Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) · Miracle Mile

Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudo & NUNO

Now showing20 September 2026 – 7 March 2027·$30

Four decades of Reiko Sudō's innovative textiles for NUNO, merging tradition with experimentation and handicraft with technology. Resnick Pavilion.

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In 1990 Reiko Sudō took a trick from car factories, sputtering iron, nickel and chrome onto plastic parts, and tried it on cloth. The result, Stainless Steel Gloss, is ultralight and see-through, and one client's shirt in it set off an airport metal detector, to Sudō's delight.

This is the largest survey of her textiles yet: over 100 lengths made with NUNO, the Tokyo studio she has led since 1987, hung as suspended sheets beside sketches, tools, prototypes and short production films. Sections run from metals, heat-set origami folds and acid burnout to washi paper, a revived silk-stencil technique and kibiso, the coarse outer cocoon layer usually turned into animal feed and soap. You finish inside a re-creation of NUNO's first shop, a 1984 Roppongi basement.

The labels lean hard on process, down to which acid ate which fiber. Time Out lists it as recommended. Resnick Pavilion, included with general admission ($30), open until 8pm Fridays, closed Wednesdays, until 7 March 2027.

Look for

Stainless Steel Gloss
Look for the semitransparent polyester sputtered with iron, nickel and chrome; a chrome-only version, reworked to pass California's fire tests, now hangs as curtains in the David Geffen Galleries.
George kasuri ("George Ikat"), 1985
A reversible black-and-white cloth named for Boy George: a photo of him in an ikat led Jun'ichi Arai to scan an ikat pattern into binary code.
Hane Organza ("Feather Organza")
Loose feathers float in rows of sheer pockets; the loom was stopped every few seconds so each feather could be slipped in by hand.
The stained-glass burnout cloth
Acid burned a black cotton layer away in a lattice to release colour beneath, copied from the bamboo windows of Kyoto's Katsura Imperial Villa, the same source Josef Albers used.
The 1984 NUNO shop, re-created
The original Roppongi basement shop rebuilt, with Arai's bold black, white and indigo textiles beside cloth he collected across Africa, Asia and the Americas.