Artist Igshaan Adams Opens the Door of His Cape Town Studio as He Preps for a Major Commission at the ICA Miami
Using humble materials, the South African artist crafts ethereal, enthralling tapestries subtly infused with cultural allusions
South African artist Igshaan Adams manages to conjure mesmerizing worlds using the simplest materials imaginable—wire, twine, strips of fabric, beads, and various bits and bobs in wood, metal, glass, shell, plastic. His delicately woven, intricately layered wall hangings shimmer as if lit from within, and his suspended sculptures, with their underlying architecture of wispy wire, have a diaphanous, cotton candy–like quality.
This fall, Adams has dazzled audiences in both New York and Miami with his ethereal creations as he prepares for his show at the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2026. His latest project is Lulu, Zanele, Zandile, Savannah, a stairwell commission for the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami opens on December 2, in time for the city’s annual art and design week, and will remain up for nearly a year. It consists of four tapestries, each paired with four small hanging sculptures, which the artist sometimes refers to as dust clouds. “I enjoy these unusual installation exhibition spaces,” Adams says of the precision the project requires. “It should feel like it was meant to be there.”
At his studio in Cape Town, Adams has a team of 25 assistants who help fabricate his elaborate artworks, which evoke paintings, while their idiosyncratic shapes and fringed edges reinforce their status as three-dimensional objects. “I started out as a painter, and I certainly think I weave like a painter,” he says. “We’re now at a point where the weaving allows us to mix certain colors and textures and materials together, just as if you were mixing paint wet on wet on a canvas.”
Certainly, Adams’s tapestries reward an up-close inspection as much as any Pointillist painting. As viewers step back, the overall patterns are revealed and the works seem to become something entirely new.
As reflected in the commission at ICA Miami, performance is also an important component of his art. Collaborating with the performers named in the installation’s title, Adams instructed them to dance on a sandwich of materials—linoleum at the bottom, then paint, then canvas, “essentially producing a monotype print,” he says. Those designs then served as the basis for the compositions of the final woven pieces. It’s an ingenious take on body art.
The artist’s ingenuity gets a captivating showcase in New York, too, with a survey of the past 15 years on view at the Hill Art Foundation through December 20. The variety of his creative output is astounding, ranging from a 2009 self-portrait he crafted with cotton thread on a felt blanket to a diverse array of sculptures—some hanging from the ceiling, others draped from a wall mount, and still more lying flat on the ground in the light-filled venue. He knows how to take up space, literally and metaphorically.
Raised in humble circumstances, Adams has negotiated a complex identity. Apartheid was still the law in his early childhood, and he was raised Muslim but with some Christian traditions. And he is gay, with a longtime partner who runs his business. But, he says, he has had to “push against being termed ‘the queer artist,’ ‘the queer Muslim artist,’ ‘the African artist,’” lest he be pigeonholed.
In between stints at different art schools, Adams labored as a gardener for eight years, which adds a layer to the large roses that have been a recurring motif in his tapestries. Roses, he notes, have nuanced meanings in Islamic tradition. Even more significant was an early job with an NGO that taught craft making to women in Cape Town, an established textile center. The experience turned out to be part of his own education, and today some of those women are weavers in his studio. Their creations using T-shirt material and recycled rope sparked ideas, including an unrealized concept that would involve unraveling a Muslim prayer mat and then weaving it back together in a new design.
Prayer mats remain an important inspiration and reference point for his signature tapestries, which are about investigating and interrogating existing objects and considering what they could be in their next life. Adams thrives on being an agent of transformation. “I appreciate cheaper things that are not necessarily considered special—like the beads that intrinsically have no value,” he says. “What interests me is how I can make something special through my own interventions.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2025 Winter issue under the headline “Simply Sublime.” Subscribe to the magazine.