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Ann Wilson, Moby Dick, 1955, detail.
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New York City is open for business and enjoyment, and I made my first out-of-state trip in over a year, visiting family in the Big Apple, and traipsing to the Whitney Museum to see this exhibit.
The exhibit includes work in many media, but I'll focus on fiber works, or creations made using fiber techniques, in this post.
From the wall text:
This exhibition foregrounds how visual artists have explored the materials, methods, and strategies of craft over the past seven decades. Drawn primarily from the Whitney's collection, it features the work of more than sixty artists who emphasize the tactility of the objects they make. Some have expanded techniques with long histories - such as weaving, sewing, or throwing pots - while others have experimented with unexpected applications of textiles, clay, and bead, among other mediums. Traces of the artists' hands-on engagement with their materials in many works invite viewers to imagine how it might have felt to make them.
While artists' reasons for taking up craft vary widely, many have aimed to subvert prevailing standards for judging so-called fine art, often in direct response to the politics of their time. By reclaiming visual languages that are often coded as feminine, domestic, or vernacular, these artists seek to undo the marginalizaton of certain modes of artistic production. The works on view provide new perspectives on subjects that have been centrally important to artists, including abstraction, popular culture, feminist and queer aesthetics, and the recent examination of identity and its relationship to place. Together they demonstrate that craft-informed techniques of making carry their own kind of knowledge, one that is indispensable to a more complete understanding of the history and potential of art.
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Ruth Asawa, Untitled, 1955.
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One highlight of the exhibit is the excellent audio guide, which you can access on a smartphone. The selections include part of an interview with Asawa. The shadows cast by the crocheted wire are an integral part of the presentation.
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Untitled, detail.
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Lenore Tawney, Spirit River, 1966
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Lenore Tawney (1907-2007) was an influential figure in the modern fiber arts movement; while conceptually innovative, the realization of her pieces involved repetitive, laborious processes she regarded as akin to meditation. By fusing abstract ideas with weaving, and other traditional techniques, she elevated fiber as a sculptural medium. Spirit River, below, is made of linen and steel rods; its openness is characteristic of her early work.
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Spirit River, detail.
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Tawney's later work became less pervious, with the woven surface becoming more dominant and revealing only glimpses, made by discontinuities in the weave, of the wall behind.
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Lenore Tawney, Four Petaled Flower II, 1974.
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Four Petaled Flower II, detail, linen and steel rods.
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Annie Albers (1899-1994) is represented by two pieces - but, surprisingly, these are lithographs. Everyone knows Albers' weaving, but I learned that:
...Albers turned to printmaking in 1963; "In lithography, " she explained, "The image of the threads could project a freedom I had never suspected." By the end of the 1960s Albers had stopped hand-weaving altogether and instead focused on printmaking for the rest of her career.
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Annie Albers, Line Involvement IV, 1964.
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This same gallery featured an artist with whom I was unfamiliar - Ann Wilson (b. 1931). The work below (and at the top of this post) is the first of her "quilt paintings," made after she found a discarded quilt in a seaside dump. From the curator's text:
For Wilson, quilts were reminders of her upbringing in Western Pennsylvania and the handiwork of her female relatives. Using the salvaged quilt as a canvas, instead of a functional object, Wilson partially overpainted grids along the fabric's seams, revealing the form's underlying geometry. At the time, Wilson was working in Coenties Slip among a community of artists who kept studios in vacant buildings near Manhattan's southern harbor that had been abandoned by the declining shipping industry. The work's title evokes the area's maritime history - Coenties Slip is mentioned in the opening chapter of Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1859). Rather than exalting this epic American narrative, the methods Wilson usese to make Moby Dick emphasize the complicated layers that create history - like a patchwork of tradition, subject to decay and regeneration.
Of course, this work was made before the landmark 1971 exhibit of Amish quilts at the Whitney, when quilts began to be accorded "art" status in their own right, without amendation or alteration, or becoming a kind of palimpsest for another artist's work. If not valued intrinsically, textile objects easily become fragile and vulnerable. Wilson's work can be seen as adding value through over-painting, transforming a cast-off
into something entirely new and gallery-worthy.
