NYTM 2026 CALENDAR
work by Elodie Blanchard
Fiber Thinks!
In person / Exhibition / Multiple Techniques
Fiber Thinks! is a fiber-focused group exhibition presented at Elsa Kayal Gallery in New York City. It brings together Frid Branham, Ragna Froda, Kathie Halfin, Lin Qiqing, Ollie Hongji Li, and Clayton Okaly. These artists use textile as a rigorous way of knowing an art form that builds culture and meaning through structure, repetition, tension, and touch.
Frïd Branham reads fiber through the built environment and daily ritual, making the everyday newly legible. Ragna Fróða explores how pattern, symbol, and material knowledge circulate across fiber cultures and through time. Kathie Halfin spins industrial paper into yarn to weave plant-like sculptures that follow cyclical time, treating textile as ecological code. Ollie Hongji Li works with knotting and natural dye to create biomorphic forms where technique becomes cosmology. Clayton Okaly draws on the quilt’s communal history, using repetition to hold continuity, belonging, and memory. Lin Qiqing turns weaving into a writing system where meaning accumulates through fragments, symbols, and touch.
Textile is one of art history's earliest languages. Cloth has long carried images, symbols, and social codes, marking belonging, recording ritual, and passing knowledge hand to hand. Yet fiber was often relegated to the categories of "decorative," "craft," and "female labor" through gendered and classed hierarchies. The artists in the exhibition challenge these distinctions through dialogue and cross-pollination among diverse identities, as well as through practices rooted in slow labor and sustained attention.
Fiber Thinks! pushes beyond the inclusion of fiber within contemporary art discourse. The exhibition asserts fiber not as a trend, but as a way of thinking. In an age shaped by shortened attention spans and by skimming in search of instant clarity and gratification, textile insists on closer looking and slower reading. Its truth is not immediate but cumulative. It lives in joins and edges, tension and gesture, repetition and repair. Together, these artists illuminate fiber as a contemporary language that remains deeply connected to historical traditions while generating new forms of knowledge, meaning, and relation in the present.
No registration required!
Clockwise: Frid Branham, Ragna Froda, Kathie Halfin, Lin Qiqing, Ollie Hongji Li, and Clayton Okaly
Elza Kayal Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in Manhattan, New York City founded in 2023. The gallery is a small, 300 square-foot space situated on Broadway in one of Tribeca’s historic buildings. The building is seasoned with other contemporary art galleries and in the radius of major contemporary art players. The founder, Eniko Imre, actively seeks new forms of creative expressions and has been maintaining professional relationships with many of the collaborating artists for over 10 years in different capacities.
Elza Kayal Gallery is named after two women, mothers, in the far reaches of Hungary and India. Women of a prior generation, who in their quiet and persistent way blazed a subtle but sure path for themselves and their family. The gallery aspires to showcase art that demonstrates precision and skill while also eliciting a strong visceral response. We want to provide a platform to artists of diverse backgrounds that make NYC their home and also bring works from across the world to our metropolis. In addition, Elza Kayal Gallery strives to nurture and support women in the entire ecosystem of visual arts, including artists, gallerists, curators, advisors and collectors.
The Way Words Turn
In person / Exhibition / Wrapping
"In conjunction with New York Textile Month and New York’s September art and design calendar, Scavolini SoHo Gallery, in collaboration with The CAMP Gallery, presents The Way Words Turn, an exhibition-event by Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra Perego.
Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra Perego are an Italian artist duo based in New York. Their practice brings together textile art, language, sculpture, installation, and research into verbal roots, exploring how words, materials, and spatial relationships shape the way we understand and inhabit the world.
Conceived specifically for the Scavolini SoHo showroom, the project brings together a selection of works from the artists’ ongoing Roots series, dedicated to verbal roots and to the relationship between language, matter, and the construction of reality. Rather than approaching the showroom as a neutral exhibition space, the artists respond to its architecture, surfaces, materials, and points of visibility through site-responsive interventions developed in dialogue with the space.
As often happens in Patera & Sbra Perego’s practice, the project began with a text: Elémire Zolla’s essay “Language and Cosmogony,” which reflects on the story of Creation in relation to the development of languages across the world, both ancient and modern. For the artists, Roots is a cosmogony: an inquiry into beginnings, into how something comes into being, how it starts, and according to what order."
Opening Reception
Thursday, September 17, 2026
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Exhibition
Through Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Monday to Saturday, 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM
No registration required!
We are Federica Patera and Andrea Sbra Perego, an Italian artist duo based in Brooklyn, New York. Federica comes from literature and publishing; Andrea from street art and painting. In 2017, our different worlds merged into a shared practice. Our collaboration intertwines textile- and text-based processes, often incorporating recycled materials. We consider language and writing as porous, living systems, generating layered meanings and narratives that explore how multiple points of view can reveal unexpected forms of universality. From wall-mounted pieces to sculptural objects, immersive installations, and sound- integrated environments, we use scale, calligraphy, and materiality to shape the relationship between viewer, work, and space. By isolating a detail or multiplying it infinitely, we question hierarchical relationships between humans, the environment, and the role of perception.
