Artforum : LOOMING LARGE Presentations of textile art in Washington, DC; New York; and Chicago (by K. L. H. Wells)
Olga de Amaral, Entorno Quieto 5 (Stillness 5), 1993, horsehair, hand-spun wool, 86 1⁄2 × 84". From “Threaded Visions: Contemporary Weavings from the Collection.”
IN ART CRITICISM covering exhibitions of decorative arts or crafts, the display of marginalized media such as textiles is often cast as a newsworthy novelty and even a subversive intervention in the world of fine art. As a trio of recent exhibitions demonstrate, however, textiles have been an important, elite, even “fine” art since at least the fourth century BCE. The three shows—at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago—all frame textiles’ significance in relation to the abstraction of the modernist avant-garde, but their variety of methods suggest how much more remains to be said about the importance of textiles in a global history of art.
The most ambitious of these exhibitions is “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” organized by Lynne Cooke at the National Gallery of Art. Previously on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and traveling to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, “Woven Histories” is described in its press release as a “landmark” show. Spanning a period from 1913 to the present, the exhibition encompasses approximately 150 objects by nearly sixty artists spread across seven thematic sections. The show’s title suggests that the diverse array of objects on view is linked or “woven” together through shared histories, while the wall texts describe the art in such terms as legacies, generations, lineages, traditions, inspiration, kinship, and genealogies. Collectively the show presents an alternative history of modern and contemporary art dominated by weaving and textiles, yet the historical relationships of these artworks to one another are rarely articulated with clarity. The exhibition’s minimal didactics and loose chronology suggest the organizers were wary of charting too straightforward a history through such complex material.
Valerie Jaudon, Jackson, 1976, metallic pigment in polymer emulsion and pencil on canvas, framed 73 × 73″. From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
One historical relationship that the exhibition does attempt to delineate clearly is between women artists (such as Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, and Hannah Höch) who designed textiles as a way to support their artmaking and to effect “social change” during the “utopian” period of the 1930s, and feminist artists of the ’70s and beyond (such as Liz Collins, Harmony Hammond, and Rosemarie Trockel), for whom textiles were a medium of political intervention. The exhibition informs us that “for inspiration,” such “feminist-inspired” artists “looked outside of their academic training to the marginalized, cross-disciplinary practices of women artists of the interwar years.” But if, as the exhibition suggests, there was something inherently radical in the use of textiles by early twentieth-century artists, that assumption is challenged by these later feminists, who frequently draw attention to textiles’ non-utopian qualities. For example, in a section of the show devoted to labor, works by Carole Frances Lung, Senga Nengudi, Lisa Oppenheim, and Sascha Reichstein focus on the workers who make textiles in industrial factories and by hand. Collectively, these examples suggest the extent to which the relative invisibility of this labor enables exploitation in a globalized textile trade. Meanwhile, Ann Hamilton raises questions about the global textile industry’s impact on climate change. For (side by side.coats), 2018/2023, installed in the exhibition lobby, she felted together unwashed fleeces from heritage sheep with secondhand woolen coats, visualizing the life cycle of a particular textile material from its natural animal source to a used, discarded garment. Elsewhere, in a section devoted to self-fashioning, Collins highlights the ableism of mainstream fashion design. In Walking Wounded, 2011, a handmade banner advertises the artist’s offer to knit WOUNDS onto visitors’ clothing for a small fee. SLASHES and SORES can be GRAFTED onto garments to enable their owners to WEAR YOUR HEART ON YOUR SLEEVE! With humor and absurdity, Collins’s project highlights the extent to which conventional clothing seeks to hide physical and psychic scars, disabilities, or bodily differences behind a veil of acceptable conformity.
View of “American Sources of Modern Art,” 1933, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Paradoxically, “Woven Histories” acknowledges these more contemporary critiques while simultaneously glorifying earlier women artists who participated in the booming textile industry as “trailblazing” social change. As the exhibition emphasizes, the textile industry pivoted toward synthetic materials and fast fashion over the course of the twentieth century, yet the show never addresses how its earlier heroines may have anticipated such changes. Do Delaunay’s fun, colorful modernist dresses foreshadow today’s sped-up trend cycles of patterned prints? Did Albers’s incorporation of Lurex, acetate, rayon, cellophane, and other synthetic fibers into her weavings help legitimate materials that would later prove to have negative ecological impacts? In raising these questions I don’t mean to imply that “Woven Histories” should have denounced these earlier artists for engaging with the textile industry, but rather to suggest that tracing a history between multiple generations of women artists isn’t as easy as hanging their work in adjoining galleries. The politics of Andrea Zittel’s “A–Z Fiber Forms” series, 2002–2006, are simply not the same as those of Sophie Tauber-Arp’s beaded purses, despite the show’s assigning them in a wall text a “shared disaffection with normative values.” As Bibiana Obler explains beautifully in her essay for the accompanying catalogue, Tauber-Arp’s beadwork is a clear example of modernist primitivism. How, then, can we best understand its influence on later artists?
