John Paul Morabito: Immortal @ Nancy Toomey Fine Art
Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by John Paul Morabito titled Immortal, curated by Patricia Sweetow, on view from February 18 to March 28, 2026. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.
The public is invited to meet artist John Paul Morabito at the gallery on Saturday, March 14, from 5pm to 7pm.
John Paul Morabito’s exhibition, curated by Patricia Sweetow at Nancy Toomey Fine Art, is a collection of dazzling woven, beaded tapestries. Immortal is an homage to Sylvester, the iconic Queen of Disco whose haunting falsetto, electronic rhythms, lyrics, and gender-fluid persona transformed devotion into dance anthems of queer liberation. This was at a time when sexual energy pulsed in clubs throughout urban centers where seduction, drag, sparkle, protest, coming out, and demands for equal rights and decriminalization began ripping through the hetero-normative walls of the United States. Immortal takes its name from the posthumous collection released after Sylvester died of AIDS related complications in 1988, which highlighted his activism and the legacy of his work. It is a reminder that the queer dance floor has always been a site of joy, protest, and survival.
Transdisciplinary weaver John Paul Morabito channels splendor, sensuality, erotics, blasphemy, sacrament, metaphor, mourning, and protest into flamboyant and glittering abstractions that exalt in queer grace. Morabito’s luminous tapestries tower as a metaphoric rallying cry. “I am retracing of the queer resistance born in urban discos of a prior generation,” says the artist. “As social and political forces once again seek to eradicate queer people, I, like those who came before me, reach for the promise of queer futurity.”
John Paul Morabito was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in 2024. They are Assistant Professor and Head of Textiles at Kent State University in Ohio. From 2013 to 2022 they were on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. They hold a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In tandem with their studio, John Paul Morabito pursues a practice-led scholarship that positions weaving as a critical platform of cultural production. Their writing has been published in Art China, The Textile Reader 2 (China Academy of Art), The Journal of Textile Design Research, and Practice, Textile: Cloth and Culture. They are the editor of Weaving Beyond the Binary, a special issue of the international peer-reviewed journal, Textile: Cloth and Culture. Their work has been included in museum exhibitions, including the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC; The Threads We Follow, North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem (formerly SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC; Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ledesma, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou City, China. Recent press includes a monograph feature in TextielPlus and a feature in the Art Issue of W Magazine. Their tapestries are included in public and private collections, with a recent placement at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.