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Over the years of developing the Loss and Absence project, we’ve been moved by the stories these words evoke—from childhood memories to moments in professional life. Most interesting are the varied avenues of conversation as we find solace in one another's discoveries, and triumphs through those moments.
How do you preserve traditions, objects, or ideas that are important to you?
How have objects helped you remember loved ones or sustain traditions?
Please add your stories. Include links to music, lectures, podcasts or videos.
Tag us on Instagram @lossandabsence with images and posts from your visit to the exhibition. Save and add to our playlists on Spotify and YouTube at the links below.
Angela Hennessy
b. 1971, USA
Mourning Weave
2014
Woven velcro, velvet fuzz, and frame
Courtesy of Part 2 Gallery, Oakland, CA
As living objects, textiles can reveal a great deal about how humans cope with loss and absence, across time and place. Drawing primarily on textile objects from the Textiles collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition explores physical, psychic, spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic responses to various kinds of losses and absences. The exhibition will display objects of corporeal and psychological loss, mourning, and trauma; together with objects of resistance, survival, healing and recuperation. These will include burial shrouds, mourning and mending samplers, funerary hangings and garments, coffin covers, and fragments. The exhibition will be organized spatially and conceptually around themes of death, reflection, passage, trauma, memory/memorial, survival, resistance, conservation/preservation, and healing.
The collaborative exhibition project “On Loss & Absence: Textiles of Mourning & Survival” between artists / educators connected to the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute — Anne Wilson, Nneka Kai, Isaac Facio and L Vinebaum will be in view in the Textile Galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago the 6th of September 2025 through the 15th of March 2026.
Carina Yepez
b. 1985, USA
Mujeres (Women)
2023
Made in collaboration with Maricela Herrera (auntie) and Lula Yepez (mom) and in gratitude to Amalia Martínez from La Haciendita, Guanajuato, Mexico
Cotton and synthetic fabrics; printed; appliquéd; quilted and machine embroidered.
Collection of the artist
"I try to grasp onto anything that I've lost over the years. I've tried to grasp onto people who I've lost, whether that be through distance or death, I want to hold onto them. When they inevitably slip through my fingers, I revert to a time I've lost a little less, my childhood, though through constant exploration of that, I've lost many things & people then, too. Whether it be a loss of a house, a relative or innocence as a whole..."
-Anonymous, 2024
"I wear my mother’s clothes a lot. After she died her clothes were packed up, but I took them out because I knew they wouldn’t be missed. I took them because in a very tangible sense there is a lot of her left in them. The memories that were once shared between me and my mom are now shared between me and garments that I took out of bins, from a closet they were meant to be forgotten in..."
-Camilla, 2023
Tag us on Instagram with images and posts from your visit to the exhibition.
Save and add to our playlists on Spotify and YouTube below.
@IG_Loss & Absence
@IG_MicroMacroSAIC
@FMS_SAIC.EDU
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