Seven Sisters is pleased to present Margot Becker, a Thousand Flowers on view June 14 through August 2, 2025. This exhibition—her first solo show—brings together recent works, including a selection developed during her 2023 residency at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC), that explore how beauty, gesture, and time can be held in cloth. The exhibition’s title draws from the medieval tapestry motif known as millefleur—a richly detailed weaving tradition in which countless small flowers fill the background—evoking a sense of abundance, intimacy, and quiet complexity that resonates throughout Becker’s work.
Since receiving her MFA in Studio Art from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, Margot Becker—now based in Hudson, New York—has become known for her precise, sensuous weavings rooted in sustainable textile traditions and the slow intelligence of handcraft. Drawing on ecology and intimacy, her work employs repetition and natural materials to create textiles that serve as vessels for emotional depth and lived experience.
A Thousand Flowers marks a subtle evolution in her practice—toward impermanence, abstraction, and transformation. The works in this series, woven over the course of three years, incorporate techniques first developed during her time at HCCC. While in Houston, Becker was inspired by the city’s climate to experiment with melting ice cubes laced with dyes onto her warp threads—a process that left delicate stains and impressions, into which she wove remembered images of flowers seen in local botanical parks. There, Becker began painting directly onto her warp threads with acrylic paint in intuitive gestures. Once dried, the warp is wound onto her loom and repeatedly stretched in the weaving process. The original image distorts, softens, and dissolves. What remains is not a picture but a trace—fragmented, atmospheric, and emotionally charged. Into this field, she weaves further imagery using discontinuous wefts. In her newest works, this method is further refined, yielding compositions that feel like sensations returning from just beyond reach.
“These pieces are about beauty as a radical act,” Becker shared in a recent conversation. “They’re about the need to find tenderness—even pleasure—when everything around us feels frayed and exhausted. We live in a moment where conversations feel strained, as though we’ve forgotten how to listen. These works are about subtlety—about learning to speak with, not over, one another.”
Throughout the exhibition, floral imagery appears not as ornament, but as metaphor. Rendered in dye and thread, flowers become gestures of care, emblems of longing, and symbols of fragile yet enduring connection. The weavings read less as images than as emotional weather—environments that hover between presence and absence. A Thousand Flowers gathers insights into a body of work that speaks with precision and softness—reminding us that tenderness, like weaving, is both a labor and a form of resistance.
Margot Becker (b. 1986, Oak Bluffs, MA,) is an artist, weaver, and educator living in Hudson, NY. Through tactile processes, she explores the sense of place, the natural environment, and the connection between the individual and the communal subconscious. Since graduating from Bard in 2009, Margot's path has taken her through nearly a decade of total immersion in animal husbandry and millwork to better understand the possibilities and limitations of sustainable textile production.
Both a forager and an idealist, Becker's work engages with ecology and a desire to understand the origins of cloth and the lives affected by it. Re-calibrating her idealism with an artistic practice, Becker has centered her work through always being present, from hands-on spinning, dying, weaving, performance, and drawing to temporal site-specific weavings. Her work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.
Margot Becker has attended residencies at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, ACRE, Mildred's Lane, Rabbit Island and AZ West. She received her BA in studio art from Bard College in 2009 and her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2020 where she was awarded the Edwin Anthony & Adelaine Boudreaux Cadogan Scholarship and the Toni A. Lowenthal Memorial Scholarship for Excellence in Textiles. Her work was recently included in the group exhibition Shift Change at the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum, La Conner, WA. Becker's work was featured in Seven Sisters' first group exhibiton Like a Crowd of Extras, in 2024.