Qualeasha Wood, Clout Chasin’, 2023, glass beads on cotton, 84 ×61″. From “Threaded Visions: Contemporary Weavings from the Collection.”
he exhibition’s exploration of non-European weaving traditions raises such questions more urgently. Modernist fiber artists such as Ruth Asawa, Sheila Hicks, and Ed Rossbach, and contemporary artists engaging with issues of identity, such as Igshaan Adams, Diedrick Brackens, and Jeffrey Gibson, have all found inspiration in non-European textile traditions, though they have adopted those practices to very different ends. Asawa, for example, was a Japanese American artist who used Mexican basketry techniques to create large abstract hanging sculptures, while Brackens creates tapestries—a medium most associated with European royalty—that variously evoke Gee’s Bend quilts and kente cloth to explore his experience as a queer Black American. Is it helpful to see artists such as Gibson and Olga de Amaral as part of a shared history of employing “vernacular traditions”? Both use Indigenous textile techniques drawn from their own cultural backgrounds to create shimmering works that arguably speak to the powers of ritual and craft. But Gibson’s work differs from Amaral’s in that it also tacitly calls out the primitivism of earlier artists for whom such textile techniques could be more easily divorced from their specific social and cultural contexts.
Valerie Jaudon, Jackson, 1976, metallic pigment in polymer emulsion and pencil on canvas, framed 73 × 73″. From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
It seems a shame, then, that “Woven Histories” so often shies away from foregrounding the subject of modernist primitivism and cultural appropriation. The thesis of the show—that textiles and modernist abstraction have always been intertwined—is well supported by the evidence in this exhibition and elsewhere. But these entanglements have not always been wholly positive. Such complexity is elided particularly in the third major category of works in the show, which explores the inherent relationship between textiles and modern technologies of the grid and the computer. Here we get the obligatory side-by-side comparison of an Agnes Martin grid painting and a Lenore Tawney weaving, as well as works such as Analia Saban’s Copper Tapestry (Riva 128 Graphics Card, Nvidia, 1997), 2020, which imitates a circuit board. The show’s reliance on visual similarity in these galleries made for some tenuous connections. Valerie Jaudon’s 1976 Pattern and Decoration work Jackson is a golden-brown painting of braided strips that evokes Islamic ornament and Celtic knots in order to challenge the marginalization of these traditions as decorative. Nearby, Marilou Schultz’s reddish-brown 1994 tapestry Replica of a Chip demonstrates the embrace of “decorative” and “non-Western” art by powerful corporations. Intel commissioned this work as part of a public relations campaign that sought to construct affinities between the artist’s Navajo/Diné weaving and its own technology manufacturing. Did something fundamentally change in the public’s understanding of “non-Western” or “decorative” art in the twenty-year period between Jaudon’s and Schultz’s works? If we are meant to see something subversive in Replica of a Chip that makes it a successor to Jackson, the exhibition itself does not make that clear.
Diedrick Brackens, spilled with nowhere to flow, 2015, nylon, acrylic, chenille, and cotton yarn, 61 × 56″. From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
Because the actual histories linking all these artworks are so loosely woven, what really unites the exhibition is taste. Every piece in the show exemplifies dominant trends in textile art; quietly omitted are the works that do not suit our tastes so well, such as Judy Chicago’s “Birth Project” embroideries, 1980–85; Charles Slatkin’s pile rugs woven in India after works by famous modernists like Calder and Picasso; the monumental French tapestries of forgotten modernists like Jean Lurçat (1892–1966); or the Navajo/Diné tapestries designed by Kenneth Noland. The taste displayed in this exhibition is so good, in fact, that it runs the risk of being a bit boring, or at least to those of us who have been thinking about textiles and modern art for some time. But while little new scholarly ground is being broken, the exhibition is undoubtedly revelatory for the general audiences that major exhibitions such as this are designed to attract. The appeal to taste can be understood as a strategic move to make the existence of textiles as fine art more palatable to relatively unfamiliar viewers. Ironically, the relative lack of didactics in the show may also have been an effort to cater to nonspecialist audiences: a deliberate strategy to avoid overwhelming viewers with too much explanation about, for example, the differences in textile techniques. Instead of information and context, the viewer encounters beautiful works hung together in ways that keep the histories between them as abstract as most of the art itself. And yet this exhibition appeals to a sense of political progressivism as well as modernist abstraction. It seems to suggest that with textiles we can have our cake and eat it, too. We get all the beautiful abstraction of high modernist painting, and all the subversive politics of more recent art. Such a claim rests on the idea that there is something inherently subversive about making art with textiles—an idea that gets harder and harder to swallow as we learn more about cloth’s complicated histories and social entanglements.
