From Canvas to Cloth: Honouring John Weeks Through Wearable Art
A modernist painting of a North African city, born of 1920s travels and reimagined on mulberry silk — the story of LS Silk NZ's collaboration with The Suter Art Gallery.
Some paintings sit still on a wall. African City was never quite one of them. Even in oil on strawboard, John Weeks's composition seems to shift and fold in on itself — all geometry and rhythm, a city seen as much in movement as in stone. Which is perhaps why it took so naturally to silk.
In a quiet meeting of elegance and legacy, The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū has partnered with LS Silk NZ to transform a work by the modernist painter John Weeks into a limited-edition silk scarf — an invitation to art lovers, collectors and the simply curious to wear a fragment of cultural history.
A modernist touchstone, reborn in silk
At the centre of the collaboration is African City, a striking oil-on-strawboard composition by John Weeks (1886–1965), regarded as one of New Zealand's earliest abstractionists. It grew out of his travels across Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia in the 1920s, and it hums with Cubist influence and architectural lyricism — a work so full of rhythm and balance that it seems to ask to be set in motion.
The Suter Art Gallery, a cultural institution whose roots reach back to 1890, chose African City as part of an ongoing effort to bring art beyond the gallery walls and into daily life.
From gallery to garment
The collaboration began the way the best ones do — as a conversation. Curators and creatives, and a shared idea: to translate canvas into cloth, pigment into pattern, a piece of legacy into something you could live in.
“We saw in African City not just a painting, but a blueprint for movement,” the LS Silk NZ team reflects. “The composition almost folds in on itself, like silk. There is tension and balance. We knew it could live beautifully beyond the frame.”
Working closely with The Suter's curatorial team, our designers adapted the work with exacting attention — preserving its tonal architecture and palette while coaxing it to behave on the tactile, light-catching surface of silk. The result feels at once archival and modern: artistic, and yet effortless to wear.
John Weeks: the artist behind the abstraction
Born in Devon and raised in New Zealand, John Weeks was a trailblazer of early twentieth-century painting in Aotearoa. He studied in Europe and taught at the Elam School of Fine Arts, bringing a distinctly international sensibility home to local modernism.
In Paris he studied under the Cubist André Lhote, and his extensive travels across North Africa lent a worldly texture to everything that followed. He was among the first New Zealand painters to embrace geometric abstraction outright — privileging rhythm, colour and form over straightforward representation. His legacy lives on in The Suter's permanent collection, and now in the softly folded corners of a scarf.
A scarf that carries a story
Woven from 100% pure mulberry silk and finished with hand-rolled edges, the African City scarf is less a fashion piece than a portable archive — a wearable fragment of modernist heritage. Knotted at the neck, looped through the handle of a bag, or draped loose across the shoulders, it moves like a line of poetry: expressive, layered, quietly bold. The geometric forms still echo the far-travelled cities that inspired them, only now softened by fabric and light.
Only a limited number have been made, which makes each one something of a collector's piece.
Where to find it
The African City silk scarf is available exclusively through The Suter Art Gallery in Nelson and online at lovesilk.co.nz.
A painting made from the memory of distant cities, carried now on the shoulders of people half a world away — it is, in the end, exactly the journey African City was always about.