Sarah Nsikak at EXPO Chicago: How Could You Hold It?
For the 2026 FOCUS section of EXPO Chicago, Sibyl Gallery is proud to present How could you hold it?, an installation of new works by textile artist Sarah Nsikak (b. 1991, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY).
Nsikak learned to sew from her Nigerian grandmother, a highly esteemed seamstress who followed her family to Oklahoma from the Nigerian state of Oyo. The act of sewing and mending allowed the artist and her grandmother to connect and transcend a difficult language barrier. Nsikak took this precious ancestral knowledge and employed it in adaptation, making and remaking her own clothes in a way that would impact her fine art practice going forward to this day. She moved to New York to work in the fashion world, but was struck by the material waste and culture of exploitation. She started her own line, La Réunion, named for a small island off the coast of Madagascar. After achieving a remarkable level of success in the garment industry with a dress featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s In America: A Lexicon of Fashion exhibition, La Réunion has since shifted to bespoke, sustainable home goods–blankets, throw pillows, lampshades–maintaining Nsikak’s longstanding commitment to the dynamic spirit of materials. Her practice crystallizes at the confluence of art, fashion, and functional design, forsaking any predetermined hierarchy between the three.
Nsikak notes how African traditions and textiles were often used in fashion for their aesthetics with little consideration for their origins. She draws inspiration for her practice in the conceptual framework that spans the global African diaspora, looking to sources from the Gee’s Bend quilters to the Bantu Herero population of Southern Africa. Nsikak reflects on how the Herero society appropriated the clothing of their German colonizers, reimagining European styles in Herero textiles and with unique flair. With these important legacies top of mind, Nsikak relishes the strength in reimagination as a means of healing physical and psychological wounds. She approaches all parts of her practice with a gentleness that is often denied to Black women, who are expected to be powerful and strong. Borrowing from African folklore and proverbs in her appliqué tapestries, Nsikak explores the nuanced strength in softness, and in bending so as not to break.
The installation for EXPO Chicago will feature a number of Nsikak’s textile works across various forms–appliqué, quilting, scrolls– that meditate on notions of grief, isolation, single motherhood, and the search for community as a Black woman living in the United States. Vibrant colors neighbor desaturated tones, reinforcing an underlying sense of emotional exhaustion that connects all of the works. This new body will draw in Surrealist imagery and forms, as well as primordial symbols–eyes, hands, shapes executed in styles that perhaps don’t quite register at first with the contemporary mind but bypass obstacles to connect with viewers on a deeply ingrained human level.
ABOUT SARAH NSIKAK
Sarah Nsikak is an Nigerian-American artist, designer, and mother living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She works predominately in antique or recycled textiles, cutting and sewing each piece by hand. Her practice spans across fine art, bespoke slow fashion, and thoughtful handmade goods for the home through her highly esteemed brand La Réunion. Nsikak's work has been exhibited at TIWA Select (NYC), Monument Gallery (Kingston, NY), Spring/Break Art Fair (NYC), SP-Arte Art Fair (Sao Paulo), V.V. Sorry (Mexico City), the Ace Hotel (NYC), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute (NYC).