Analia Saban, Copper Tapestry (Riva 128 Graphics Card, Nvidia, 1997), 2020, woven copper wire, linen thread, 99 1⁄4 × 71 1⁄4″. From “Woven Histories:Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
WITH THEIR MORE tightly focused premises, the two smaller exhibitions are better able to contend with some of these nuances. “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art,” at the Met, was organized by Iria Candela, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art, and Joanne Pillsbury, one of its curators of ancient art of the Americas. Although I was not able to see it in person, the exhibition bears mentioning here as a productive counterpoint to the “Woven Histories” show. “Weaving Abstraction” paired Andean weavings from the fourth century BCE through the sixteenth century CE with those of four twentieth-century women—Albers, Hicks, Tawney, and Amaral—to explore the rich variety of weaving techniques and abstract forms in ancient Andean textiles and their influence on modern fiber artists. This history is often celebrated in scholarship on fiber art, which typically venerates figures such as Albers and Hicks for using the techniques of ancient Andean textiles to create modernist masterpieces. But the topic is rarely covered in depth, in part because it is usually discussed by modernist art historians who have little specialist expertise in ancient Andean art. Yet depth abounded in “Weaving Abstraction,” despite its taking up only one gallery and lacking an accompanying catalogue (instead, the fall 2023 issue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin consists of related essays by Candela and Pillsbury). As demonstrated by their texts, the curators reveled in the kind of concrete, detailed information about textiles that more general modernists tend to gloss over.
For example, the exhibition’s object labels included the recorded provenance of each work, allowing viewers to trace the routes of many of these pieces as they traveled from South America to North America via Europe or other circuitous routes. In the curators’ Bulletin essays, we learn even more about how artists of the twentieth century were able to access ancient Andean textiles. Archaeological digs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries unearthed thousands of textiles and other objects, producing enormous public collections in Peru, Germany, and the United States. Publications such as Max Schmidt’s Kunst und Kultur von Peru (Art and Culture of Peru, 1929)—part of a series published by Albers’s family—and exhibitions like “American Sources of Modern Art (Aztec, Mayan, Incan)” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1933 highlighted this ancient Andean art. In their essays, the curators also challenge several Western assumptions about textiles in the Andean context. Pillsbury, for example, contests the theory, famously advanced by Aloïs Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer in the early twentieth century, that abstraction was a first step toward naturalism, arguing that in the ancient Andes, abstraction coexisted with naturalism and became more prevalent over time.
Marilou Schultz, Untitled (Unknown Chip), 2008, wool, 98 1⁄2 × 47 1⁄4″.From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
More generally, the exhibition subverted many primitivist ideas about Indigenous crafts. As the show argued, for Andean cultures such as the Wari, Chimú, and Inca, textiles were not necessarily individual, small-scale productions but were manufactured in centralized ways at state-controlled workshops or using standardized materials or patterns. Such centralization speaks to the high status of textiles, the concentration of resources required to produce them, and the important ritual and diplomatic functions that they served for elites. We can understand these ancient Andean textiles as luxury crafts, perhaps more akin to the tapestries produced by the Gobelins factory in Paris than to, say, Amish quilts.
“Weaving Abstraction” was a useful corrective to the vagueness of much existing scholarship, but it was still only a first step. Largely set aside was the question of cultural appropriation. The curators rightly presented abstraction as a global resource that various cultures and individuals have mined for artistic expression. But their emphasis on the splendor of the show’s twentieth-century textiles risked positioning the racism of modernism as a kind of necessary evil. Discussions of white artists’ practices of modernist primitivism and cultural appropriation often appear strangely taboo in accounts of textile art, as though the lower status of textiles in Euro-American artistic hierarchies precludes them from reinforcing other hierarchies of power. Yet as the scholar Jenni Sorkin made clear in her keynote address at the National Gallery of Art’s symposium, “Braided Histories: Modernist Abstraction and Woven Textiles,” which accompanied “Woven Histories,” there is much work to be done in this regard. One step Sorkin took was that of unpacking the relationships between fiber art and ethnic studies, two academically based practices that developed in the United States in the late twentieth century. We don’t need to dismiss fiber art as merely a form of cultural appropriation; we can and should see its modernist primitivism as productive. But it produced more than just beautiful works of art: It also shaped individual and community identities and hierarchies of value—or, in a word, politics.
