A Career In Color: Explore Olga De Amaral’s Retrospective In Miami

For textile artist Olga de Amaral, “When I think about color, when I touch color, when I live color, I fly.” Fly she does. Now 93, she is the subject of a magnificent retrospective that kicked off last year in Paris at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, and has crossed the pond, landing at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami this spring. Born and living in Colombia, she goes on to say, “Color is a language common to all cultures.” And she’s experienced several of them, first earning an architectural design degree from the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá, then studying fiber art at Cranbrook in Michigan, before returning home to found and teach in the textile department at the University of Los Andes, along the way meeting fellow textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen, whose LongHouse Reserve has one of her pieces in its permanent collection.

All this history and more is on view at the ICA, via over 50 small- and large-scale works, ranging from 1968’s Líneas en lino to 2020’s Cenit 2, that the exhibition’s designer, architect Lina Ghotmeh, has imagined as a vertical forest, taking inspiration from both the museum’s third floor, which overlooks a canopy of trees, and de Amaral’s incorporation of nature in her textiles. “In France it was symbolic,” curator Marie Perennès notes. “Olga’s retrospective was the last exhibition presented in the Jean Nouvel building, closing a chapter with an artist whose work speaks profoundly to memory and time.” Adds cocurator Stephanie Seidel, “Amaral’s fiber art, inspired by Colombia’s varied landscapes, resonates with South Florida’s tropical ecosystem. Her ties to Miami enrich the context—bringing familiar and rarely seen works to audiences at the crossroads of the Americas.”