CROSS YOUR HEART — Spring 2026
Julie Nightstand (center) collaged with vintage Morning Glory photographs
There are gestures we learn as children and repeat without much thought. A finger drawn across the chest, a stem threaded and linked to another, a hand cupped outward to receive a gift or a quiet phrase repeated. These actions are often unconscious, but through them our beliefs, fears, wishes, and desires are carried outward, even just for a instant, from within.
These fleeting moments resist language. They are marked, instead, by ritual and gesture. With that in mind, we invite you to consider the ties binding us and the fragile forms they take. Cross Your Heart, pairs our latest designs with new works by artists Hiroko Takeda, Joshua Vogel, Molly Haynes, Taylor Kibby, Ariel Dearie, and Rodger Stevens. In different ways, each of these artists’ attend to the subtle exchanges between hand and material, touching on the intimate and delicate act of both form making, and meaning making.
The exhibition title, Cross Your Heart, recalls a phrase learned in childhood: "cross my heart, hope to die..." A vow both solemn and soft, this childish promise is made not through contract, but through shared belief and trust. What emerges in the space between these works is something similarly held. Cross Your Heart presents a collection of works that suggest devotion without declaring it, connection without fixing it, and meaning that is present even as it wilts away.
It is April 16th. This morning, after breakfast, my two-year-old daughter and I stepped outside. She wanted to inspect the spring flowers, just now unfolding their delicate petals. I watched as she examined a small branch from a flowering tree nearby and let my mind wander backward. Like pages turning. Back. Back. Back.
Back to my childhood.
Back to a peony unfolding in my mother’s garden in Illinois, a single ant traversing its petals still wet with rain.
Back to clovers in the grass that clung to my toes as I ran barefoot in the summertime.
Back to pinky swears, and daisy chains, and secrets shared at recess.
Back to looking a friend in the eye and whispering “cross my heart and hope to die…” with utter sincerity and meaning simply: I promise. You can trust me.
Back to all the delicate bonds and solemn vows I’ve made. Some kept still. Some now broken.
A flower, a motion, an action, a promise. Each a token of friendship, affection, or fleeting love. Each held close to the heart, the place within us that feels nearest to the sacred.
And yet, what I was echoing in those childish moments (without knowing) was something much older.
To cross one’s heart is believed to stem from the Christian gesture of tracing the sign of the cross across the chest, a way of calling truth into the body, and placing one’s words under witness. It was never just a promise, but an invocation: a quiet appeal to something beyond oneself to hold it fast. Over time, the gesture softened, passing from ritual into playground, from oath into game, until it became what we remember—a child’s earnest insistence that what is said must be believed.
And the flowers, looped stem through stem into fragile chains, carry their own lineage. Daisies, long associated with innocence and devotion, were gathered not for their rarity but for their abundance. Anyone could pick them. Anyone could make something from them. A chain formed slowly, link by link, each connection held in place by care alone. They were worn, gifted, forgotten. They wilted by day’s end.
Still, they meant something.
There is a particular kind of promise made in these small acts that are unwritten, unrecorded, and sometimes unkept. Not the binding oaths of ceremony or contract, but softer offerings that lace us together while ripe, and release us when spent. They bloom. They wilt.
Gestures that hold meaning not because they endure, but because they are made at all. Arising like a flower from the bare soil. Action. Connection. Repitition. Fragility in the face of permanence. Fragility as permanence? Not a stone. A flower. Not a church. A field….
To cross your heart. To weave a chain of flowers. To bind something, briefly, and believe in it while it lasts.
Made to fade, but not without meaning.
On view at Egg Collective’s Tribeca Gallery, Soft Earth is a temporary shoppable installation featuring florals, fashion, and furniture from three female-led brands rooted in craft: Egg Collective, Thank You Have a Good Day and Fox Fodder Flowers
Opening Weekend
Saturday, March 21st & Sunday, March 22nd
from 11-5
151 Hudson Street
On view through April 24th, 2026
Fox Fodder Flower Arrangement (center) with vintage Iris photographs
Rooted in Tribeca and guided by three female-led studios devoted to craft, Soft Earth celebrates the power of creative alignment. Each brand brings its own language of design, yet together they form a shared landscape—one where furniture, flowers, and garments emerge as part of the same living environment.
Reflecting the subtle beauty of the season’s awakening, within the gallery petals unfurl beside sculptural forms, textiles echo the softness of newly warmed earth, and natural materials carry the memory of the landscapes from which they came. The installation invites visitors to move through these layers slowly, discovering how objects can hold both delicacy and strength, much like the first blooms of spring.
Thank You Have a Good Day Skirt and Cropped Tank (center) with vintage Cherry Blossom photographs
Like the equinox itself, the collaboration is about balance: between nature and design, structure and softness, individuality and community. In this moment of seasonal renewal, the installation is both a celebration of new work and a gesture toward the possibilities that grow when creative voices gather and bloom together.
Phillips Nightstand (center) collaged with vintage Peony photographs
A Light exists in Spring
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period -
When March is scarcely here
A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.
It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.
Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay --
A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament
— Emily Dickinson