Hannah Höch, Collage II (Auf Filetgrund) (Collage II [On Filet Ground]), ca. 1925, paint and collage on paper, 9 3⁄4 × 7 5⁄8″. From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.” © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
HILE “WEAVING ABSTRACTION” contributed to our understanding of modernism primarily through deep analysis of Andean art, the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Threaded Visions: Contemporary Weavings from the Collection” pointed to the value of technical craft expertise for understanding modernist abstraction more fully. Presented in the museum’s rotating textile galleries, the exhibition allowed the kind of careful examination of weaving form and technique that nonspecialists are ill-equipped to undertake. Consisting of fifteen woven works by fourteen contemporary artists—including Junichi Arai, James Bassler, Peter Collingwood, Lia Cook, Cynthia Schira, and Ethel Stein—it demonstrated that the relationship between weaving and abstraction goes well beyond the grid. The curator of the exhibition, Melinda Watt—who, in her previous role at the Met, helped organize major textile shows such as “Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800” in 2013–14 and, at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York, “English Embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum, ca. 1580–1700: ’Twixt Art and Nature” in 2008 —here suggests that it is weaving’s very versatility that has made it such a rich resource for artists over the past forty years. Sections focusing on opacity and transparency, color, and pictorialism display the range of variables that artists can manipulate to explore new forms. By focusing on these formal qualities, the exhibition highlights the extraordinary technical skill of artists who vary in age, nationality, gender, and race. But this attention to form and technique in no way detracts from the diversity of these artists’ subjects. On the contrary, it suggests that revealing the artist’s technical process illuminates the full significance of their work’s content. Amaral, for example, was represented in all three exhibitions, but her most engrossing work on display was easily Entorno Quieto 5 (Stillness 5), 1993, at the Art Institute, a piece composed of 284 handwoven strips loosely hanging perpendicular to the wall. As light filters through the small gaps between the strips, it forms a moiré pattern that ebbs and flows across the surface of the work, emerging and dissipating in a dance-like movement. Each strip varies in thickness, and together they hang like the warp threads on a loom. But they are kept loose at the bottom to enable their slight movement side by side and the consequent play of light between them. The artist’s every technical decision contributed to the arresting optical effect, which dominated a gallery devoted to “translucency and opacity” in which, as the wall texts explained, the works on display explored constructions of space and solidity.
Rosemarie Trockel, Untitled, 1987, silk screen on cotton, 75 × 110 1⁄2″. From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.” © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
As these examples make clear, “Threaded Visions” covered some of the same ground as “Woven Histories.” Both exhibitions highlighted the origins of computer programming in the weaving technology of the Jacquard loom, as well as the variety of ways artists have engaged in non-European textile traditions to create abstract work. But with its smaller scale, more generous pacing, and more extensive didactics (complete with diagrams of weaving techniques and looms), “Threaded Visions” promoted the leisurely and close looking that enables viewers to better understand the relationships between techniques and forms. Similarly, the smaller size and more extensive labeling of “Weaving Abstraction” invited viewers to linger with works that might have been unfamiliar to them, to look closely at technique, to imagine how textiles functioned in other cultures, and to make visual connections between art from very different contexts.
This is not to suggest that relatively unfamiliar craft media or Indigenous art should only be displayed in small, specialized exhibitions. Such a proscription would only serve to silo this art further and render it less visible. But it is frustrating to see museums like the National Gallery of Art put resources behind major exhibitions on marginalized art without more thoroughly incorporating the expertise of specialists who, as “Weaving Abstraction” and “Threaded Visions” amply demonstrated, can dramatically enrich our understanding of modern and contemporary art.
Anni Albers, Pasture, 1958, mercerized cotton, 14 × 15 1⁄2″. From “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art.”
IN ART CRITICISM covering exhibitions of decorative arts or crafts, the display of marginalized media such as textiles is often cast as a newsworthy novelty and even a subversive intervention in the world of fine art. As a trio of recent exhibitions demonstrate, however, textiles have been an important, elite, even “fine” art since at least the fourth century BCE. The three shows—at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago—all frame textiles’ significance in relation to the abstraction of the modernist avant-garde, but their variety of methods suggest how much more remains to be said about the importance of textiles in a global history of art.
The most ambitious of these exhibitions is “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” organized by Lynne Cooke at the National Gallery of Art. Previously on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and traveling to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, “Woven Histories” is described in its press release as a “landmark” show. Spanning a period from 1913 to the present, the exhibition encompasses approximately 150 objects by nearly sixty artists spread across seven thematic sections. The show’s title suggests that the diverse array of objects on view is linked or “woven” together through shared histories, while the wall texts describe the art in such terms as legacies, generations, lineages, traditions, inspiration, kinship, and genealogies. Collectively the show presents an alternative history of modern and contemporary art dominated by weaving and textiles, yet the historical relationships of these artworks to one another are rarely articulated with clarity. The exhibition’s minimal didactics and loose chronology suggest the organizers were wary of charting too straightforward a history through such complex material.
