Marcia Kure Announced as Keynote Speaker at the 12th International Shibori Symposium, Basel. September 25–27, 2026
Photo Copyright: Kenta Watanabe via International Shibori Symposium & World Shibori Network Foundation
Marcia Kure Announced as Keynote Speaker at the 12th International Shibori Symposium, Basel
September 25–27, 2026
Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland
Marcia Kure will participate as a Keynote Speaker at the 12th International Shibori Symposium (12ISS) Textile & Architecture: The Art of Dimensional Transformation, taking place September 25–27, 2026, at the Museum der Kulturen Basel, Switzerland.
Kure joins an international group of keynote speakers spanning art, architecture, material research, science, curatorial practice, and textile scholarship. The 12ISS keynote program brings together Yoshio Murata, Christiane Sauer, Hideo Mabuchi, Marcia Kure, Shigeki Fukumoto, Beatrice Voirol, Hiroyuki Murase, and Josef Helfenstein.
The symposium takes as one of its points of departure The Dyer’s Art (1976), which advanced the then radical proposition that dyed and patterned textiles should be understood not simply as craft objects but as repositories of cultural, ecological, and technical knowledge. Fifty years later, 12ISS returns to the Museum der Kulturen Basel and asks:
What does textile knowledge demand of us now?
At the center of the symposium is the relationship between textile and architecture through the idea of dimensional transformation. Shibori is approached not simply as a technique but as a structural logic. Fold, bind, compress, resist, release. These actions give material form through pressure, tension, memory, and transformation.
This inquiry resonates closely with Kure’s practice, in which drawing functions as inscription, structure, and a carrier of information. Working across drawing, textile, sculpture, and installation, Kure considers the line as mark, route, scar, glyph, and record of movement. Her materials and surfaces are stained, bound, stretched, abraded, suspended, and accumulated, allowing the processes of contact, force, time, and transformation to become part of the work itself.
Cloth becomes structure. Surface acquires volume. Materials retain the memory of the forces that shaped them.
Bringing together artists, architects, designers, scientists, researchers, curators, makers, and scholars, 12ISS examines how textile knowledge moves across disciplines, materials, scales, technologies, and generations, from historic resist-dye traditions to contemporary material research and digital fabrication.
12th International Shibori Symposium
Textile & Architecture: The Art of Dimensional Transformation
September 25–27, 2026
Museum der Kulturen Basel
Basel, Switzerland
Organized by the World Shibori Network Foundation
In partnership with the Rock Foundation, Inc.
Marcia Kure has been invited to the Mildred Thompson Legacy Project Artist Residency, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Installation view: "Mildred Thompson: Frequencies" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, May 10 – Oct 12, 2025. Photo: Oriol Tarridas
Marcia Kure has been invited to the Mildred Thompson Legacy Project Artist Residency, where she will work from September 13 to October 6, 2026, in Mildred Thompson's former home and studio in Atlanta.
There she will begin Relation as Method: Mildred Thompson, Abstraction, and the Intellectual Life of the Artist, a studio and archival inquiry that takes Thompson's practice as an intellectual pressure point through which to reconsider her own. The point of encounter is a shared question: how an artist builds a language capacious enough to hold many kinds of experience and knowledge without letting any single history, identity, material, or medium determine what the work must become.
Thompson (1936–2003) was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, photographer, writer, critic, editor, and musician. She spent much of her career in Germany and France before settling in Atlanta in 1986 and served as an associate editor of ART PAPERS from 1989 to 1997. What draws Kure to her is the freedom with which she moved between disciplines, materials, geographies, and systems of knowledge.
Thanks to Melissa Messina, curator and executor of the Mildred Thompson Estate and to the Mildred Thompson Legacy Project for the time and the space to enter this dialogue with Thompson's life, work, archive, and intellectual legacy.
Marcia Kure is among the artists in Between Here & Infinity: Celebrating 30 Years of the Spelman College Art Collection, opening at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art on September 9, 2026.
Marking three decades of the Museum's commitment to the art of Black women, the exhibition presents nearly seventy works from the permanent collection, grounded in dreaming and the Black feminist imagination and organized into five areas named for the layers of Earth's atmosphere: the Root, the Threshold, the Interior, the Expanse, and the Horizon. Visitors are invited to move through the exhibition in any order.
Between Here & Infinity is the first exhibition to span both of the Museum's galleries. It opens in the Bank of America Gallery at the Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation & the Arts on September 9, 2026, and expands into the gallery in the Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby, Ed.D. Academic Center on October 1, 2026.
Kure is joined in the exhibition by Emma Amos, Firelei Báez, Elizabeth Catlett, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Maren Hassinger, Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, Mildred Thompson, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Billie Zangewa, and others.
The exhibition is curated by Dr. Chaunesti Webb-Johnson, Curator of Collections at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.
Dates: September 9 to December 5, 2026
Venue: Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, 440 Westview Drive, Atlanta, GA 30310
Between Here & Infinity: Celebrating 30 Years of the Spelman College Art Collection
Spelman College Museum of Fine Art | September 9 – December 5, 2026
Marcia Kure at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
9 May to 22 November 2026
Marcia Kure is currently presenting new work at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
The 61st edition of the International Art Exhibition is curated by Koyo Kouoh under the title In Minor Keys. The exhibition is on view from 9 May to 22 November 2026 at the Giardini, the Arsenale, and venues throughout Venice.
For La Biennale di Venezia, Marcia Kure presents Network V, a new body of work developed between her studios in Nigeria and the United States. The project brings together large-scale drawings and sculptural works within a single, interdependent system. Drawing functions as the structural core of the project: where decisions are made, routes traced, and material histories registered. Across Network V, marks accumulate.
Lines operate as routes and pressures; surfaces carry density and duration. Materials are selected for their histories of circulation and transformation, registering contact and movement across time. Drawing remains the primary site of inquiry, while sculpture carries the marks of exchange and movement into space. Through Network V, Kure engages how bodies and materials are shaped by long-standing systems of labor, trade, and power. The work holds these forces in tension, registering their effects materially and spatially.
Marcia Kure is an artist and researcher working between Nigeria and the United States. Her practice is grounded in drawing and extends into sculpture and material-based processes. Through line, inscription, and trace, her work examines how power, trade, and movement shape bodies, materials, and environments over time. Kure's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Wanås Konst Sculpture Park, Sweden; Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta; the Sharjah Biennial; the International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville; Dak'Art, Dakar Biennale; and La Triennale, Paris. Her work is held in public collections including the British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Menil Drawing Institute; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution; the Newark Museum of Art; the Princeton University Art Museum; and the Studio Museum in Harlem.