Beginning October 25, the Baltimore Museum of Art unfurls something North America has not seen in 45 years: a museum exhibition devoted to the monumental tapestries of Senegal. Woven Monuments: Tapestry and Identity in Senegal, on view through March 7, 2027, gathers about a dozen wall-sized works in wool and cotton, most of them woven at the state-supported Manufactures sénégalaises des arts décoratifs in Thiès.
These are not quiet crafts. Born in the years after Senegal’s independence in 1960, the Thiès workshops turned weaving into cultural diplomacy: bold modernist abstraction meets scenes of history, daily life and landscape in saturated color, each tapestry a nation’s imagination made visible, thread by thread. The exhibition celebrates nine artists, among them Badara Camara, Théodore Diouf, Khalifa Gueye, Souleymane “Souley” Keïta and Papa Ibra Tall, and the master weavers who translated their designs at enormous scale.
Curated by Carlee S. Forbes, the show invites Baltimore visitors to stand small before textiles that behave like murals — and to discover how a young nation quite literally wove its identity. The BMA is at 10 Art Museum Drive, and general admission is always a happy bargain: reserve tickets at artbma.org.
Photo: Baltimore Museum of Art
