The Fabric Workshop and Museum presents The Living Temple: The World of Moki Cherry

Moki, born Monika Karlsson in northeast Sweden in 1943, had a globetrotting interdisciplinary art career in partnership with her husband Don Cherry (1936-1995), an American jazz musician and bandleader who was better-known than Moki during her lifetime. Her work spanned textiles, fashion, painting, ceramics, performance, and more from the 1960s until her death in 2009.

Her profile has risen, especially in the last few years, with notable explorations of her oeuvre on both sides of the Atlantic, including a 2021 exhibition at Brooklyn’s Blank Forms (in conjunction with the museum’s book on the Cherrys’ legacy) and a 2016 show at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, which led to 2023’s A Journey Eternal exhibition at the same venue. FWM joins in with The Living Temple: The World of Moki Cherry (on view through April 12, 2026), bringing several decades of Moki’s work into a single space.

Altering the course of humanity?

While it may seem naive in our current era of divisiveness and nationalism, there was once a concerted effort to bridge divides between cultures and establish the basis for understanding between all peoples. Through music, fashion, interpersonal care, and the creation of a home base for new thought, the Cherrys sought to not-so-humbly alter the course of humanity. This included their Organic Music Society (also the title of Don’s 1972 album), which they explored for a decade while living in a repurposed schoolhouse in Tågarp, Sweden, which drew collaborators from around the world.

Don led the musicians through the processes of trans-national musical communication, while Moki created visual iconography (sets, clothing, album art), managed the familial care, cooked, watched other people’s children, and also performed as a musician. (If that sounds to you like unequal duties, you would be right.)

A majestic vision

Once overlooked, Moki’s portals now shimmer and sing on FWM’s white walls: treasures, simple fabrics transformed via appliqué into dragons, sacred (and curvaceous) geometry, demons, monsters, portable shrines. The exhibition gives a large portion of its wall (and ceiling) space to her collaborations with Don and their joint projects of Movement Incorporated and the Organic Music Society.

While utopia doesn’t have everything, Don and Moki’s vision for the world was one of absolute majesty. There is power in fusing the world’s traditions in a way filled with care, truth, and unabashed love. Every piece on display at FWM is filled with details you could easily look at for 10 minutes at a time—a simple process of letting the work wash over you, perhaps unconsciously decoding the iconography or getting lost in waves of color. Even the stains are interesting.

The displays run the gamut of clothing, acrylic paintings, tapestries, sculpture, diaries, stage design, doodles, and film. Also on display are Moki’s diaries and other ephemera from the period. Most enthralling are the larger pieces such as her “air mail” works, various portraits of Don, shrines to self-created syncretic religions, arrangements of Carnatic music, and a dragon whose breath is colorful ribbons.

Not meant for a museum

These works were not simply meant to hang in museums, but were an integral part of the nomadic home for the Cherry family and those adjoining them (as Don said, “if there’s anything that’s going to happen in society, it must start in the home”). Moki would hang giant tapestries from the walls to create a totalizing environment, so that anywhere they went, they would be home. This was a new culture in which the everyday became both a sacred space and a playful space. Even seen in part and in a colder gallery environment, this work succeeds on its own merits. It retains its ability to charge a space with meaning, focus, and awe.

So it’s sad that all we get here is a hint of the harmony of the works together. A corner of the first-floor room has a poorly lit floor-to-ceiling reproduction of a photograph of the Cherrys’ living space, tapestries adorning the walls. In contrast to the immersive intent of the original works, FWM gives us cleanly spaced white walls and hints of music through headphones and monitors. Piff Paff Puff, a children’s show the Cherrys created for Swedish TV in 1971, plays on the museum’s 8th floor, with scenes from the forest, home, and schoolhouse of the couple’s Tågarp collective.

Missing Moki’s life force

As incredible as these assembled works are, this exhibition pales in comparison to the possibilities, best exemplified by the Cherrys’ own self-curated exhibit, which they were invited to create as part of Moderna Museet’s 1971 show, Utopias and Visions 1871-1982. There, the Cherry family held court in a geodesic dome, draped with Moki’s textile art, filled with music and art and community interaction (glimpse it here). Art was not merely displayed; it was made as a musical/visual/interpersonal totality. Visitors were invited into the process as guests, as collaborators, as catalyzers of a vision.

I would have thought that FWM, with its central location, facilities, and emphasis on the generation of new work, would be primed for this type of activity. But the exhibition lacks this dynamic quality. Yes, there was a single concert, and a Junk Drawer Sound Machines workshop is coming up on January 9, but the actual life force of the Cherrys’ work—new improvised music, discussion, convergence, the emergence of a new truth, a way out from this overwhelming hatred—that’s history. No-one is living in this temple anymore, just relics and ghosts.