Valerie Jaudon, Jackson, 1976, metallic pigment in polymer emulsion
and pencil on canvas, framed 73 × 73″. From “Woven Histories:
Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
One historical relationship that the exhibition does attempt to delineate clearly is between women artists (such as Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, and Hannah Höch) who designed textiles as a way to support their artmaking and to effect “social change” during the “utopian” period of the 1930s, and feminist artists of the ’70s and beyond (such as Liz Collins, Harmony Hammond, and Rosemarie Trockel), for whom textiles were a medium of political intervention. The exhibition informs us that “for inspiration,” such “feminist-inspired” artists “looked outside of their academic training to the marginalized, cross-disciplinary practices of women artists of the interwar years.” But if, as the exhibition suggests, there was something inherently radical in the use of textiles by early twentieth-century artists, that assumption is challenged by these later feminists, who frequently draw attention to textiles’ non-utopian qualities. For example, in a section of the show devoted to labor, works by Carole Frances Lung, Senga Nengudi, Lisa Oppenheim, and Sascha Reichstein focus on the workers who make textiles in industrial factories and by hand. Collectively, these examples suggest the extent to which the relative invisibility of this labor enables exploitation in a globalized textile trade. Meanwhile, Ann Hamilton raises questions about the global textile industry’s impact on climate change. For (side by side.coats), 2018/2023, installed in the exhibition lobby, she felted together unwashed fleeces from heritage sheep with secondhand woolen coats, visualizing the life cycle of a particular textile material from its natural animal source to a used, discarded garment. Elsewhere, in a section devoted to self-fashioning, Collins highlights the ableism of mainstream fashion design. In Walking Wounded, 2011, a handmade banner advertises the artist’s offer to knit WOUNDS onto visitors’ clothing for a small fee. SLASHES and SORES can be GRAFTED onto garments to enable their owners to WEAR YOUR HEART ON YOUR SLEEVE! With humor and absurdity, Collins’s project highlights the extent to which conventional clothing seeks to hide physical and psychic scars, disabilities, or bodily differences behind a veil of acceptable conformity.
View of “American Sources of Modern Art,” 1933, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Paradoxically, “Woven Histories” acknowledges these more contemporary critiques while simultaneously glorifying earlier women artists who participated in the booming textile industry as “trailblazing” social change. As the exhibition emphasizes, the textile industry pivoted toward synthetic materials and fast fashion over the course of the twentieth century, yet the show never addresses how its earlier heroines may have anticipated such changes. Do Delaunay’s fun, colorful modernist dresses foreshadow today’s sped-up trend cycles of patterned prints? Did Albers’s incorporation of Lurex, acetate, rayon, cellophane, and other synthetic fibers into her weavings help legitimate materials that would later prove to have negative ecological impacts? In raising these questions I don’t mean to imply that “Woven Histories” should have denounced these earlier artists for engaging with the textile industry, but rather to suggest that tracing a history between multiple generations of women artists isn’t as easy as hanging their work in adjoining galleries. The politics of Andrea Zittel’s “A–Z Fiber Forms” series, 2002–2006, are simply not the same as those of Sophie Tauber-Arp’s beaded purses, despite the show’s assigning them in a wall text a “shared disaffection with normative values.” As Bibiana Obler explains beautifully in her essay for the accompanying catalogue, Tauber-Arp’s beadwork is a clear example of modernist primitivism. How, then, can we best understand its influence on later artists?
Qualeasha Wood, Clout Chasin’, 2023, glass beads on cotton, 84 × 61″.
From “Threaded Visions: Contemporary Weavings from the Collection.”
The exhibition’s exploration of non-European weaving traditions raises such questions more urgently. Modernist fiber artists such as Ruth Asawa, Sheila Hicks, and Ed Rossbach, and contemporary artists engaging with issues of identity, such as Igshaan Adams, Diedrick Brackens, and Jeffrey Gibson, have all found inspiration in non-European textile traditions, though they have adopted those practices to very different ends. Asawa, for example, was a Japanese American artist who used Mexican basketry techniques to create large abstract hanging sculptures, while Brackens creates tapestries—a medium most associated with European royalty—that variously evoke Gee’s Bend quilts and kente cloth to explore his experience as a queer Black American. Is it helpful to see artists such as Gibson and Olga de Amaral as part of a shared history of employing “vernacular traditions”? Both use Indigenous textile techniques drawn from their own cultural backgrounds to create shimmering works that arguably speak to the powers of ritual and craft. But Gibson’s work differs from Amaral’s in that it also tacitly calls out the primitivism of earlier artists for whom such textile techniques could be more easily divorced from their specific social and cultural contexts.
