Lady Wisdom
An Exploration of the Divine Feminine in Contemporary Fiber, Pattern, and Abstraction
DAVID McCUNE INTERNATIONAL GALLERY · FALL 2026
Curated by Andrew Treague Prieto
Opening Reception — October 15, 2026

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Pattern as Intelligence

Lady Wisdom explores the divine feminine through the lens of pattern recognition — approaching

pattern as a visionary way of locating female intelligence in the world. The exhibition honors the

divine feminine as a spiritual energy that is at once nurturing, intuitive, and creative, while also

proposing pattern as an alternate expression of logic, made visible through the capture, creation,

and disruption of repeated form.

At its heart, this exhibition reframes the “divine feminine” not as a symbol, but as a working

method in contemporary art — a way of making grounded in materiality, care, labor, and systems

of thought. Across the works on view, decoration and function, craft and concept, tradition and

innovation are held in continuous, generative tension.

The artists gathered for Lady Wisdom span modernist textile history, postwar abstraction, feminist

material discourse, and contemporary ecological and migratory concerns. Their number includes

historically significant figures — Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Emma Amos, Jenny Holzer, and Sheila

Pepe among them — alongside a vital generation of contemporary practitioners, including

Jacquelyn Strycker, Sarah G. Sharp, Katya Grokhovsky, Chieko Murasugi, Kia Love, Nava

Lubelski, Patricia Van Dalen, Chellis Baird, Sabina Ott, and Elizabeth “Betty” Schmitt Jennerjahn.

A highlight of the exhibition is its dialogue with the legacy of Black Mountain College in North

Carolina — the storied and internationally influential site of experimental art, design, and

interdisciplinary pedagogy whose spirit runs through so much of the work on view. The exhibition

is further enriched by generous institutional loans from The Johnson Collection and the North

Carolina Museum of Art.

Andrew Treague Prieto
Curator