Farewell Motherlode
Artist and fashion designer Gary Graham, Critic in RISD's Textile Department, joins Liz Collins in a reflection of the radical experimentations and multi-disciplinary approaches on view in Liz Collins: Motherlode. On the last day of the exhibit, hear from these close friends and occasional collaborators about inspiration and reinvention.
Free. Registration for this in-person program is required. Space limited.
This program is full to capacity and not longer taking registrations.
American artist and fashion designer Gary Graham creates limited-run collections of women’s clothing at his studio in upstate New York. Garments are made on-site using antique textiles, custom jacquards, and natural fiber woven from domestic mills. GaryGraham422 is his site-specific project that allows space, history and community to determine textile production and to inform the making of intimate collections. Narratives for each collection combine real stories with fictional characters to blur distinctions between past, present and future in mysterious ways.
Graham studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, was honored as a 2009 CFDA/Vogue award finalist and has been a recipient of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Legend of Fashion award. He has created textile collections for commercial interiors fabric manufacturer Pollack New York and designed a collection of one-of-a-kind women’s outerwear in a collaboration with Asian retailer Joyce Hong Kong.
In 2024 Graham designed costumes for artist Kara Walker’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibit Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), creating custom garments for each of the show’s eight larger-than-life robotic figures. His work has been exhibited at Hancock Shaker Village, the Peabody Essex Museum and the American Folk Art Museum and is held as part of the permanent collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Phoenix Museum of Art and the RISD Museum.
Liz Collins graduated with a BFA (1991) and MFA (1999) from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She would later serve as a professor of textiles at RISD from 2003 to 2013. In 1999, Collins launched her own knitwear company, which over the course of five years came to be recognized for its innovative designs. Starting in 2003, she increasingly shifted her focus toward visual arts. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Touchstones Rochdale, England (2022) and Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York (2015–17), and been featured in a range of international exhibitions and within a broad range of galleries and institutions, including at the 60th Venice Biennale exhibition (2024) and in the Woven Histories exhibition presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2024), and Museum of Modern Art (2025). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the USA Fellowship, MacColl Johnson Fellowship, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her work is held in a range of public and private collections, including the RISD Museum, Museum of Arts & Design (New York, NY), Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Brazil), Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York, NY), and FIT Museum (New York, NY), among others.