Well of Loneliness [a 1928 novel] by Radclyffe Hall, and I thought, “That’s it!” I reached out to Erdem and he provided me clothes from the collection to wear for the show, so it’s a little symbiosis inspired by the book, the designer, and great lesbian singers and songwriters. And then, because we have such an unfriendly trans climate, I decided to throw in some trans singer-songwriters too.

What about the Radclyffe Hall book intrigued you?

I’ll be perfectly honest with you: I did not read the book! [Cackles.] But I did research Radclyffe Hall and their relationship with gender and iconography. Radcliffe and their lover [Una Troubridge] definitely served very revolutionary nonbinary looks and butch femme dynamics, and they were very subversive. That’s what inspired me.

The V&A East Storehouse, part of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, just installed the wallpaper from a work of yours that was in the 2017 New Museum show “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon.” How do you feel now about that “Trigger” show? It’s been eight years—a very long eight years.

For me it’s a standout memory for several reasons. One is because it was my first exhibition in an actual museum. Also, I got to do three things at once. The show was on exhibition, I did a performance in the window, and I was also doing a show at the same time at Joe’s Pub. They all sort of played off each other. But the main thing is that my mom, who’s since passed, and my sister, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew all came to visit the museum with me. My mom was a painter, so for her to go into the museum and see my work hanging—work that I had done in high school up to the present—was amazing. We had so much fun. She of course was like, “Oh, I know where you got all your talent.” [Laughs.]

She later had her very first show of her watercolors, two months before she died. It was in the place where she was living, but it was very exciting for her to get a bunch of her paintings back from different people and put them on display. That was the last really big, major thing for her. I have her palettes and her watercolors and all the stuff at my house, and I’m going to reactivate it when I have time. I’ll make paintings with her colors.

You recently performed as part of “An Evening with Joy Episalla” at MoMA. What is your relationship with Episalla and fierce pussy, the queer art collective they helped found?

I met Zoe Leonard before I met any of the rest, when I lived in San Francisco years ago. Then, when I lived in [in New York] on Second Avenue from 2008 to 2011, I had a fierce pussy poster—which said, “I AM A / lezzie / butch / pervert / girlfriend / bulldagger / sister / dyke / AND PROUD!”—hanging in my loft. Somebody did a photo shoot and Joy saw that their work was hanging in my house. We started talking, and it wasn’t very long afterward that I had my first show at Participant Inc, and we hit it off. We had a conversation at PS1 about my work, and I kind of became an honorary member of fierce pussy. They took one of my childhood pictures—because I said that I thought of myself as a tomgirl—and it ended up at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art when they had a fierce pussy show there.

We were also arrested together in 2019 in Washington, D.C., outside the Supreme Court. I was nervous because I didn’t know whether I was going to jail or not, and I didn’t want to get separated from them. As I was getting arrested, I put on my lipstick and was like, “Well, if they see lipstick, maybe they’ll be sure and put me with the women.” We call ourselves the Lipstick Brigade, because we all put on our lipstick in solidarity as we were getting arrested.

You’re going to be resurrecting Kiki & Herb in London in July. What do you get out of shifting your persona into Kiki? What does it bring out of you, and has that changed over the decades you’ve been doing it?

It has definitely changed. When I first started doing it, it was in response to the world around me as a young trans person in San Francisco, when everybody was dying of AIDS. I was young and didn’t feel like I had any real authority—and I didn’t want to come across as earnest or strident, even though I wanted to be political—so I created this 60-some-year-old alcoholic lounge singer who had been everywhere and done everything. Then I could say all the things I wanted to say and that appealed to my community, and they could hear things that no other performers were really centering in their work.

That started in the early 1990s, and by the time we got to Off Broadway in 2003, I was kind of tired of it. But we kept getting offers, and then we were offered Carnegie Hall. After that I said, “OK, I’m quitting—I’m done.” I went over to get my master’s degree in performance design from Central Saint Martins College in London, and the Scissor Sisters asked us to come out on tour and open for them, so of course we did that. Then [in 2006] some people were like, “Why don’t you come and do Broadway?”

After that I couldn’t do it anymore because I wanted a different kind of a life. I felt like the rage that I had channeled when I first started as Kiki was genuine and real and truthful, but by the time I finished, I felt like I was manufacturing whatever it was that made her seem real to people and that appealed to them. It was also taking its toll on me, because it got in the way of me actually being happy and healthy and growing as an artist. So I had to stop.

But you didn’t stop.

In 2015 Joe’s Pub asked me if I would consider doing a series for my 25th anniversary in show business or whatever, and I was doing a whole season dedicated to shows I’d been doing over the years. They asked if I would do Kiki, and I told them I would do it if it made me enough money for a down payment on a house. So that’s why I did it then. And then I always joked that if I ever did it again, it would be “The Second Bathroom Tour.”

We haven’t done a non-Christmas Kiki & Herb show since, and Trump being reelected made me think it’s not going to be hard for me to manufacture rage. It’ll be organic, and it’ll be fun because when it’s real and centered and grounded, it’s kind of cathartic.

We’re obviously living in very troubling times for the trans and queer communities—and all communities in general. How would you describe your current mood regarding that?

It’s a lot worse for a lot of other people, you know. I’m very aware of how privileged I am, and I’m angry on behalf of not just my community but all at-risk communities. I’m a successful, white, trans woman who’s been around the block a few times. I’ve lived through enough to know that this isn’t maybe the worst thing that’s ever happened, because I remember when, literally, the government wanted us dead. It was not hyperbolic to say that the U.S. government wanted gay people to die. It’s so frustrating that we’re back here, and I know it’s terrifying for young people who have never lived through it. When it’s happening to you, what do you do? How do you rally? How do you pull yourself together? How do you fight? That’s where we all are, and we’re all kind of figuring it out as we go along. But one of the gifts of being older is that you can have a little bit more perspective and know that this too shall pass. But there’s always just so much collateral damage. People literally die, and for no good reason other than that these stupid, arrogant, rich, white people have no sense of humanity.

You cut a vacation short to return to New York for a protest march in April. How was that march for you? How much hope do you have that there is something brewing or bubbling up?

I wouldn’t say I have hope, but I have faith. I have faith that we will persevere. As queers, trans people, and other minorities who are in dangerous and treacherous positions, we’ve always managed to survive. We’ve always found work-arounds. Whether it’s a highly visible thing, like a march, or just finding ways to not follow the rules, live our lives, and protect each other, we are adaptable. No matter what happens, we will adapt—I have faith in that. But do I have hope that it’s going to change and these people are going to wake up and do the right thing soon? No, I don’t. I think they’re always going to be horrible and evil, and until something comes along, like a huge wave of all of us banding together and removing them like a cancer from their positions of power, it’s going to just be this way.

Was there anything about that recent march that felt different or unique to you?

I read this piece that was saying we’re all out there marching to show that we’re in solidarity with each other, but there are never any demands. There’s never anyone saying, ‘We’re not moving and we’re not going to leave until you tell us you’re going to change this or change that.’ Marching is good for the spirit, and it’s good to give newspapers a story to write about, saying that there is resistance. But power isn’t being harnessed in order to force these people to make decisions and act in the way that we need them to act. When you have people surrounding Social Security offices or government facilities to keep DOGE from going in, that is major. That’s effective. That matters.

Read more of our Pride Month coverage here.