Naomi Livia, Essene Black Madonna, detail
Hand-made work is having its moment. Fiber, once considered "only" craft, is now a field where the sense of discovery is still wide open, and the institutions are paying attention.
At LACMA, Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudo & NUNO is the largest retrospective yet of the Japanese textile designer. Closer to home, the Palo Alto Art Center's Live the moment light puts Terri Friedman's color-saturated weavings in conversation with Corita Kent.
The one to mark on your calendar opens February 13 at SFMOMA. Go Your Own Way: Northern California Craft, 1945-80 is the first major museum exhibition devoted to the region's postwar craft: 100 makers and more than 200 objects in textiles, glass, ceramics, metal, and basketry.
The deeper reason is cultural. We live inside a stream of images that arrive in seconds and leave just as fast. Every work in Longhand asks for the opposite pace. Two of the four artists make photographs in the darkroom, by hand, on silver gelatin paper. Two work in fiber and pigment at the scale of the body. All four make objects you need to see in person.
Naomi Livia: the photo editor who picked up the loom
For decades, Naomi Livia kept her two practices apart: the loom she learned as a child, and the camera she found in a teenage darkroom class. She moved to New York in 1989, earned her MFA at Hunter College, and spent years inside the photography world: a founding image editor at Cabinet magazine, a picture editor and researcher at The New Yorker, a teacher at Fordham and the International Center of Photography. Early on, she helped research Naomi Rosenblum's A History of Women Photographers.
Naomi Livia, Primal radiant force, 2024-26
gelatin silver print, handmade weave mounted on wooden loom
6'6' x 5'9" x 2"
In her role as editor, Livia looked at more images than most of us ever will. That vantage point gave her a sharp read on what happened when everyone became a photographer: images flattened into a feed. Her answer is to make the photograph a physical object again. She prints large-format silver gelatin images in the darkroom and pairs them with hand weavings in cotton, wool, linen, mohair, alpaca, even pineapple fiber. The two sit side by side, layered, each sharpening the other. As she puts it, photographers "don't take pictures. They make them."
This summer, Frampton Co presented her solo show Desert Weave at Exhibition The Barn in Bridgehampton, with a preview hosted for the Parrish Art Museum's collector circle. She lives and works between New York and Paris. Longhand is a chance to see her in Northern California.
In Essene Black Madonna, a 48 x 36 inch round, photograph and weaving share one circle, the lens on one side and the loom on the other. It is the whole argument of the show in a single object.
A second work, Healing Fields in Space-Time Curvatures (Lattice VIII), comes from her ongoing Lattice series, where a silver gelatin print and a hand weave hang together as one composition. The title names what Livia hopes to find in the space between the two: hope, healing, and connection.
Naomi Livia, Healing Fields in Space-Time Curvatures (Lattice VIII), 2026, Silver gelatin print, handmade weave, 20x24"
Linda Simmel: the woods her father walked
In the forests outside Potsdam, an artist collective called Atelierhaus Panzerhalle makes its home in a former tank repair workshop and the ruined barracks of a military base. Linda Simmel, a painter of trees, found her way there. Born in Los Angeles, she earned her BFA in painting at UC Berkeley and was represented by Takada Gallery in San Francisco, then spent a decade traveling to and showing around Berlin, where she joined the collective.
Linda Simmel, The Path, 2025, Oil on canvas, 66 x 48 in.
The woods matter because of her father. He was an immigrant, and her work carries what she calls an inheritance of longing. The Hiking Club: A Vocabulary of Yearning pays homage to his lost utopian ideals and the woods in which he wandered, and New Museum Los Gatos gave that body of work a solo exhibition in 2023 and 2024. Trees, branches, and blossoms are her subject; memory is her medium.
Her work sits in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Crocker Art Museum, Saint Mary's College Museum of Art, and the Triton Museum of Art. For a painter who lives quietly in Sonoma, that is a museum-grade résumé hiding in plain sight. Under-surfaced, in other words.
