→ Beauty & Splendor
Beauty & Spendor
October 10 – November 5, 2025
Curated by Joyous R. Pierce
Opening Reception: Friday, October 17, 6-9pm
NARS Main Gallery
Since 2016, the NARS South-West Brooklyn Exhibition Program has recognized the flourishing artist communities in South-West Brooklyn, offering local artists a platform to engage in dialogue and showcase the diversity of their experiences and artistic practices. In 2025, the open call expands to include the entirety of South Brooklyn, reflecting NARS’s commitment to celebrating the vibrant and growing network of artists across the region. This exhibition offers a platform for artists who live and/or work in South Brooklyn and who work primarily in textile or fiber-based practices. Whether through weaving, quilting, embroidery, soft sculpture, or other fiber-based media, we are seeking works that highlight the diverse voices and lived experiences of South Brooklyn’s creative community.
Artists should be based in or actively working within the following South Brooklyn neighborhoods: Sunset Park, Red Hook, Gowanus, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Greenwood Heights, Kensington, Borough Park, Flatbush, East Flatbush, Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Gravesend, Midwood, Flatlands, Canarsie, Mill Basin, Sheepshead Bay, Homecrest, Madison, Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Coney Island
This exhibition runs from October 10 - November 5, 2025 and will be up during the Sunset Park Open Studios weekend. The opening will be on Friday, October 17th from 6-9pm during our Sunset Park Open Studios weekend.
Beauty & Splendor is a group exhibition celebrating the work of textile artists based in South Brooklyn. Thematically centering sustainable innovation, abstraction, and neo-traditional approaches, Beauty & Splendor invites artists who are reshaping the role of textiles in contemporary art and cultural practice, artists who radically reimagine textile as a site of beauty, sustainable innovation, technical mastery, and cutting-edge creative narrative. From critiques of gendered labor to ecological futurism, from ritual stitchwork to speculative materiality, we welcome those who treat textile as language, thread as voice, and pattern as a technology of both memory and possibility.
Beauty & Splendor is a relational project: one where beauty, memory, and materiality converge to celebrate textile practice and posits⸻How do we actively reroute the inherited patterns, gendered, colonial, institutional, industrial within textile arts? How do we weave kinship across communities, histories, and emergent futures? Additionally, intentionally timed to take place during Indigenous Peoples’ Month, the exhibition extends a special invitation to artists from ALAANA communities, African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native American, as well as those who identify as queer, trans, nonbinary, and/or from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds.