Zoë Buckman Turns Domestic Space into Vigil at Mindy Solomon Gallery

Portrait of Zoë Buckman, artworks in background, “Trace your ridges” (self portrait), and “Smells like Light.” (Photo by Abbey Drucker)  

Zoë Buckman’s new solo exhibition, “Who By Fire,” takes its name from Leonard Cohen’s reworking of the High Holiday prayer “Unetaneh Tokef,” the liturgy that contemplates who will live and who will die in the upcoming year. In Buckman’s hands, that charged refrain becomes a textile language – ink, paint, appliqué, and dense hand-embroidery — stretched across vintage domestic linens. The works are unabashedly intimate and insistently public at once: portraits and self-portraits in the rooms where bodies rest, grieve, recover, and brace.

“I was tethered to my mum’s experience of dying,” Buckman said during a site visit at the Mindy Solomon Gallery. Her mother, she explained, leaned into Cohen and Jewish ritual at the end of her life; the family chose Cohen’s “Alexandra Leaving” for the funeral.

Afterward, Buckman “started to go to Shabbat dinners more and bring more Jewish traditions into my home.” The title track kept circling her. Then, as she began the series, a news item from her London neighborhood landed like a verdict: “Some anti-Semites had set fire to a Jewish family’s house while they were sleeping… The family escaped, but it didn’t make big news. There was just this silence.” She named the series “Who By Fire” because, as she says bluntly, “it’s the truth.”

“Before they became an outline”, Ink, acrylic, hand embroidery, applique on vintage textile, 2025, 73.5″ x 90″ x 2″ framed (Courtesy of Zoë Buckman/Mindy Solomon Gallery)

The images that Buckman photographs — family and community members in bedrooms, on couches, under quilts— become compositions painted and stitched into vintage cloth. That translation, lens to cloth, shifts the ethics of looking: the textile isn’t merely a picture plane; it’s a used thing, already bearing seams, stains, hems.

“I’m really drawn to bedding,” she said, standing before a large self-portrait. “The bed is this place of such comfort and intimacy, and unfortunately, can be such a place of trauma also.” Her own quilt appears again and again: “This is the third or fourth time I’ve depicted it. I really need a new quilt,” she added, wryly, “because it’s so laborious sewing and painting this thing every time.”

If the bed is a sanctuary, the surface isn’t peaceful. Threads dangle in unruly cascades; appliqués lift and “fly” off a hoodie; stitched lines hover between drawing, scar, and suture. “One way I’m speaking to precariousness is with the threads,” said Buckman. “They’re loose and hanging down—a bit like drips or tears… It’s not perfect, it’s not finished, it’s not done.” The effect is a felt unease that never overwhelms the tenderness in the faces, hands, and postures she renders.

Refusing denialism, practicing care

Buckman has long made work about gendered violence. The new series widens that inquiry to Jewish identity amid a climate of rising antisemitism. “The denial of our experiences as women has always been part of my work,” she said, citing the familiar victim-blaming script that surrounds sexual assault. “In recent years, I was alarmed by the denial of the Holocaust—even in New York, the most Jewish city in America. Then, October 7 happened… what added to the trauma was the denial of the sexual assaults that took place.”

How to make denial visible without re-traumatizing viewers — or herself — became a central formal question. “The pieces I first made don’t exist,” she admitted. “They were much more graphic. I put them away. I realized I didn’t want to spend the next two years embroidering depictions of awful things and put that into the world. That’s not me.” Instead, “Who By Fire” insists on complexity: “I want there to be joy, color, beauty, texture. So, there’s this play between confrontation and care.”

That duality runs through the titles—poetic fragments that feel diaristic but open. Works called “clock,” “the exit.” and “crows on the tracks” point to hyper-vigilance and memory.

“Clocking the exits is something many of us do automatically,” she said. The crows come from a childhood commute: “No one needs to know that, but I like people to draw their own parallels.”

“Crows on the tracks, hand embroidery, applique on vintage textile, 2025, 40″ X 41.5″ X 2″ framed (Courtesy of Zoë Buckman/Mindy Solomon Gallery)

Labor, scale, and taking up space

Buckman’s practice spans neon, ceramics, and sculpture; here, textiles demanded a different kind of time. “I’ve never worked so f—— hard in my life,” she laughed, then winced. “Each piece I have at some point hated. It’s intimate—painting, sewing, sewing, sewing—not talking to people for days. I’ve accidentally sewn my fingers into the work.” Unlike fabricated neon, this is labor that can’t be outsourced. The payoff is presence: “These are the largest works I’ve ever made. To learn how to take up space and say, we are here and we’re not going anywhere—but to do it through something made with my own hands—that’s been the challenge.”

Two monumental canvases—her “besties,” as she called them—anchor the show, each taking six to nine months. Their scale changes how we stand with the subjects: not over them, but near, as if pausing at the threshold of someone’s room, invited yet cautious. The embroidery throws small shadows; the stitch becomes light, and light becomes a kind of breathing.

Against slogans, toward nuance

If “Who By Fire” confronts a public crisis, it resists the aesthetics of the placard. “Politically driven artwork was becoming very reductive and slogan-based,” said Buckman. “Everything was losing nuance, losing the capacity to connect. It got shouty.” Her antidote is patience—of making and of meaning. “If I keep focusing on tenderness, nuance, richness, depth—on multiple layers—people will want to engage with that again. Maybe it takes a decade. Maybe long after I’m gone.”

That patience has not shielded her from risk. Buckman has endured trolling since her early twenties; controversy around abortion and sexual-assault work brought the usual vitriol.

“What I never imagined,” she said, “was bullying from my peers. There’s been a really huge risk in speaking up about antisemitism and the Jewish experience in an industry and a time of willful misunderstanding and blatant hatred… But I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t making work proudly about what it is to be in these identities and these bodies.”

“Clocks the exit”, Ink, acrylic, hand embroidery on vintage textile, 2025, 74.5″ x 56.5″ x 2″ framed (Courtesy of Zoë Buckman/Mindy Solomon Gallery)

A house of cloth, a room for breath

In the gallery, the domestic origins of Buckman’s materials shape how we move: a rhythm of approach and retreat, like stepping into a doorway and back again. Quilts become weather; stitches, isobars. Loose threads hang like the ends of a whispered sentence. The rooms of home—where we bless bread and spill tea, where we are vulnerable and, sometimes, unsafe—are rendered as topographies of care. You feel the double exposure: the warmth of a bed, the jolt of sirens; the safety of ritual, the anxiety of “not knowing what’s coming next.”

If the series begins in grief and alarm, it refuses to end there. The cloth holds multitudes: repair and rupture, testimony and hush, a mother’s quilt, and a daughter’s stubborn hope. Buckman’s images are not answers but dwellings—spaces where a viewer can sit with contradiction without being shouted at, where a community can insist on its presence without apology.

As the conversation came to a close, she mentioned the work’s discipline as a kind of ritual time: “It’s like sitting shiva… These are ten months.” The line lands with weight—and with a strange comfort. To stitch is to count days, to hold what frays, to choose tenderness as method and message.

WHAT: “Who By Fire,” Zoë Buckman solo exhibition
WHERE: Mindy Solomon Gallery, 848 NW 22nd St., Miami
WHEN: 11 a.m to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, Opened Sunday Nov. 30, 2025 through Saturday Jan. 10, 2026
COST: Free
INFORMATION: 786-953-6917 or mindysolomon.com

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.