A World of Movement and Memory: Igshaan Adams Dazzles in Miami and New York

This season, the work of Igshaan Adams—one of the most poetic and materially inventive voices in contemporary art—unfolds across two U.S. cities in tandem. At ICA Miami, Lulu, Zanele, Zandile, Savannah (on view December 2, 2025–November 1, 2026) cascades through the museum’s three-story stairwell, transforming the site into a shimmering vertical landscape. Meanwhile, in New York, the Hill Art Foundation presents Igshaan Adams: I’ve been here all along, I’ve been waiting (September 16–December 20, 2025), a sweeping 15-year survey that traces the artist’s intertwined journeys of spiritual inquiry, community devotion, and embodied ritual.

Working between tapestry, sculpture, found materials, beading, and collaborative textile traditions, Adams creates works that pulse with memory—mapping the movements of bodies in prayer, the wear of footsteps on linoleum floors, or the invisible currents shaped by joy, grief, and communal connection. Raised in the segregated Cape Town suburb of Bonteheuwel during the final decades of apartheid, the artist has built a practice rooted in healing: transforming the overlooked into the luminous, elevating the everyday into a site of grace.

“My task is to serve God through people,”

Adams has said—a sentiment felt in every line of thread, wire, and suspended dust cloud.

ICA Miami: A Cascade of Tapestries and Dust Clouds

At ICA Miami, Adams debuts an ambitious new commission that responds architecturally to the museum’s soaring stairwell. Four monumental tapestries—woven in chromatically rich threads, embedded with beads, lace, chains, and fringe—descend the height of the space like a resplendent textile waterfall. The work’s title, Lulu, Zanele, Zandile, Savannah, references women from Adams’ community in Cape Town, suggesting a lineage of matriarchs whose unseen labor and love bind families and neighborhoods together.

The tapestries echo aerial maps, domestic surfaces, and meteorological patterns, blurring the boundary between abstraction and narrative. Light dances across thousands of beads, giving the surfaces a shimmering vitality—alive with the touch of many hands.

Suspended throughout the stairwell are Adams’ signature “dust clouds,” sculptural clusters of twisted wire and repurposed materials that seem to hover weightlessly. They gesture both to the cosmic—nebulae, shifting light, atmospheric disturbance—and to the grounded: the joyful “dust-ups” of bodies dancing in Adams’ childhood, or the twirling Sufi dervishes whose movements he has studied for years.

“The body becomes a conduit for vibration,”

Adams notes of Sufi philosophy—an idea embodied in the dust clouds’ energetic, ephemeral forms.

Practical Info — ICA Miami

Exhibition: Igshaan Adams: Lulu, Zanele, Zandile, Savannah
Dates: December 2, 2025 – November 1, 2026
Location: ICA Miami, Stairwell
Curated by: Gean Moreno, Director, Art + Research Center

At the Hill Art Foundation: A Spiritual and Communal Retrospective

In Chelsea, New York, I’ve been here all along, I’ve been waiting offers the most intimate portrait to date of Adams’ layered and ongoing exploration of faith, community, and personal history. Spanning over 15 years, the exhibition brings together tapestries, suspended sculptures, floor-based works, preparatory drawings, and devotional textiles that trace his evolution from early figurative investigations to the expansive abstractions of today.

Central to the show is the motif of the rose—appearing here for the first time in a public exhibition as a sustained body of work. Taught by his mentor and Sufi master, Ma Rukea, the rose becomes metaphor: a veil of beauty that conceals deeper wisdom, an emblem of contradiction and spiritual striving. For Adams, it is a lesson in seeing beyond surfaces toward hidden truths.

The Hill Art Foundation also foregrounds some of the artist’s most celebrated investigations into the traces of lived experience. Works such as Onder Die Voorkamer Lig (2022) and Hoek Onder Die Trappe (2022) recreate sections of linoleum flooring excavated from homes in Bonteheuwel—each worn patch mapping years of movement, habit, and domestic ritual. As an act of exchange, Adams replaces the original flooring in these homes, transforming the old linoleum into a tapestry of memory, community, and resilience.

Equally powerful are Adams’ prayer-rug weavings, derived from decades-used rugs within his neighborhood. Here, the bodily impressions made during prayer become patterns of devotion. The translation of these rugs into tapestry becomes an act of collective remembrance—an affirmation of spiritual continuity.

Practical Info — Hill Art Foundation

Exhibition: Igshaan Adams: I’ve been here all along, I’ve been waiting
Dates: September 16 – December 20, 2025
Location: Hill Art Foundation, New York
Texts by: Siddhartha Mitter

A Practice of Care, Community, and Transformation

Taken together, the exhibitions at ICA Miami and the Hill Art Foundation present Adams at a defining moment. His work—rooted in the weaving traditions of his community, grounded in the rituals of faith, and elevated through sculptural ambition—speaks to a profound belief in the interdependence of people and place.

Whether tracing footsteps on a kitchen floor, the choreography of prayer, or the movement of cosmic dust, Adams’ art reveals the invisible forces that bind us: rhythm, memory, community, and spirit. In Miami and New York, visitors are invited not simply to view these works, but to feel their pulse.