Pulitzer Arts Foundation presents Olga de Amaral: Weaving the Infinite

ST. LOUIS, MO.- The Pulitzer Arts Foundation announces the recent opening of a major retrospective dedicated to Colombian fiber artist Olga de Amaral (b. 1932), co-organized with Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Amaral is known internationally for her virtuosic textile works, which blur the boundaries between weaving, sculpture, and painting.

On view at the Pulitzer through January 31, 2027, and at Cooper Hewitt beginning in April 2027, Olga de Amaral: Weaving the Infinite is co-curated by Stephanie Weissberg, Senior Curator at the Pulitzer, and Christina L. De León, Associate Curator of Latino Design at Cooper Hewitt.

Featuring textiles and works on paper created over more than 60 years, Olga de Amaral: Weaving the Infinite is the most comprehensive examination to date of the artist’s foundational contributions to the fiber arts movement and design. The exhibition underscores the ways in which Amaral’s experiments with dimensionality and scale in weaving reflect her background in architectural drafting. It offers new insights into the relationship between her commercial and fine art practices through the first-ever presentations of materials from her Telas Amaral design studio. This exhibition also explores the scope and significance of her sustained engagement with global textile and craft traditions by presenting an array of artworks and objects from the artist’s own personal collection.

Olga de Amaral, née Olga Ceballos Vélez, was born in Bogotá, Colombia (b. June 14, 1932), where she continues to live. She studied architectural drafting at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá and textiles at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, in 1954. By the 1960s she was teaching at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and was included in a group exhibition at MoMA, New York, titled Wall Hangings, before staging a solo show, Woven Walls, at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design in 1970. Her work was featured in several editions of the Lausanne International Tapestry Biennial beginning in 1967. After living in Barcelona and Paris in the early 1970s she returned to Colombia, receiving her first major survey show at the city’s Museo de Arte Moderno in 1972 and representing her country at the Venice Biennale in 1986.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue available in spring 2027, published by Princeton University Press.