D. Dominick Lombardi and QinZa Najm
July 27, 2026UNDERGROUND POETRY FOR UNSETTLED TIMES
September 22, 2026
artwork in banner: Ilaria – “Woolie” (textile sculpture)
Coinciding with New York Fashion Week, WhiteBox presents Counting Sheep, a collaboration with FOUR PAWS that brings contemporary art into direct conversation with one of fashion’s less visible realities: the lives of animals behind the production of wool. Through painting, sculpture, textile, fashion, and durational performance, the participating artists turn the sheep from material resource back into a living presence, asking what disappears when an animal becomes a commodity.
The exhibition moves deliberately between beauty and disturbance, attraction and complicity. Martin Wittfooth’s Agnus Vanitatis revisits Francisco de Zurbarán’s seventeenth-century Agnus Dei. The bound sacrificial lamb remains, but the devotional setting gives way to fabrics, lambskin blankets and mulesing shears. Wittfooth shifts an ancient image of sacrifice into the contemporary economy of fashion, examining our tendency to treat nature as an “extractable resource”—something transformed into what is pleasing, comfortable and fashionable.
Andrea Fischer – Lamb Keychain (soft sculpture – 4.5ft x 4.5ft x 7in)
Andrea Fischer takes another route, transforming the familiar lamb keychain into a monumental soft sculpture. Constructed from recycled materials and vintage animal fabrics, the brightly colored work exaggerates the lamb’s conversion into an accessory while connecting the installation to one hundred smaller lamb objects distributed through the project.
In Woolie, Ilaria similarly places tenderness against violence. The title folds “wool” into “woe,” while the soft, handmade sheep bears a wound beneath its throat alongside the words “fashion victim.” Behind the apparent innocence of the object lies the exhibition’s central contradiction: “beneath the wool, beneath the trend, beneath the industry,” there remains a harmless living being.
Barbara Ishikura – “Isabella’s Seagull” (painting 60x70 in)
Barbara Ishikura’s Isabella’s Seagull expands this inquiry beyond fashion toward our larger relationship with the animal world. Informed by John Berger and Rebecca Solnit, Ishikura approaches animals through kinship and coexistence, invoking “empathy, interconnectedness” and our shared responsibility toward what she calls the “more-than-human world.”
That question of visibility becomes literal in Shay Salehi’s durational performance. Throughout Fashion Week, Salehi will engrave livestock identification tags by hand, beginning with number one and continuing sequentially as the tags accumulate across the gallery wall. An ordinary mechanism for identifying livestock becomes an act of counting and witnessing—a physical register of animals largely rendered invisible within fashion’s systems of production.
Together, these works refuse a simple opposition between art and fashion. Instead, Counting Sheep enters Fashion Week from within its own visual languages—beauty, material, desire, repetition and spectacle—to expose what those languages can conceal. At WhiteBox, the sheep is no longer merely wool. It becomes image, body, number, subject and witness.
Emma Bautista – “Crimson and Clover” (dress/fashion design)