May 6–June 21, 2025
Although her practice is rooted in photography, Hana Miletić’s first solo exhibition in New York contains no images. Instead, the eight handwoven textiles adorning the walls of the gallery are convincing recreations of ad-hoc repairs and temporary structures the artist photographs as she traverses urban centers—in this case, the surrounding Chinatown neighborhood. Above the reception desk, for example, hangs a looped, twisted, and knotted necklace of woven caution tape that may prompt viewers to proceed with heightened awareness. There is also a crocheted “carrot orange” net reinforced in its sagging midsection with a fibrous “mint green” sleeve (a tree guard?) and a slapdash web of overlapping silvery bands (a taped-up window?). Clinging to their former functions, even if obscurely, Miletić’s mimetic weavings could easily pass for found objects.
Miletić used a 1970s-era manual (as opposed to mechanized) loom to create these works, each titled Materials (2023–25), but they more closely resemble machine-woven textiles than fiber art. Her woven translations of industrially produced plastics, like duct tape, netting, and tarps, relate neither to Anni Albers’s abstractly patterned “pictorial weavings” nor the large-scale sculptures of artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sheila Hicks, or Lenore Tawney. Artists working in fiber often contend with reductive and gendered associations with craft, production, and utility by critiquing and resisting such framings, but also by embracing them. With her expertly crafted but unassuming sculptures, Miletić foregrounds the difficulty, slowness, and invisibility of such labor, while also celebrating, in turn, the care and attention implicit in her overlooked subjects.
The Zagreb-born artist knitted and crocheted with female family members as a child, but only started weaving in 2015, after taking classes at a community arts center in Brussels, her adopted home since the early 1990s. Preferring the slower, more reflective and intentional process of weaving to the frictionless immediacy of digital photography, she pushed her images to the background of her practice. Though she doesn’t, as a rule, exhibit her source photographs, she includes them in publications, like her 2024 zine Detours. Once you’ve seen them, photography begins to haunt her sculptures. It becomes hard to look at her woven reinterpretations without imagining the original context—without filling in the blanks.
Extracted from pictures and translated into a new material, Miletić’s sculptures are more elusive in their newfound autonomy. One minimalist composition from 2023—a felted white square overlaid with a bold, stop-sign-red “X” of woven wool and cotton—is based on the artist’s snapshot (reproduced in Detours) of a wordless placard hinged to the doorway of a home slated for demolition. The message, in the photo, is clear—keep out. Miletić’s version, though, is abstract and indeterminate: the “X” doesn’t just deter; it can also be a reparative suture.
The form is echoed in a neighboring work, from 2025, in which crisscrossing orange bands stretch from floor to ceiling. The message printed on the fabric—“Trains Not Stopping • Work In Progress”—becomes distorted and illegible as it repeats and extends from the work’s center. Resulting from the artist’s use of AI to expand her original photograph, it seems to be the only liberty Miletić permitted herself here. Placed in direct contrast to the artist’s meticulously replicative handwork, the garbled text hints at the role of digital photography in her process, while also suggesting the shortcomings of any machine-assisted translation.
The largest work in the show, a black tapestry nearly fourteen feet wide, is also its most pictorial. Resembling a patched-together window covering, its uneven edges appear stitched together by erratically applied blue dashes—painter’s tape faithfully replicated down to the loose fibers of torn and frayed edges. The otherwise blank expanse evokes a nocturnal seascape, with a long, uninterrupted, and sloping blue line defining a shore. As with the other works, Miletić fabricated this one with environmentally conscious and ethically sourced fibers such as organic wool, recycled and repurposed polyesters, and so-called “peace silk,” which is produced without killing the worms. The artist’s attention to care extends to her material choices as well.
In the past, Miletić has made space in her practice for collaboration, organizing communal felting workshops for female-identifying immigrants and hosting poetry readings and music performances inside her textile installations. Here, the people responsible for the original constructions remain, understandably, absent. While Miletić risks romanticizing and exploiting ruin, the arduous and conscientious process of handweaving honors the improvised resourcefulness and unintended aesthetics of her anonymously produced subjects. If these sculptures of repair, adaptation, and renovation are symbols of a city’s constant cycling between decay and renewal (or neglect and overdevelopment), her project seems at odds—perhaps intentionally so—with the gallery’s sterile quietude, which cloisters the show, and its visitors, from the bustling neighborhood just beyond the threshold.
