Moki Cherry’s woodworking phase didn’t produce your typical chairs and birdhouses. Once the late Swedish artist began playing with plywood, she constructed light-box sculptures that resembled surrealist faces. She named them “Talking Heads” — only appropriate, since members of the new wave band of the same name had crashed in her Queens loft.
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Philadelphians can see one of these “talking heads” at an exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. The retrospective, on view through April 12, 2026, is the largest collection of Cherry’s work staged in North America. Curated in partnership with Ars Nova Workshop, “The Living Temple: The World of Moki Cherry” includes paintings, ceramics, sculptures, tapestries, clothing and even video clips of the performances and children’s TV shows the artist created with her husband, the American jazz trumpeter Don Cherry.
Moki Cherry was born in 1943 in the northernmost county of Sweden, not far from the Arctic circle. She studied fashion design at the Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm before she began her decades-long multidisciplinary artwork.
“You can imagine a woman in remote Sweden, whose contemporaries might become teachers or homemakers,” Mark Christmas, executive and artistic director of Ars Nove, said at a Thursday press preview. “I think she sees an alternate future for herself as an artist and, well, specifically a fashion designer.”
After she met and married her husband, Cherry began splitting her time between her native country and New York City. She brought art into every corner of their family homes, creating singular canopies for her children’s beds and expansive murals on the walls. It was an effort to transform an ordinary domestic space into a “living temple.” (Philly residents might sense a kinship with Isaiah Zagar, whose mosaicked South Philly house features prominently in the documentary “In a Dream.”)
Kristin Hunt/for PhillyVoice
This textile piece features silk, cotton and a plastic doll. It is called ‘Movie star longs for a child (Marlene),’ in reference to the German actress Marlene Dietrich.
Her retrospective starts on a ground floor gallery space in the Arch Street art museum, where visitors will see pieces from Cherry’s home, her “talking head” and a textile portrait of a movie star whose gloved hand jumps out of the frame. The show continues up to the eighth floor, where TV sets loop footage of Cherry and her family performing on their children’s television show “Piff, Paff, Puff,” the costumes and tapestries from the Swedish series displayed alongside. Music clearly ran in the family, as several of Cherry’s children and grandchildren became professional recording artists; her son Eagle-Eye Cherry had a Billboard hit in 1997 with “Save Tonight.”
Also on the eighth floor is another new exhibit, featuring the Fabric Workshop and Museum’s artist in residence. Lisa Alvarado created two enormous fabric “talismans” that hang from the ceiling. Custom motorized pieces on the walls produce music as their gears turn. Colorful shapes also cover the space’s window, filtering the light that shines through the talismans, which nod to the 1965 flag the United Farm Workers adopted under Cesar Chavez.
Kristin Hunt/for PhillyVoice
Fabric Workshop and Museum artist in residence Lisa Alvarado stands in front of one of her two ‘talismans.’
Alvarado, who is based in Chicago, says her Mexican American heritage informs her work. Her family was impacted by the Mexican repatriation campaigns of the 1930s, when the U.S. government deported over one million Mexicans or Mexican Americans, most of them U.S. citizens.
“I also wanted to connect the work to what’s happening in history, social history,” she said at the Thursday event. “As an artist of Mexican American ancestry, I see a lot of parallels in the politicizing of citizenship that’s going on right now between the past and present.”
Like the Cherry retrospective, “Lisa Alvarado: Talismans for a Theater of Resilience” will be on view through April 12, 2026. The artist will play the harmonium in the space with her band Natural Information Society on Oct. 12.
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