Valerie Jaudon, Jackson, 1976, metallic pigment in polymer emulsion and pencil on canvas, framed 73 × 73″. From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
It seems a shame, then, that “Woven Histories” so often shies away from foregrounding the subject of modernist primitivism and cultural appropriation. The thesis of the show—that textiles and modernist abstraction have always been intertwined—is well supported by the evidence in this exhibition and elsewhere. But these entanglements have not always been wholly positive. Such complexity is elided particularly in the third major category of works in the show, which explores the inherent relationship between textiles and modern technologies of the grid and the computer. Here we get the obligatory side-by-side comparison of an Agnes Martin grid painting and a Lenore Tawney weaving, as well as works such as Analia Saban’s Copper Tapestry (Riva 128 Graphics Card, Nvidia, 1997), 2020, which imitates a circuit board. The show’s reliance on visual similarity in these galleries made for some tenuous connections. Valerie Jaudon’s 1976 Pattern and Decoration work Jackson is a golden-brown painting of braided strips that evokes Islamic ornament and Celtic knots in order to challenge the marginalization of these traditions as decorative. Nearby, Marilou Schultz’s reddish-brown 1994 tapestry Replica of a Chip demonstrates the embrace of “decorative” and “non-Western” art by powerful corporations. Intel commissioned this work as part of a public relations campaign that sought to construct affinities between the artist’s Navajo/Diné weaving and its own technology manufacturing. Did something fundamentally change in the public’s understanding of “non-Western” or “decorative” art in the twenty-year period between Jaudon’s and Schultz’s works? If we are meant to see something subversive in Replica of a Chip that makes it a successor to Jackson, the exhibition itself does not make that clear.
Diedrick Brackens, spilled with nowhere to flow, 2015, nylon, acrylic, chenille, and cotton yarn, 61 × 56″. From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
Because the actual histories linking all these artworks are so loosely woven, what really unites the exhibition is taste. Every piece in the show exemplifies dominant trends in textile art; quietly omitted are the works that do not suit our tastes so well, such as Judy Chicago’s “Birth Project” embroideries, 1980–85; Charles Slatkin’s pile rugs woven in India after works by famous modernists like Calder and Picasso; the monumental French tapestries of forgotten modernists like Jean Lurçat (1892–1966); or the Navajo/Diné tapestries designed by Kenneth Noland. The taste displayed in this exhibition is so good, in fact, that it runs the risk of being a bit boring, or at least to those of us who have been thinking about textiles and modern art for some time. But while little new scholarly ground is being broken, the exhibition is undoubtedly revelatory for the general audiences that major exhibitions such as this are designed to attract. The appeal to taste can be understood as a strategic move to make the existence of textiles as fine art more palatable to relatively unfamiliar viewers. Ironically, the relative lack of didactics in the show may also have been an effort to cater to nonspecialist audiences: a deliberate strategy to avoid overwhelming viewers with too much explanation about, for example, the differences in textile techniques. Instead of information and context, the viewer encounters beautiful works hung together in ways that keep the histories between them as abstract as most of the art itself. And yet this exhibition appeals to a sense of political progressivism as well as modernist abstraction. It seems to suggest that with textiles we can have our cake and eat it, too. We get all the beautiful abstraction of high modernist painting, and all the subversive politics of more recent art. Such a claim rests on the idea that there is something inherently subversive about making art with textiles—an idea that gets harder and harder to swallow as we learn more about cloth’s complicated histories and social entanglements.
Analia Saban, Copper Tapestry (Riva 128 Graphics Card, Nvidia, 1997), 2020,
woven copper wire, linen thread, 99 1⁄4 × 71 1⁄4″. From “Woven Histories:
Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
WITH THEIR MORE tightly focused premises, the two smaller exhibitions are better able to contend with some of these nuances. “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art,” at the Met, was organized by Iria Candela, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art, and Joanne Pillsbury, one of its curators of ancient art of the Americas. Although I was not able to see it in person, the exhibition bears mentioning here as a productive counterpoint to the “Woven Histories” show. “Weaving Abstraction” paired Andean weavings from the fourth century BCE through the sixteenth century CE with those of four twentieth-century women—Albers, Hicks, Tawney, and Amaral—to explore the rich variety of weaving techniques and abstract forms in ancient Andean textiles and their influence on modern fiber artists. This history is often celebrated in scholarship on fiber art, which typically venerates figures such as Albers and Hicks for using the techniques of ancient Andean textiles to create modernist masterpieces. But the topic is rarely covered in depth, in part because it is usually discussed by modernist art historians who have little specialist expertise in ancient Andean art. Yet depth abounded in “Weaving Abstraction,” despite its taking up only one gallery and lacking an accompanying catalogue (instead, the fall 2023 issue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin consists of related essays by Candela and Pillsbury). As demonstrated by their texts, the curators reveled in the kind of concrete, detailed information about textiles that more general modernists tend to gloss over.
