Viola Bordon: Muliebrity

March 6 – July 26, 2026

About the Exhibition:

Viola Bordon: Muliebrity is a part of Radical Americana, a series of exhibitions organized by The Clay Studio and a consortium of Philadelphia’s extensive collection of arts and cultural institutions that celebrate how today’s artists are continuing the city’s unique and rich legacy as a center for creativity and civic engagement. To learn more about the other participating artists and organizations, please click HERE.

Since the American Revolution, the Roman goddess Libertas has personified the nation’s ideals, embodying evolving definitions of freedom and belonging. The 1886 dedication of the Statue of Liberty, however, unfolded amid national conflict over the boundaries of liberty, including the end of Reconstruction, debates over immigration, and the rise of women’s suffrage. Drawing on archival research at the American Historical Society, textile artist Viola Bordon examines “Lady Liberty” as a fragmented American icon. Her triptych Muliebrity, composed through appliqué and found textiles, invokes a distinctly feminine power grounded in endurance and embodied knowledge, prompting us to consider how figures of womanhood have been repeatedly mobilized to serve patriarchal institutions.

About the Artist:

Viola Bordon is an artist and educator based in Philadelphia whose work examines transformation across material, ecological, and social systems. Her quilting is an act that binds histories of labor, belief, and resistance. Working through inherited methods of reuse and repair, she frames systems of power that shape both personal and collective experience. Her quilts negotiate structures that hold tension between faith and skepticism, memory and material. Quiet repetitive labor forming articulated dissent, allowing form itself to think through what endurance makes visible. Her practice also includes environmental installations, drawing on methods of reuse, endurance, and collaboration. Her projects have been supported by the Fulbright Commission, Lilly Endowment, Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and Salt Planes State Park. Bordon’s teaching and research emphasize tactile knowledge and the quiet radicality of sustained attention to material and processes.

Viola Bordon: Muliebrity is generously supported by Radical Americana, the Cambium Giving Society of the Museum for Art in Wood, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Bresler Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, William Penn Foundation, and Windgate Foundation.

Opening:
First Friday, March 6, 2026
5 – 8 pm
Walk-ups Welcome