Soil to Surface
In person / Exhibition / Dyeing
Soil to Surface highlights the creations of small-scale women farmers, women’s cooperatives, and internationally recognized designers from Türkiye, alongside the work of School of Art and Design students, faculty, and alumni at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). Proposing an alternative framework where farmers, craftspeople, and designers operate on equal ground, the exhibition sees the FIT community actively reimagining these materials for contemporary design through technical experimentation and innovative thinking.
Agricultural waste and local textile materials are repositioned in a contemporary context, allowing multiple narratives to emerge across time and geographies, while creating new paths for creative businesses to be local, sustainable, and value-driven.
Central to this process are women farmers and women’s cooperatives in Türkiye, whose knowledge, labor, creativity, and lived experience have transformed agricultural byproducts into new material possibilities. Their relationship with the land has been cultivated across generations. Working with pomegranate peels, walnut husks, nettle leaves, onion skins, bay leaves, and barley straw, they transform these materials into plant-based dyes, paperlike surfaces, and handcrafted embellishments. By integrating agricultural production with artistic practice, Soil to Surface challenges conventional hierarchies and suggests a more inclusive and socially just model for creative collaboration.
The exhibition opens on Thursday, September 24 and is on view at the FIT Art and Design Gallery through November 1, 2026.
The Art and Design Gallery at FIT showcases the work of students, faculty, and distinguished alumni, as well as invited guest artists and collaborators. It is a window into the College and a window out. The exhibition spaces serve as a place to foster learning and innovation.
Breathing Patterns
In person/ Exhibition / Embroidery
Breathing Patterns is an exhibition of hand-embroidered wall works and accompanying scent compositions that explore geometry as a living, embodied system. Created through slow, repetitive hand needlework, the embroidered forms draw on geometric patterning as a language of structure, care, and endurance. Each stitch accumulates time, marking the quiet labor of the hand while transforming rigid systems into intimate, tactile surfaces.
The geometric patterns suggest order and repetition, yet they are never mechanical. Slight irregularities—inevitable in handwork—introduce breath, vulnerability, and presence. These deviations become central to the work, emphasizing the body behind the pattern and the feminist lineage of needlework as both domestic labor and creative resistance.
Scent functions as an invisible counterpart to the stitch. Developed in dialogue with the embroidered forms, the fragrances move through space as thread moves through cloth—activating memory, emotion, and physical awareness. Rather than illustrating the visual works, scent extends them, allowing the patterns to be felt as atmosphere and duration.
Together, embroidery and fragrance invite a slower mode of attention. Breathing Patterns proposes making and sensing as acts of care, where repetition becomes meditative and geometry becomes intimate—measured not only by the eye, but by the body in time and breath.
No registration required!
Anna Novakov is an interdisciplinary artist working across textile, scent, and installation. Rooted in traditions of hand needlework, her practice draws on Serbian cultural heritage and the labor of domestic craft to explore memory, lineage, and embodied knowledge. She integrates olfactory elements to extend the sensory experience beyond the visual, creating immersive environments that engage touch, smell, and sound. Her work often examines themes of diaspora, transformation, and intimacy, positioning the handmade as both material and method. Through repetition and subtle variation, Novakov constructs poetic spaces where personal and collective histories quietly converge.
Negotiated Skin
In person / Exhibition / Biomaterial
Negotiated Skin is an immersive, cross-media solo exhibition by New York-based artist Freda Xia, presented at Time To Be Happy Gallery. Bringing together wearable sculpture, suspended membrane works, mineral-pigment paintings, material studies, photographic documentation, and sound, the exhibition creates an evolving environment in which soft sculptural forms and paintings enter into close dialogue across body, material, time, and space.
For this exhibition, Xia develops translucent, membrane-like forms through layering, collapse, and visible acts of repair. Her fiber works evoke the presence of the body without depicting it directly, moving between garment, sculpture, and installation. Alongside them, mineral-pigment paintings of heads passing through New York City subway spaces offer a more figurative expression of Negotiated Skin, tracing bodies in motion, proximity, and separation.
The exhibition itself becomes an exploration of boundaries and negotiation: between intimacy and exposure, abstraction and figuration, material fragility and shared presence. Through layers of negotiation, skin becomes a surface of connection and immersion. During the opening, an organic sound environment, celebratory drinks, and light refreshments invite visitors to linger, gather, and engage with the work through embodied encounter, conversation, and perception.
No registration required!
Freda Xia is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based in New York. With a background in painting, fashion design, and textiles, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Textiles at Parsons School of Design. Her practice moves between biomaterials, wearable sculpture, soft textile structures, and installation. Working with hand-reeled raw silk, wool, fruit waste, and protein-based biomaterials, she creates membrane-like forms that explore bodily memory, rupture, repair, and transformation. Her work investigates textiles as living systems of protection, adaptation, and material alternatives to petroleum-based surfaces.