Abstract weaving is having a moment: here’s why

Since the earliest days of textile art, believed to be around 10,000 BC, abstraction has been used to convey meaning. Although the theme of an abstract work is not so clearly communicated, these textures are embedded in the politics of their time. In ancient Andean communities, for example, colorful geometric patterns on wool were used to communicate messages across linguistic and geographic boundaries. XVIII From the 19th century to the present, abstractions woven into blankets, rugs and clothing have become symbols of cultural resilience and preservation for the Navajo/Diné people. And in modern and contemporary fiber art, an artist’s choice of non-figurative forms is a stance in itself.

This spring, a series of US museum exhibitions, including “Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies” at MoMA PS1 and “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York; “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; “Hana Miletić: Soft Services” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and “Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper” at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, are taking a fresh look at the importance of abstraction in textiles over a period of time. In the art world, where textiles have often been neglected, geometries are now spreading in the minds of curators. For the showcased talents who have worked quietly in the textile industry for years, the change is welcome.

Textile artists and experts say that the trend is more to recognize this increase. In the last five years, their long-forgotten artwork has experienced tremendous institutional interest. Finally, like photography or ceramics, textiles have shed the often used labels of “craft” or “applied art” and are gaining their rightful place in the canon of fine art.

“We’ve had to fight really long and hard to be considered fine art,” said fourth-generation Navajo weaver Melissa Cody, who is preparing for her first major solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 on April 4, following another at the Museum. de Arte de São Paulo at Assis Chateaubriand and Garth Greenan Gallery in New York at the end of the month. In recent years, he has also been selected for group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery in Washington DC, and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. For Indigenous artists, there are additional barriers, including a lack of cultural knowledge and representation within the current class of art museum curators.

When museums display traditional models, “there has been a big push for institutions to consult with individual tribes to get more information about the many historical works they have, but also about their contemporary collections. valid,” Cody said. It’s been a big change since she graduated from the museum studies program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2007, she said. consider tribal histories. For a long time, much of our information was ignored because it was never written down; For most American tribes, histories are verbal.’

Cody’s abstract textures address the past and present existence of his indigenous community. For example, he draws colors and patterns from the Germantown sampler: wool from Pennsylvania used to make blankets given to the Navajo people when the US government forced them off their ancestral lands. Her works touch on themes from her life as a child growing up on a reservation, learning to weave from her mother at the age of five, and selling those pieces as early as elementary school for the latest tech toy. This experience of digital life also permeates his layered geometric compositions: the “noble pixel,” he called it, referring to the technological developments that proliferated in his childhood.

At the Met, Weaving Abstraction curators Iria Candela and Joanne Pillsbury are also exploring artistic connections between history. Interdepartmental exhibitions from the first millennium BC to the 16th century. presents Andean tapestries dating back to the 19th century alongside the modern work of four female fiber artists from the museum’s collection: Anni Albers, Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney and Olga de Amaral. In addition to a shared exploration of geometry driven by warp and weft processes, these works spanning time are also linked through research: modern practitioners drew deep inspiration from the ancient textiles of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

Albers first saw examples in Berlin in the 1920s while in the Bauhaus textile workshop, and in the 1930s, she traveled to Mexico and Cuba with the painter Josef Albers, her husband, and they became collectors of pre-Columbian artwork and textiles. the samples Similarly, Hicks, Tawney, and de Amaral collected fragments from their travels in South America throughout their careers, each based on academic research they conducted at the same time in the 1960s.

In the ancient Andes, “while fiber arts and textiles were the most valued form of signaling,” explained Candela, “in the 20th century textiles were relegated to the world of handicrafts and women’s work,” considered a lesser form of art. . It is interesting that Anni Albers was able to move more fluidly between the worlds of commercial textiles and textile art in her career and respect for both. In 1949, he held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, featuring his functional fabric designs for draperies and room dividers, along with some of his first textiles. For a medium long displaced from the art world, the exhibition “was a real paradigm shift,” said Fritz Horstman, director of education at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. “This is probably one of the major contributions to textiles,” he continued. “It really raised the bar where, although we’re still moving up, it could be seen on the same level as painting and sculpture.”

Hicks, Tawney and de Amaral were members of the fiber arts movement of the 1970s, which aimed to continue to bring this medium to the center of the art world, using references from non-Western cultures where it was highly respected. They also collaborated with commercial manufacturers to make functional home textiles, but their “goal [was] for pure formal experimentation for the sake of art,” says Candela.