Textile Ecologies: Rethinking Fabric as Ecosystem weaving Together Art, Sustainability, and Activism
By Valentina Gioia Levy
While we eagerly await the opening of New York’s vibrant spring art week, Philadelphia offers a quieter yet thought-provoking detour just a train ride away. Two standout exhibitions invite us to rethink fabric — not as a mere material for adornment or utility, but as an ecosystem in itself, not only as an artistic medium, but as a vital interface between aesthetics and ecology.
At the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, The Ecology of Fashion Workshop Series invites visitors into an interdisciplinary space where design, biology, and activism intersect. Visitors are welcomed with a disarming question: “How did we get here?”—a phrase that sets the tone for a reflective journey through the entangled histories of fashion, industry, and environmental harm. This cross-disciplinary program tackles the ecological footprint of fashion, proposing innovative, regenerative approaches to creation and consumption. Through public workshops, conversations with leading sustainability experts, and student-driven initiatives, the event reframes fashion as a living system—one that must be recalibrated for resilience and renewal, rather than trend and turnover.
A particularly striking presence within the program is MycoWorks, a biotech company with artistic roots. Co-founded by writer-curator Sophia Wang and Phil Ross, an artist who began cultivating mycelium not in a lab but in the studio, the project exemplifies how visual practice can spark material innovation. Ross began by sculpting with living fungal matter in the early 2000s, cultivating organic structures in petri dishes and growing them into architectural forms. His concept of mycotecture — the art of building with mycelium — paved the way for Reishi™, a durable, leather-like biomaterial now used in high-end fashion and design. From studio-based experimentation to recent debuts at Salone del Mobile, ICFF, and Design Miami, MycoWorks exemplifies how artistic experimentation can lead to tangible ecological alternatives and ignite ecological innovation at scale.
Phil Ross. Mycotecture, 2008. The brick is made from Ganoderma lucidum, a medicinal fungus used in his pioneering practice of mycotecture — building with living organisms.
Also featured is the Trash Academy, a grassroots educational project based in Philadelphia that frames waste not just as a material problem but as a socio-political issue. Their work foregrounds the disproportionate impact of litter and illegal dumping on Black, Brown, and low-income communities, advocating for justice through creative education and civic engagement. Here, fabric becomes entangled with questions of access, equity, and visibility.
Trash Academy. The Fast Fashion Crisis, poster, on view at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, The Ecology of Fashion Workshop Series.
The exhibition culminates in the 7th Annual Garbage Gala, organized by Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, set for May 16, 2025. Transforming the Academy into a vibrant runway, the Gala features wearable artworks crafted entirely from repurposed materials. Against the backdrop of dinosaur fossils and immersive natural dioramas, student designers present fashion as both provocation and proposition—challenging us to imagine beauty through waste, and value through what is too often discarded.
Together, these initiatives propose a shared ethos: fabric as ecology, making as ethics, and creativity as catalyst proposing a space for rethinking how we live, wear, and create on a damaged planet.
Meanwhile, just a short walk away, The Fabric Workshop and Museum presents a complementary reflection with Soft/Cover, an exhibition that spans generations of textile-based practices. Blending archival works produced through the museum’s storied residency program with recent commissions, the show positions fabric as a medium of memory, protest, intimacy, and possibility.
Soft/Cover (installation view). The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.
Among the most captivating works is The Flea Circus by Maria Fernanda Cardoso, an artist based in Sydney who seamlessly integrates nature, science, and performance. This installation and live performance features trained fleas executing miniature stunts inside a tent meticulously crafted from canvas, taffeta, and silk. These textiles are not incidental: they conjure an atmosphere reminiscent of vintage traveling circuses — a bygone world of spectacle and wonder. The ornamental fabric structure not only transports viewers into a nostalgic imaginary but also functions as a soft architecture that frames the performance space, amplifying its theatricality while cloaking it in historical allure.
Originally presented at institutions such as the Pompidou Center in Paris and the New Museum in New York (1998), the work returns to Philadelphia, where Cardoso expanded its sculptural dimension. Portraits of flea “performers” and props like thimbles, tightropes, and miniature ladders elevate the circus into a layered tableau — part surreal attraction, part critical allegory. While whimsical on the surface, The Flea Circus is a pointed meditation on labor, exploitation, and the urge to dominate the natural world. In this context, textile becomes more than a decorative element; it is the stage and skin of a world engineered for control, echoing humanity’s long history of manipulating both living beings and their environments for entertainment and power.
Maria Fernanda Cardoso, performing Cardoso Flea Circus at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, December 6, 1996. Photo credit: Will Brown. The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia
The exhibition also revisits rare works from the 1970s and '80s, including Louise Nevelson’s Opera costumes (1985), Vito Acconci’s Leaf Shirt (1985), Robert Kushner’s Dancers (1977), and wearable pieces by Richard Tuttle and Roy Lichtenstein. These garments exemplify the long-standing role of textiles as vehicles for critique, narrative, and transformation.Contemporary commissions extend this legacy with deeply embodied approaches.
Louise Nevelson, Opera Costume, 1985. Installation view in Soft/Cover, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, 2024–2025. Created in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.
Originally commissioned for the Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ production of Orfeo ed Euridice, this sculptural garment was developed as part of Nevelson’s residency at The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Translating Nevelson’s iconic visual language into textile and form, the piece is one of her few forays into costume design.
John Killacky uses textile as a medium for expressing the complexities of living with disability, while Aimee Koran explores how motherhood reshapes the female form and psyche—how the maternal experience is both invisible and monumental, woven into the fabric of daily life. In Soft/Cover, the textile becomes a witness, a shield, and a provocation — woven with memory, politics, and possibility. Fabric is transformed into a second skin, a reliquary that holds stories of loss, resistance, and repair — suggesting that softness is not a weakness, but a strategy for survival.
By interweaving art, sustainability, and activism to craft new narratives for a world in urgent need of repair, The Ecology of Fashion and Soft/Cover highlight the transformative and generative potential of fabric. Far from being a passive material, textile emerges here as a cultural force — capable of holding memory, critiquing systems, and proposing alternatives. These two exhibitions remind us that every thread carries meaning, and every stitch can be a political gesture.
To remake the world, they seem to suggest, we must first unweave and rethread the stories we have inherited — disentangling them from extractive logics and reassembling them into forms of care, regeneration, and coexistence. What we are witnessing is the blueprint of a new textile culture: one that binds creativity and responsibility, tradition and innovation, softness and strength.
