Curated by Jenny Jaskey, Chief Curator at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Fishers of Men is a new installation by American artist Eric N. Mack. The exhibition transforms the skylit North Gallery into an immersive spatial composition where suspended textile paintings and custom steel armatures animate the architecture and invite movement through the space. Throughout the installation, textiles lean, drape and cantilever within the gallery, establishing a dynamic dialogue between material, space and motion. Mack’s approach to textiles is fluid and responsive, engaging the built environment as both anchor and collaborator. The steel structures supporting his works act not only as armatures but as sculptural gestures in their own right, allowing the compositions to shift and reconfigure across contexts. In Fishers of Men, the gallery becomes a landscape of layered surfaces and spatial rhythms, fostering discovery and reflection.

The installation includes more than 90 meters of textiles, including Zulu 2, Rocket, Technicolour Fade, and Satora by Sahco. Each material was selected by Mack for its distinctive tactile and chromatic qualities, enriching the work’s physical and emotional resonance. As with his titles and fabric sources, Mack’s material choices are deeply referential, drawing on personal memory, art history and cultural narratives.

Taking its name from a now-closed Harlem seafood restaurant, Fishers of Men also evokes themes of faith, community and transformation. Within the exhibition, these associations unfold through the poetics of textile. The result is a site-responsive environment that embodies both permanence and transience, material and metaphor.

Arts and Letters
Galleries
Audubon Terrace Broadway between West 155 and 156 Streets
New York, NY 10032

27 September 2025 – 8 February 2026
Thursday –Sunday, 12 pm–6 pm

About Eric N. Mack

Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) first wanted to be an artist when he saw the work of his grandmother, who, when ill and confined to bed, made numerous drawings of the objects on her dresser. The idea that art could be created by paying careful attention to things familiar to the body, like a tube of lipstick or a bottle of perfume, became foundational to the work he went on to make. Mack loved museums from an early age. Both of his parents worked at the National Gallery in DC, and trips to the Hirshhorn and Corcoran to see shows by Ana Mendieta, Morris Louis, and Sam Gilliam expanded his sense of what art could be. In art school, he started using textiles in his paintings. The first work he exhibited in a museum, at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2012, incorporated a moving blanket (Honey Hollow, 2012). He has gone on to make fabric paintings for numerous sites, including an abandoned gas station in the desert (Halter, 2019), the courtyard of a Venetian palace (Sarong, 2023), and now a Beaux Arts gallery designed by Cass Gilbert at the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Fishers of Men, 2025).

About American Academy of Arts and Letters

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Its 300 members distribute over 70 awards annually; fund concerts and new works of musical theatre; purchase and commission contemporary art for donation to museums across the country; and present exhibitions, talks, and events for the public at our historic buildings in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of New York City.

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