MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN, NEW YORK
Alice Riehl's Porcelain Florilegium
February 28 – October 12, 2026
Delicate yet radiant, and remarkably resilient, porcelain becomes a vehicle for reimagining plant life in the modern city in Alice Riehl’s Porcelain Florilegium. This installation features four of the artist’s most recent large-scale porcelain wall murals, inspired by botanical imagery drawn from medieval and Renaissance tapestries, French decorative arts, mythology, and her sustained observation of the natural world. The exhibition represents the first major U.S. museum presentation of Riehl’s work and highlights MAD’s ongoing commitment to contemporary craft and innovation in materials.
MUSÉE DE LA TOILE DE JOUY, FRANCE
Herbarium Interior, Nature is where we live
March 27 – May 24, 2026
Inspired by the legacy of Toile de Jouy and the richness of its botanical imagery but also shaped by her observations of plant life and urban environments in New York during her Villa Albertine residency in spring 2025, Alice Riehl invites us to rethink our intimate connection with the vegetal world. By bringing attention to forms of life often overlooked in cities, she challenges our capacity to truly see, to recognize the otherness of living beings, and to imagine new ways of coexisting. How might we move beyond this blindness? What new relationships could we envision?
At the core of this exploration, art emerges as a powerful way to reconnect urban dwellers with plant life. Through her porcelain wall installations, Riehl develops a visual language where storytelling, symbolism, and the heritage of textile traditions intersect.
In collaboration with the Musée de la Toile de Jouy, the artist presents a site-specific mural that bridges the Oberkampf manufactory’s historic vision of nature with contemporary, personal reflections on urban plant life gathered in New York. By selecting textiles and printed materials from the museum’s archives, Riehl creates a dialogue between the eighteenth century and today, highlighting the enduring relevance of our questions about the natural world.
Photographs, videos, herbaria, and research materials document the development of Herbarium Interior and provide insight into the artist’s creative process.
