RE/CONSTRUCT

Superhouse is pleased to announce RE/CONSTRUCT, a solo exhibition by trailblazing American artist and designer Elizabeth Browning Jackson. On view from November 7 through December 20, 2025, the exhibition marks Jackson’s first solo presentation in over three decades. A boundary-breaking talent, she was part of New York’s explosive downtown art furniture scene in the 1980s and exhibited at Art et Industrie, the gallery seminal to that movement. Through her work, Jackson helped redefine art and design, most notably by establishing a precedent for shaped rugs. With RE/CONSTRUCT, she continues to demonstrate her unique capacity to expand the possibilities of fiber as a sculptural medium.

The exhibition brings together four of Jackson’s original rug designs from the 1980s with four contemporary reinterpretations, which she calls “reconstructions.” Displayed alongside these rugs are examples of her origami-inspired bent aluminum furniture, also from the 1980s. Cut and folded from flat plates, these pieces mirror the dimensional vitality of her rugs and further highlight her daring graphic sensibility and radical explorations of abstraction across materials. Presented together, the rugs and furniture establish a total environment, continuing Jackson’s vision of immersive scenography where surface, form, and space converge into a singular expression.

Jackson’s shaped rugs broke new ground in the 1980s by giving dimension and sculptural presence to a medium then overlooked. Through varying pile heights, irregular contours, and twisted perspectives, she introduced movement into objects traditionally understood as flat and static. Conceived for the floor rather than the wall, her rugs subverted the monumentality of vertical sculpture and created a more intimate relationship between viewer, object, and ground. By treating fiber as a vehicle for spatial invention, Jackson forged a new design vocabulary that blurred the boundaries between art, craft, and architecture.

In RE/CONSTRUCT, these innovations are carried forward and renewed. In one work, Jackson revisits her monumental ten-foot-diameter spiral rug Spiral (1980), dismantling its swirling form and reassembling the fragments into a bold new composition, Split Spiral (2025), that transforms surface into relief. In another, she reimagines a pleated-shaped rug, heightening its dynamism with a rust-colored corten steel palette that juxtaposes natural and industrial references. These “reconstructions” testify not only to her technical mastery of tufting but also to her persistent drive to reframe the expressive possibilities of the rug.

Raised on the Rhode Island coast, Jackson absorbed the language of nature’s patterns—spirals, waves, and stones—forms that continue to underpin her graphic sensibility. In revisiting and reimagining her early works, she affirms that her singular imagination—once revolutionary in bringing art to the floor and form to the surface—remains vital today, still pushing fiber into new dimensions.

About Elizabeth Browning Jackson
Elizabeth Browning Jackson studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of New Mexico, and Capella Garden in Sweden before graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute. With family roots in design—her mother studied at the Bauhaus under László Moholy-Nagy and her father’s family was active in the New England textile industry—it was perhaps inevitable that she would translate her sculptural practice into furniture and rugs.

In the early 1980s, Jackson revolutionized floor coverings by moving “art off the wall and onto the floor,” transforming rugs from static rectangles into playful spirals, splashes, waves, and geometric forms. After an introduction to Rick Kaufman, she joined the circle around Art et Industrie and was offered her first solo exhibition there in 1982. Her early rug and furniture works made inventive use of industrial materials—automotive paints and vinyl from Canal Street hardware stores, fiberglass, and acrylic yarns—before evolving into minimalist bent steel and richly tufted wool. Working entirely through analog processes rather than digital rendering, Jackson produced animated, tactile works that explored movement, perspective, and spatial invention.

Jackson has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally in Paris and Tokyo. Her works are held in both private and public collections, including the The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, USA) and the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, USA), and have been featured in numerous publications including Artists Design Furniture by Denise Domergue, the International Design Yearbook, the Financial Times, and The New York Times. Elizabeth Browning Jackson lives and works in Rhode Island. Learn more.