Opens May 14, 2026
Museum Vestibule
Ellen Berkenblit: The Peacock Room welcomes visitors to the Museum with an unexpected and encompassing visual experience.
For this wallpaper, artist Ellen Berkenblit has transformed a small and delicate source image—a Victorian drawing of a peacock feather—into a bold and outsized design. She created it for the exhibition Ellen Berkenblit: The Clouds are Luminous, her first solo museum show, which opened at the Allentown Art Museum on December 6, 2025, and continues through May 17, 2026. While we usually associate wallpaper with home decor, Berkenblit’s asymmetrical pattern and deep black background disrupt expectations of docile domesticity, making this small room into an immersive experience.
About the artist:
Ellen Berkenblit has been exhibiting nationally and internationally to critical acclaim for forty years. Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others. Berkenblit is the recipient a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2013 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2018, the Drawing Center, New York, commissioned a film about her practice, and in 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago commissioned a site-specific mural by the artist for their Atrium Project. Berkenblit is represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Vielmetter in Los Angeles, Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago, and Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.