In a sign of the times, when I now look at log cabin quilts, the seams remind me of the folds of a face mask.
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Moby Dick, Ann Wilson, 1955.
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Rosie Lee Tompkins, Three Sixes, 1986.
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Faith Ringgold, Feminist Series: Of My Two Handicaps, #10 of 20, 1972/1993.
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From the curators:
This painting from Faith Ringgold's Feminist Series includes a quote from Shirley Chisholm, who in 1968 became the first Black congresswoman. The text, which reads, "Of my two handicaps, being female put more obstacles in my path than being Black," helped Ringgold articulate her frustrations with gender and racial inequity.
Ringgold's chosen materials and format also refer to her growing investment in the woman's movement. "Of My Two Handicaps" is made in the form of a thangka, a type of painted Tibetan hanging scroll. When Ringgold first encountered thangkas in 1972, she had been painting on stretched canvas, often at a large scale, and she found this ancient format full of possibility. She had grown up around fabric and sewing - her mother, Willi Posey, worked as a fashion designer in Harlem - and was determined that she needed to "stop denying the part of me that love making things with cloth."
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Of My Two Handicaps, detail, acrylic on canvas, framed in cloth.
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Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015) is another artist for whom the personal is political. In an interview used in the audio guide, she states that she felt women had democratized art, by bringing making things for the home and (I think) because many designers of mass-produced apparel and furnishing fabrics were unsung women graduates of art schools.
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Miriam Schapiro, The Beauty of Summer, 1973-74.
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The Beauty of Summer, detail, acrylic and fabric on canvas.
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Again, from the wall text:
In 1972, Miriam Schapiro began to incorporate textiles onto painted canvas surfaces. The materials she chose - including patterned fabric, lace, crocheted doilies, embroidered handkerchiefs, and aprons, among others - were associated with woman's work in the home. She called the method "Femmage," combining the feminine associations of her chosen materials with her collage-based method. Works like The Beauty of Summer demonstrate her pointed rejection of the hard-edge abstract mode in which she had worked in the 1960s. This stylistic change coincided with a profound ideological one. Schapiro embraced feminism and realized that she no longer subscribed to the belief that art could be separated from social reality. Instead she endeavored to celebrate "the decorative," a term that had long been pejoratively linked to femininity.
The exhibit also included men working with fiber, including Jordan Nasser, who works in the traditional medium of Palestinian embroidery called tatreez. (Learn more about tatreez here and see a tutorial here)
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Jordan Nassar, A Lost Key, 2019.
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A Lost Key, detail, hand embroidery on cotton and wood frame.
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Nassar works collaboratively with women in Palestine, who stitch the borders, leaving the center blank for Nassar to complete. The landscape-like imagery and title evoke displacement and yearning, and elicit interpretations of homeland across generations.
Tatreez is a form of cross-stitch and Elaine Reichek (b. 1943) also works in precise cross-stitch; two of her modern samplers are featured. Reichek updates the tradition of schoolgirl samplers: present are the unchanging alphanumeric characters identical to those sewn by 19th-century children, but the aphorisms have changed. I've rotated some of the text in the sampler border, for easier readability.
In Sampler (The Ultimate), Reichek quotes some of the men associated with the Bauhaus, the industrial design and architecture school founded by Walter Gropius in 1919. The school was progressive in its design outlook, not so much in terms of gender equality, as the quotes from contemporaries show.
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Elaine Reichek, Sampler (The Ultimate), 1996.
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Sampler, detail, hand embroidery on linen.
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Sampler, detail, quote from Adolf Loos.
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Elaine Reichek, Sampler (Kruger/Holzer), 1998.
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Sampler, detail, hand embroidery on linen.
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Sampler, detail.
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Liza Lou, Kitchen, 1991-1996, wood, papier mache, found objects, beads.
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Finally, I include a crowd-pleasing work which is the apotheosis of laborious handwork. Every. Surface. In. This. Kitchen. Is. Beaded. Even the cookbook pages. The artist used wood and papier mache to create the objects and then encrusted the objects and surfaces in shiny beads. It glitters but, oh, the drudgery reflected in placing and gluing each individual bead in place.
Hours and hours, in the kitchen...