Three works in Longhand show her range. Vertical Landscape, 66 x 48 inches, sends a column of pale yellow-green light down a darkened wood. Thinned paint falls in long drips, so the surface carries the feeling of rain moving through the scene, and the canvas holds a wall the way a window holds a view.
Horizontal Landscape is land and water at once, a pale blue channel through moss green, ochre, and oxblood, scratched back until earlier layers surface, with blossoms floating on top in outline, remembered more than observed. And Tree Etchings, a set of three, prints one plate of one grove in graphite grey, dusty oxblood, and green with lavender. Together they read as a single work about time.
Liz Robb: a knitwear designer who went sculptural
Before the hotel lobbies and the gallery walls, Liz Robb designed sweaters. Born in Cincinnati in 1985, she trained in fashion design at the University of Cincinnati and worked in knitwear before taking an MFA in Fibers at the Savannah College of Art and Design. That origin explains everything about the work. A knitwear designer thinks in yarn weight, tension, and drape the way an architect thinks in load.
Liz Robb, Moonage, 2026, Jute, cotton, beads, 104x116"
The surface reads as texture; from across the room, it reads as line. Fiber has crossed from the trade into the collection, and Robb sits on both sides of that bridge. Her work does what paintings cannot: it absorbs light, softens sound, and invites the hand. She has built two practices at once, and each feeds the other. She makes commissions for some of the great hospitality brands in the country: indigo-dipped wool for a lodge at Blackberry Farm, a shibori-dyed rope piece for The Alida Hotel on Savannah's riverfront, work for the Palms in Las Vegas and the Marriott in Philadelphia's Old City. For the residential client, she makes sculpture.
A 2021 residency in Lacoste, France, had her working with the natural dyes, pigments, and yarns of Provence.
In Longhand, Moonage is the most sculptural object in the room. The long black beaded piece hangs like a column, dense and tactile. Up close, the surface reads as texture; from across the room, it reads as line. Her work does what paintings cannot: it absorbs light, softens sound, and invites the hand.
Liz Robb, Moonage, detail
Georgina Reskala: the crease becomes the horizon
Georgina Reskala ruins her own photographs on purpose. She photographs a seascape or landscape, prints it, folds and creases the print, then photographs it again, round after round in the darkroom, until the original view nearly disappears into the creases. It is the way memory works: each retelling reshapes the moment a little more. In her own words, every time she replicates an image, she mimics storytelling and the way history drifts.
Georgina Reskala, Composition 1, 2/10, 2026, copper plate etching, black soft ground/hard ground and dry point. 15.25x13.5"
The patience comes from her training. Reskala, who is Mexican-Lebanese, was born in Mexico City in 1967 and came to San Francisco to study photography at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where Larry Sultan mentored her and Chris Johnson trained her in traditional fine printing. A year in Barcelona and a year in advertising in Mexico City followed before she returned to CCA for her MFA in 2015. Today she lives and works in Santa Monica.
Museums have taken notice. Her work belongs to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, the Portland Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and the Museo de Arte Zacatecas, and she was shortlisted for the Hariban Award in Kyoto in 2017. Closer to home, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco included her Horas Transparentes in its inaugural California Jewish Open in 2024. For more than a decade she has also documented Oaxacan artisans, and she teaches textiles, so the hand is never far from her camera.
You've met Georgina Reskala before. Her work has appeared in numerous Upstart Modern shows, from Karpe de Nepantla to Tell Me How It Ends to Heritage Threads. Her work bridges themes of longing, resilience, and memory. In Longhand, a small group of her prints is the quiet counterweight to the large paintings and weavings around them. Give them a minute. The creases resolve into horizon lines, and then the horizon dissolves again. Reskala treats every photograph as a record of handling, never a neutral copy, and in a moment when images multiply endlessly, her prints show what each repetition costs and what it keeps.