For the past few years, woven art has undeniably been having a moment – and interest in the medium in its various forms, from wall hangings to three-dimensional sculptures to garments, shows no sign of waning.
‘Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction’, an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), spotlights textile-driven pieces of abstract art from over the past hundred years or so, including both well-known historical groundbreakers like Anni Albers, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and an inclusive array of contemporary and more emerging artists, including Jeffrey Gibson, Nagakura Ken’ichi, Rosemarie Trockel, and Andrea Zittel.
‘I was looking from the present, and it set off a lightbulb,’ says Lynne Cooke, the show’s curator and senior curator of special projects in modern art at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. ‘I recalled that this really had happened in other times in the past. I wondered whether the reasons underlying the intersection of textiles and fine art practices were the same each time or how these very intermittent exchanges came about. That really was the starting point.’
The show includes an impressively wide range of items that reflect many of its artists’ dexterity with media. From Gunta Stölzl, for example, there is fabric from drapes and upholstery, as well as a gouache painting. The common thread, pun intended, is the use of abstract imagery, which Cooke says is logical. As she puts it, ‘The quintessential language of modernity is abstraction. It’s the language of the era.’
There’s also an array of paintings and art on paper in the show by the likes of Hannah Höch, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky.
‘It seemed that often the most fundamental and the most radical both within painting practices and within the making of textiles centered around ideas and practices of weaving,’ Cooke says.
After its run at LACMA, the exhibition will move to the National Gallery of Art in March, followed by runs at Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
With nearly a dozen pieces displayed, Albers is an anchor of the show and, for many viewers, the artist who’s become synonymous with abstract expression in woven art. ‘I think she would be quite surprised at how her name is so often invoked because of the turn toward making things again,’ says Brenda Danilowitz, chief curator of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. ‘She’s become quite a legend.’
In Miami, nearly 3,000 miles from LACMA, there’s another show up that’s focused on woven art and it is visual themes, diversity, and impact.
‘To Weave the Sky: Textile Abstractions’ from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection is the fourth exhibition at El Espacio 23, an expansive contemporary art space founded by Pérez, the entrepreneur and collector who is arguably best known in the art community as the namesake of Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). It includes around 100 artists with a wide geographic reach, especially in South America. There are pieces by Brazil’s Sonia Gomes and Ernesto Neto, Argentina’s Guillermo Kuitca, Poland’s Natasza Niedziolka, and Zimbabwe’s Wallen Mapondera. Alongside names that might be discoveries for some viewers, there are pieces from household-name artists like Nick Cave and Faith Ringgold.
‘We like having that flexibility, being an independent art space, that we can have those conversations, and we can put very well-established artists in conversation with relatively unknown or emerging artists,’ says Patricia Hanna, art director of El Espacio 23 and the Jorge M. Pérez Collection. ‘Absolutely, that’s intentional.’
The show was guest-curated by Tobias Ostrander and has been in the works for several years.
‘You have to stop and admire and think about the process and the materiality of the work –that’s what attracted us to many of the first textiles that we acquired,’ Hanna says. ‘Then it became this idea of, “We want to do a textile show.” We began to acquire a little more intentionally, thinking about this idea of one day having an exhibition of this nature at El Espacio 23.’
This article was originally published in the Art Basel Miami Beach magazine 2023.
Published on November 3, 2023.
Rachel Felder is an author and journalist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, the Financial Times, Women’s Wear Daily, and many other publications. She has written five books. The most recent, Red Lipstick: An Ode to a Beauty Icon (HarperCollins), examines the enduring appeal, glamour, and history of makeup’s most beloved staple. She commutes between New York and Miami.
Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Etel Adnan, Avril, 2017. Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A dark filter was applied over this image for readability. 2. Sheila Hicks, Peluca verde, 1960–1961. © Sheila Hicks. Courtesy of Fundación Amparo – Museo Amparo. 3. Polly Apfelbaum, Wimple, 2009. Courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.