Janet Echelman is probably the most successful living artist affiliated with Greater Boston. She and her team at Studio Echelman, based in Brookline, have advanced fiber art into the arena of grand public sculptures, weaving dazzling nets suspended above parks and plazas, often lit with glowing colors, so that they appear like psychedelic interstellar jellyfish hovering over our cities, come in peace.
A career retrospective, “Janet Echelman: Radical Softness” at the Sarasota Art Museum through April 2026 shows the scope of her art—with public installations from Singapore, Sydney, Shanghai, Santiago and Beijing to San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Seattle.
She’s lived on and off in Boston, studied at Harvard and Lesley University, taught at MIT, served on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, though of late she’s based in Florida, where he was born in Tampa in 1966.
But for all her longtime Boston connections, her art isn’t often seen around here. She’s currently got a net sculpture on view at the lobby of the MIT Museum in Cambridge through 2027, and she had a giant net suspended above Boston’s Greenway in 2015. Echelman hints that she’s got a permanent artwork planned for Cambridge. “I think it’s not yet publicly announced,” she tells me. “But it’s coming soon.”
In the meantime, Echelman has devised a pair of red, green and blue nets, sort of like wondrous giant mesh pillowcases, that dancers and aerialists from Montreal scamper and climb and roll and fall across, up to 25 feet above the stage, in “Noli Timere,” an aerial and sculptural spectacle developed in collaboration with New York and Nova Scotia choreographer Rebecca Lazier that arrives at ArtsEmerson’s Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston from Jan. 29 to Feb. 1, 2026.
“This is a new project in every way and a more ambitious collaboration than I’ve ever dreamed,” Echelman says of the show, which debuted at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, last February.
“Noli Timere” (Latin for “Be Not Afraid,” also a reference to her friend, Nobel Prize-winning Harvard professor and poet Seamus Heaney’s last words) addresses “how we navigate an unstable world” and the “fragile beauty and urgency of human and ecological interconnectedness,” according to an ArtsEmerson press release.
The dancers moving across the shifting nets to music by Quebecoise composer Jorane might be seen as a metaphor. “We impact the world and the world impacts us,” Lazier says.
“‘Noli Timere’ is the culmination of a long artistic search to express how to navigate a world where the ground is no longer solid – and how to do this without fear,” Echelman says in the press release.
Echelman and Lazier began developing the performance in a workshop at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2019 (“This could have been a terrible idea: humans in nets,” Lazier remembers), then a workshop at Princeton University, where Lazier is a professor, that began in January 2020 and was cut short by covid.
“This is so timely because the world is so unstable now,” Lazier says they thought at the time.
“We never imagined how unstable the world could be,” Echelman adds now.
“Noli Timere” is performed by a cast of eight—plus riggers. The on-stage dancers and aerialists perform in duos, sometimes rolling around embraced, sometimes with one walking on net and the other hanging below like a reflection, and in whole cast gangs, running and swinging and climbing.
“I see the net itself as a dancer,” Echelman explains. There are “four backstage riggers who dance the net like a marionette with pulleys.”
“Nothing I planned ever worked,” Lazier says of developing the choreography. The nets hamper movement. So the show required new invention. “You can’t be decorative,” she says. “Everything has to be focused on getting somewhere or helping someone get there.”
Lazier says, “You can’t understand the physics of it without being in it.”
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