Utopias get a bad rap, mostly for their association with the unrealistic and impractical. But two new (and complimentary) exhibitions at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia leave you wondering if you maybe have utopias all wrong.
In its blend of artwork and archival records, “The Living Temple: The World of Moki Cherry” reminds you that when Moki Cherry and her husband, the trumpeter Don Cherry, performed in the 1970s, you didn’t just show up to their concert; you entered a world. Moki’s tapestries and paintings framed the performance, or housed it. The jacket Moki made for Don is a straight-up star of what is the largest collection of her artwork to appear in North America. The other star, as seen in her posters and sketches and in the videos and photographs or her work through the decades, is the radical power of people creating things—sounds and sentences and visual works of all kinds—in the company of other people.
In 1943, Moki Cherry was born Monica Karlsson a few kilometers from the Arctic Circle, in Sámi territory controlled by Sweden. She moved around as a child, her father a station agent, her mother a postal worker, and, at 19, she was a student at Beckmans Designhögskola, an alternative design and fashion college in Stockholm. Don Cherry was born in Oklahoma City and grew up in the Watts section of Los Angeles. In 1963, when Don met Moki, at the Golden Circle in Stockholm, he was already known for his work with Ornette Coleman and generally as a proponent of an experimental sound that was outgrowing the bounds of what was then called jazz. By 1967—discouraged by finances, by racism, and the US involvement in Vietnam, not to mention the commercialization of music in the US and Europe—Don had moved to Sweden, to a rural schoolhouse with Moki, and, on July 19 that year, at a workers’ association, they assembled musicians for an event entitled Movement Incorporated.
Chairs were switched out for carpets, candles for lights. Moki’s paintings went on the walls, and through the mist of incense, slides were projected as the couple presented what Don called “collage music.” It was a stew of rhythms and ideas that drew variously from his interactions with South African piano players like Abdullah Ibrahim, North African musicians, and his own studies of Indian music. (The Cherrys’ explorations would lead to the wide-open genre known today as World Music.) They were Happenings, the kinds of Fluxus art events seen in cities in the US—the difference being, as the posters noted, “sound by Don Cherry” and “environments by Moki.”
Moki painted and sewed feverishly up to and sometimes through each gig; she played
and danced, two of the movements that were being “incorporated.” “We found the space and invited all the musicians and some dancers,” Moki wrote later. “I made posters, designed the stage, and did live painting with the music. It sold out and was well received on every level so we were encouraged. We were on to something that seemed to work and was great fun.” As the music developed, so did Moki’s artwork: Fabric Workshop’s exhibit traces her output from her days at Beckmans to working part of the year out of a home studio in Long Island City (where, by the 1980s, the Talking Heads practiced “Psycho Killer” repeatedly in the apartment upstairs). Some of the work is specifically functional, like the cover for Don Cherry’s 1972 LP Where’s Brooklyn? (A very different question in 1972!) Some, like lighted totems made with wood and translucent colors, is expansive. But the theme throughout (Moki died in 2009) involves natural forms that connect the human world with the world in which humans live.
An untitled painting from 1967 is a Fauvist landscape not of any topography that is visible to the eye; it’s a painting of a terrain’s energies, the vibrations and emanations that she and her husband were together extolling and exploring. Over the years that galleries ignored her letters, she built a school for young people in Sweden, raised a family, and made the Stockholm schoolhouse and the New York apartment artworks that were simultaneously places to live. “Home is stage, stage is home” was her mantra, the utopian ideals that were not only successful but misconstrued, or written off.
“I get kind of triggered when people say, ‘You were spaced-out hippies,’” said Neneh Cherry, Moki’s daughter, during a Fabric Workshop presentation that included her own daughter, Naima Karlsson, a musician and archivist who manages Moki’s estate. “There was a kind of order and a love of beauty. You know, when I was growing up, there wasn’t always a lot of money around, or money would come and go. But [Moki] would say, ‘We’re rich in so many ways,’ and I think there was this idea of wanting to make the world a more beautiful place.”
What makes “The Living Temple” even more compelling is its juxtaposition: in a gallery adjacent to Cherry’s work is “Talismans for a Theater of Resilience,” a simultaneous exhibition by Lisa Alvarado (b. 1982), the Chicago-based artist and musician. Over the course of her residency at the Fabric Workshop, Alvarado, whose work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial and most recently at the Hoffman Donahue gallery, created two large hanging works, each nearly 20 feet by 10 feet. Using screenprints and experimenting with dyes, the works float in light adjusted by Alvarado’s manipulation of the gallery’s window. Colored gels create a geometric version of an ancient celestial calendar and sounds bounce through the space—bells in the ceiling; rain sticks camouflaged as wall clocks; a drum played by ghosts.
Alvarado, not unlike Moki Cherry, began this particular installation with a mediation on landscape—in this case, the geophysical world. During her workshop residency, Alvarado, who is interested in the invisible interplay between people and things (what she calls “vibrational aesthetics”), visited nearby Bryn Mawr College where, accompanied by the workshop’s studio technicians, she immersed herself in the region’s geology, and geology in general. “I learned that crystals are uncomfortable being underground,” she told me on opening day. “That that’s why they move.” (Bryn Mawr’s geology department is legendary, founded in 1896 by Florence Bascom, the first women to work for the US Geologic Survey.) “The transitions of nature,” Alvarado told an interviewer last winter, “activated my curiosity as a child.”
The resulting banners play with natural cycles and historical ones—in the latter case, the return, like a tectonic force, of the kind of migration that her own ancestors underwent, in the 1930s, when Mexican-Americans faced forced repatriation. (In 2005, California passed the Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program, legislation officially recognizing the “unconstitutional removal and coerced emigration of United States citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent.”) In the fabric-dying process, colors have melted into colors, and in the process of fabric assemblage, abstract shapes emerge to mix geology and iconography, symbols that reference the flag of the United Farm Workers, a labor union founded in 1966 by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Gilbert Padilla. Alvarado uses Aztec awarenesses of eagles as her talismans: They reverberate with notes of strength and ultimately victory.
One of the victories of both exhibitions is that they are a collaboration between the Fabric Workshop, a place where artists come to work and play with materials and ideas, and Ars Nova, a Philadelphia-based arts organization that—with the work of long-time Philadelphian John Coltrane as their talisman—emphasizes not just collaboration but improvisation as a powerful force for renewal, community-based and otherwise. For the opening, within the space created by her banners, Alvarado performed with Natural Information Society, the Chicago-based musical ensemble founded by her husband, Joshua Abrams, that creates, in the group’s own words, “long-form psychedelic environments informed by jazz, minimalism traditional musics.” The performance was sponsored by Ars Nova.
The piece, called “Perseverance Flow,” began slowly, with Abrams playing rhythmically on a gimbri—a Sub-Saharan, three-stringed, skin-covered box—in his lap. Alvarado, on hand-pumped harmonium, let the reeds make chords that filled the room. Mikel Patrick Avery, on a drum kit, launched a bass drum’s beat through mists of percussion, and on bass clarinet, Jason Stein made sounds like swells and piercing winds. It was rhythms intersecting rhythms, and the room felt like an ocean, the seas shifting, tide coming in. But then, after an hour that felt like minutes, Alvarado’s chords led us home safe, the sounds calming, the room still vibrating, the chords resolved, the world a different place.
“The Living Temple: The World of Moki Cherry” and “Lisa Alvarado: Talismans for a Theater of Resilience” are both at the Fabric Workshop through April 2026.