For example, the exhibition’s object labels included the recorded provenance of each work, allowing viewers to trace the routes of many of these pieces as they traveled from South America to North America via Europe or other circuitous routes. In the curators’ Bulletin essays, we learn even more about how artists of the twentieth century were able to access ancient Andean textiles. Archaeological digs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries unearthed thousands of textiles and other objects, producing enormous public collections in Peru, Germany, and the United States. Publications such as Max Schmidt’s Kunst und Kultur von Peru (Art and Culture of Peru, 1929)—part of a series published by Albers’s family—and exhibitions like “American Sources of Modern Art (Aztec, Mayan, Incan)” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1933 highlighted this ancient Andean art. In their essays, the curators also challenge several Western assumptions about textiles in the Andean context. Pillsbury, for example, contests the theory, famously advanced by Aloïs Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer in the early twentieth century, that abstraction was a first step toward naturalism, arguing that in the ancient Andes, abstraction coexisted with naturalism and became more prevalent over time.
Marilou Schultz, Untitled (Unknown Chip), 2008, wool, 98 1⁄2 × 47 1⁄4″.
From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.”
More generally, the exhibition subverted many primitivist ideas about Indigenous crafts. As the show argued, for Andean cultures such as the Wari, Chimú, and Inca, textiles were not necessarily individual, small-scale productions but were manufactured in centralized ways at state-controlled workshops or using standardized materials or patterns. Such centralization speaks to the high status of textiles, the concentration of resources required to produce them, and the important ritual and diplomatic functions that they served for elites. We can understand these ancient Andean textiles as luxury crafts, perhaps more akin to the tapestries produced by the Gobelins factory in Paris than to, say, Amish quilts.
“Weaving Abstraction” was a useful corrective to the vagueness of much existing scholarship, but it was still only a first step. Largely set aside was the question of cultural appropriation. The curators rightly presented abstraction as a global resource that various cultures and individuals have mined for artistic expression. But their emphasis on the splendor of the show’s twentieth-century textiles risked positioning the racism of modernism as a kind of necessary evil. Discussions of white artists’ practices of modernist primitivism and cultural appropriation often appear strangely taboo in accounts of textile art, as though the lower status of textiles in Euro-American artistic hierarchies precludes them from reinforcing other hierarchies of power. Yet as the scholar Jenni Sorkin made clear in her keynote address at the National Gallery of Art’s symposium, “Braided Histories: Modernist Abstraction and Woven Textiles,” which accompanied “Woven Histories,” there is much work to be done in this regard. One step Sorkin took was that of unpacking the relationships between fiber art and ethnic studies, two academically based practices that developed in the United States in the late twentieth century. We don’t need to dismiss fiber art as merely a form of cultural appropriation; we can and should see its modernist primitivism as productive. But it produced more than just beautiful works of art: It also shaped individual and community identities and hierarchies of value—or, in a word, politics.
Hannah Höch, Collage II (Auf Filetgrund) (Collage II [On Filet Ground]), ca. 1925,
paint and collage on paper, 9 3⁄4 × 7 5⁄8″. From “Woven Histories: Textiles and
Modern Abstraction.” © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
WHILE “WEAVING ABSTRACTION” contributed to our understanding of modernism primarily through deep analysis of Andean art, the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Threaded Visions: Contemporary Weavings from the Collection” pointed to the value of technical craft expertise for understanding modernist abstraction more fully. Presented in the museum’s rotating textile galleries, the exhibition allowed the kind of careful examination of weaving form and technique that nonspecialists are ill-equipped to undertake. Consisting of fifteen woven works by fourteen contemporary artists—including Junichi Arai, James Bassler, Peter Collingwood, Lia Cook, Cynthia Schira, and Ethel Stein—it demonstrated that the relationship between weaving and abstraction goes well beyond the grid. The curator of the exhibition, Melinda Watt—who, in her previous role at the Met, helped organize major textile shows such as “Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800” in 2013–14 and, at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York, “English Embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum, ca. 1580–1700: ’Twixt Art and Nature” in 2008 —here suggests that it is weaving’s very versatility that has made it such a rich resource for artists over the past forty years. Sections focusing on opacity and transparency, color, and pictorialism display the range of variables that artists can manipulate to explore new forms. By focusing on these formal qualities, the exhibition highlights the extraordinary technical skill of artists who vary in age, nationality, gender, and race. But this attention to form and technique in no way detracts from the diversity of these artists’ subjects. On the contrary, it suggests that revealing the artist’s technical process illuminates the full significance of their work’s content. Amaral, for example, was represented in all three exhibitions, but her most engrossing work on display was easily Entorno Quieto 5 (Stillness 5), 1993, at the Art Institute, a piece composed of 284 handwoven strips loosely hanging perpendicular to the wall. As light filters through the small gaps between the strips, it forms a moiré pattern that ebbs and flows across the surface of the work, emerging and dissipating in a dance-like movement. Each strip varies in thickness, and together they hang like the warp threads on a loom. But they are kept loose at the bottom to enable their slight movement side by side and the consequent play of light between them. The artist’s every technical decision contributed to the arresting optical effect, which dominated a gallery devoted to “translucency and opacity” in which, as the wall texts explained, the works on display explored constructions of space and solidity.
