In Miami’s pulsing Design District, where concrete and creativity collide, the Institute of Contemporary Art has conjured a sanctuary—a place where Olga de Amaral’s fiber sculptures float like whispered secrets between earth and sky. Over fifty of her works, suspended like celestial bodies in a carefully orchestrated cosmos, greet visitors with a silent, shimmering gravity. This exhibition, a migratory echo of its Parisian debut, runs from May to October, stitching together six decades of her luminous career.
The gallery’s third floor is a masterclass in tension and transcendence. De Amaral’s pieces—some no heavier than a sigh, others dense with the weight of history—defy their materials. Linen, horsehair, and gesso are alchemized into gold; threads become constellations. "We wanted the works to breathe," says the exhibition’s curator, Marie Perennès. "To dissolve walls, to converse with the trees beyond the windows." The Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh arranged the space not by chronology but by chromatic resonance—a symphony of neutrals crescendoing into metallic brilliance.
Now 92, de Amaral has spent a lifetime threading the needle between craft and high art. Her early rugs, woven with Colombian artisans in the 1950s, were mere preludes to the tapestries that would later drape the halls of MoMA. "She didn’t just make art from fiber," notes co-curator Stephanie Seidel. "She rewired its DNA—turning textiles into totems, weaving into philosophy."
Walk through the "Brumas" series (2013-2018), and the air itself seems to fray. Thousands of painted cotton strands hang in precise formations, shifting from fog to geometry with each step. Further on, the "Cenit" works loom like gilded monoliths, their surfaces scarred and sacred. "Every knot is a prayer," de Amaral has said. "The whole contains the fragment; the fragment contains the world."
This is art that refuses to be framed—literally. It drapes, it dangles, it demands space. To experience it is to wander through the loom of time itself, where every thread hums with the weight of history and the lightness of a breath.
