Opening & Artist Reception
Saturday, May 2, 5–7pm
Municipal Bonds is pleased to present Hypergeographies of the Dye Garden, Crystal Gregory's first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from May 2 through June 20, 2026.
Based in Lexington, Kentucky, Gregory centers her new work on handwoven textiles dyed with plants grown in her garden. Each plant yields a distinct color shaped by the conditions of a specific place and time, with climate and season held in the palette. That color enters the work as a record of its origin and continues through the life of the textile, as she brings her weaving into relation with concrete, silver, and wood. Here, cultivation and construction meet, and weaving extends into a spatial and architectural language grounded in place.
"A thread, made up of individual fibers, makes up a continuous line. It bends and stretches, supports weight, collapses, and folds. As a practitioner, I think a lot about the life of each thread within a fabric. As an individual, each thread is prone to stress, strain, and breakage, but as a collective, the burden of tension becomes bearable. A cloth has a tensile strength. It interlaces with its neighboring thread to create a greater sum of parts. And if a fold suggests an elastic surface, a tensile quality that yields to pressure, this is not a weakness, for an object that gives in is actually stronger than one that resists (Barnett, 1999). A fold can permit the opportunity to be oneself in a new way, a resilience without changing one's elemental properties.
In recent works, woven textiles and architecture are explored as they pertain to movement-movement described by and remembered through the outlining material landscape. The movement through a landscape, the pliability of a textile, as well as their gridded systems, are described and explored in relation to social structures of citizenship and intersecting parts of a whole. Ultimately, recognition of these systems as boundaries and edges describes the life within."—Crystal Gregory, 2026
Crystal Gregory is a sculptor whose work investigates the intersections between textile and architecture. Gregory received her BFA from the University of Oregon and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Fiber and Material Studies Department. She was awarded the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship for the Performing and Visual Arts, and with this award, moved to Amsterdam, where she took a role as Guest Artist at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie of Art.
Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including Through the Thread at the Rockwell Museum of Art, Devotion/Destruction: Craft Inheritance at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Projects, Load Bearing: The Art of Construction at the Hunterdon Art Museum, and Bodies at Rest, Brookfield Properties, Brooklyn Commons. Gregory's work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Surface Design Journal, Art Critical, and Peripheral Vision Press, and is held in collections including the Mary and Al Shands Collection at the Speed Museum and the US Embassy in Sri Lanka. Crystal Gregory is an Associate Professor within the School of Art and Visual Studies and holds the Arturo Alonzo Sandoval Endowed Professorship in Fiber at the University of Kentucky. She is represented by Municipal Bonds.
