From African Wall Art to Bible Paintings and Chelsea Textiles

As Frieze Week 2025 descends upon New York in its vivid, suggestive power, the city is poised between realities—between past and future, material and ethereal, tradition and cutting-edge. Amidst this visual maelstrom, three art forms quietly resonate with each other in layered syncopation: African wall art, paintings of the Bible, and the textured refinement of Chelsea textiles. Those motifs, at first glance disparate, come together in ways both unexpected and compelling throughout the most powerful exhibitions of this year.

African Wall Art: The Cultural Identity

From the Guggenheim’s great rotunda to Midtown’s bare-bones warehouse locales, the graphic colors and symbolic geometry of African wall art take form not merely as visual backgrounds but as deep repositories of memory and identity. Artists such as Rashid Johnson, whose massive Sanguine holds down the Guggenheim’s new survey, borrow explicitly from African heritage. His wall-based works, comprised of ceramic tiles, mirror shards, and black soap, challenge the haptic narratives of classical African murals.

These visual languages, which for so long had been ignored in the circuits of elite art, are now viewed from a respectful perspective. Johnson’s works contemplate race, history, and material transformation—his layered surfaces evoking the narrative walls of West African dwellings, but infused with the brutal urbanity of modern America. This is not merely decorative art; it’s a spiritual dialogue banked in clay and fire.

In these shows, African wall art transcends ornament—it is resistance, affirmation, and living archive. It testifies across diasporas, bridging Harlem’s art institutions with the broader international Black aesthetic, even as it reminds us of a heritage both very old and ever-modern.

Bible Paintings: Sacred Narratives in Modern Frames

Meanwhile, the holy comes back in an unexpected guise. In MoMA’s overview of Jack Whitten and MoMA PS1’s homage to Alanis Obomsawin, a more subdued strand appears—one based on the interpretative tradition of paintings of the Bible. Whitten’s abstraction, though complete, can often appear biblical in heft and symbolism. His tessellated acrylic tiles give his works an appearance that glows like stained glass windows, recording instances of human weakness, myth, and transcendence.

Obomsawin’s films and graphic illustrations also capture this spiritual tone. Her visual narrative—on First Nations resistance and remembrance—resonates with the didactic authority of biblical imagery. Secular, yet her works approximate the parable form, leading viewers through richly layered moral and historical lessons. It’s here that the heritage of Bible paintings—as instruments of revelation, pedagogy, and communal memory—gains new, activist relevance.

This return to sacred visuality is especially evocative in the context of current spiritual searching throughout cultures. In shows such as “I Remembered to Forget” by Rob Wynne, reflected texts floating on walls whisper like prophetic speech—unsettled, poetic, but full of wonder. For those brought up on traditional Biblical paintings, this is a reformation of spirituality in form, respecting heritage while broadening the spiritual vocabulary.

Chelsea Textiles and the Art of Domestic Storytelling

In a materializing year, the understated beauty of Chelsea fabric is experiencing a revival. Classically renowned for their elegant craftsmanship and heritage motifs, these fabrics now inspire everything from wall hangings to immersive environments.

At Lisson Gallery, Carmen Herrera’s geometric abstractions—made while living in Paris—are a match for the structural restraint of handwoven cloth. The mathematical rhythm and clean lines of her paintings appear to be taken from midcentury textile patterns, taking the domestic to the divine. Likewise, the FALCON Art Collective’s diffuse show in Midtown transmutes run-down corporate areas into reclaimed, quilt-like collages—each artist sewing together a fragment of the city’s cultural memory.

Chelsea fabrics, which used to be confined to interiors, now transgress their limits and are at the heart of the way we perceive touch, memory, and care in art today. They temper the hard lines of modernism and show us that art exists not only in paint and steel, but in warp and weft, in the sensual poetry of fabric.

First Korean Baptist Church: Faith and Art

In a less visible corner of the Frieze spectacle, an interfaith conversation blossoms unseen. The First Korean Baptist Church, not included in the commercial listings or upscale venues, becomes a spiritual annex to the city’s artistic scene, spilling over. Home to a community-curated show of faith-inspired works, local variations on Bible paintings and textile crafts based on Korean Christian traditions, the church serves as a contemplative counterpoint to the week’s marketplace frenzy.

Tourists stepping into its simple sanctuary are met with a different rhythm—silent, respectful, grounded in everyday life. On these shores, Chelsea fabrics assume devotional functions, inscribed with biblical texts and Korean calligraphy. This congregation’s incorporation of African patterns found in wall art, via mission-centered cultural exchange, is similarly quietly presented, symbolizing the gradual, unavoidable labor of worldwide spiritual and artistic solidarity.

Frieze Week 2025, with all the metropolitan pomp of it, could be an unlikely setting for long-lost aesthetics such as African wall hangings, Bible paintings, and Chelsea tapestries to be given the limelight. But these traditions endure, not as antiquities but as indispensable weapons of resistance, memory, and beauty. They remind us of some timeless truths the digital screen and conceptual veneer tend to overlook: that the handmade, the spiritual, and the storied continue to count.

In a city that travels too quickly, these arts bring us to a stop. They compel us to look, not only with our eyes, but with memory, touch, and spirit.