Rosemarie Trockel, Untitled, 1987, silk screen on cotton, 75 × 110 1⁄2″. From “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.” © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
As these examples make clear, “Threaded Visions” covered some of the same ground as “Woven Histories.” Both exhibitions highlighted the origins of computer programming in the weaving technology of the Jacquard loom, as well as the variety of ways artists have engaged in non-European textile traditions to create abstract work. But with its smaller scale, more generous pacing, and more extensive didactics (complete with diagrams of weaving techniques and looms), “Threaded Visions” promoted the leisurely and close looking that enables viewers to better understand the relationships between techniques and forms. Similarly, the smaller size and more extensive labeling of “Weaving Abstraction” invited viewers to linger with works that might have been unfamiliar to them, to look closely at technique, to imagine how textiles functioned in other cultures, and to make visual connections between art from very different contexts.
This is not to suggest that relatively unfamiliar craft media or Indigenous art should only be displayed in small, specialized exhibitions. Such a proscription would only serve to silo this art further and render it less visible. But it is frustrating to see museums like the National Gallery of Art put resources behind major exhibitions on marginalized art without more thoroughly incorporating the expertise of specialists who, as “Weaving Abstraction” and “Threaded Visions” amply demonstrated, can dramatically enrich our understanding of modern and contemporary art.
Anni Albers, Pasture, 1958, mercerized cotton, 14 × 15 1⁄2″. From “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art.”
Collectively, these exhibitions suggest that we need to do more than celebrate the status of textiles as fine art. If we really want to put textiles on the same footing as other art forms, we must be ready to critique them as well. More specifically, we must attend to the critical questions raised by the medium’s practitioners, including those concerning modernist primitivism, cultural appropriation, sexism and racism, exploitative labor practices, and climate change. Contemporary artists have embraced textiles for their rich variety of techniques and forms, as “Threaded Visions” showed, but also for their deeply resonant and diverse cultural associations. Quilts, tapestries, clothing, baskets, and other textile media all have their own sets of affiliations and contexts, and diving deeply into these nuances, as contemporary artists have done, enriches our understanding not only of individual artists’ works but of the global history of art.
Similarly compelling was Qualeasha Wood’s Clout Chasin’, 2023, a Jacquard tapestry that displays a collage of screenshots, selfies, social media comments, and error messages. These document the artist’s experience of being doxed and trolled online, materializing digital images and insults into the concrete form of woven fabric. The punch-card-operated Jacquard loom is often celebrated as a precursor to the modern computer, and today’s fully computer-programmed Jacquard looms are used by a variety of artists to translate digital images into monumental weavings. Wood plays this history against itself, deploying a contemporary loom in an exploration of the dangers and potential harms of the digital revolution. As the title of the work suggests, social media users engage in both abusive and defensive behavior to chase clout, something that contemporary artists like Wood may seek, even if their metrics of prestige differ. Yet Wood’s piece pokes fun at her own artistic clout, not only by documenting some of her most ignorant critics but also by taking the form of a fringed throw blanket bedazzled with glass beads that coalesce into a halo around Wood’s self-portrait. Here, the form of the Jacquard weaving helps question contemporary art’s hierarchies of value.
Ultimately, these exhibitions suggest that we may have exhausted the appeal of legitimating textiles by focusing on their links to modernist abstraction. This has been a winning strategy since “Abstract Design in American Quilts” at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971, but there are only so many times we can breathlessly claim to “discover” that textiles are modern art. A focus on form may appeal to contemporary viewers who are relatively unfamiliar with the medium, but it hardly does full justice to the transhistorical and transcultural importance of textiles as a labor-intensive, highly valued art whose functions ranged from the quotidian to the elite. If we really want to let decorative arts and crafts subvert the status quo, we can start by attending to the specificity of these marginalized domains, allowing their unique histories and material attributes to broaden our frames of reference and reconfigure our systems of value. Measuring every textile against the yardstick of modernist abstraction may result in beautiful exhibitions, but there are surely many other histories that could be unfurled from this material.
Article published on https://www.artforum.com/