Women Textile Artists in Miami are having their moment
- May 20
- 1 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Textiles have been used as a means of communication for centuries; the word “text” comes from the Latin textus, meaning “woven.” Covering us from birth to death, textiles have conveyed symbolic, political, and spiritual messages across cultures from the Incan empire to Gee Bends quilters. As evident in the multi dimensional work of Miami’s Fiber-based women artists, textiles intrinsically convey both ideas of care and nurturing, as well as resistance and critical inquiry.
The growing institutional and art market embrace of textiles today is not without historical precedent, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, fiber art emerged as a radical movement across Europe and the United States, developing in parallel with the struggles for women’s liberation, civil rights, and peace. Artists activists like Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago pushed the medium forward, created spaces for other women to show their work and broke new ground. They paved the way for the recent popularity of textile art, which is having a long-overdue moment. Recently, 93-year-old Colombian fiber artist Olga de Amaral broke auction records. And her critically acclaimed exhibitions at ICA Miami and the Cartier Foundation in Paris were 2025 blockbusters.
![Rodriguez’s “Currents of Resistance,” like her interdisciplinary practice as a whole, reveals the hidden layers of history, where colonial resistance still echoes in the land itself. Her work reminds us of the need to engage with history as an agent of change. “We are living in a very dangerous time,” Rodriguez said. “Art must create space—for critical thinking, conversations, for beauty, for joy, and for action. It is essential to look back at factual histories, paying close attention to those eras where our communities have been targeted to understand how we protect each other [in order to] persist and thrive.”](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6c8e7f_c5545cbdcf3b49169fd1920e56d8d123~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_804,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/6c8e7f_c5545cbdcf3b49169fd1920e56d8d123~mv2.jpg)
