WASHINGTON, DC — By confronting previous, slim definitions of what summary modernist artwork is, Woven Histories: Textiles and Trendy Abstraction on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork makes the case that textiles are an integral a part of this historical past. A mess of intertwined ideas (textile strategies and applied sciences, social and labor actions, politics, communities, tradition and id, cross-generational affect) come collectively to light up the methods craft, style, and design have intersected and melded over the previous century — and finally to current an expanded, fiber-forward imaginative and prescient of how trendy summary artwork got here to be.
That includes about 160 artworks made by 57 artists, the sprawling exhibition, curated by Lynne Cooke, consists of seven distinct sections. It kicks off with works made by European artists within the aftermath of World Conflict I, the Russian Revolution, and the 1918–20 flu pandemic. Clothes by painter and textile designer Sonia Delaunay, work by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, weavings by Bauhaus stalwarts Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, and different artworks set the stage for the subsequent technology of modernist weavers, displayed within the following room. Amongst these artists are Olga de Amaral, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney, all of whom drew inspiration from Albers’s philosophies and fervour for pre-Columbian textiles. (Artworks by these weavers have been additionally featured in The Met’s Weaving Abstraction in Historic and Trendy Artwork earlier this 12 months.)
A number of items on this exhibition have been additionally introduced collectively in a 2019 group present Cooke curated on the Artist’s Institute at Hunter Faculty, titled Maneuver. As a evaluate in The New Yorker described, it traced “each Albers’s ongoing affect and the endurance of modernism’s pet format, the grid” — a thread that winds by Woven Histories, too.
In a gallery dedicated to knots, nets, and webs, the bones of textile making overlap with the visible language of summary portray — nodding to each Albers’s writings on weaving’s grid construction and artwork historian Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay “Grids,” which argues that this construction is a trademark of modernist summary artwork. The dozen or so massive, grid-like items that cling from these white partitions underscore the connections between oil work, woven varieties, and weaving applied sciences, just like the Jacquard loom, a predecessor to computer systems. One label factors out that canvas, a woven cloth, is “the literal basis of modernist portray.” Put one other means, work on canvas are a type of textile artwork.
The journey continues with a sampling of baskets and trendy woven sculptures, spotlighting off-loom weaving strategies. A curvy, looped wire Ruth Asawa sculpture and Yvonne Koolmatrie’s conical, spiny sedge grass “Eel Lure” (2003) dangle from the ceiling. Cabinets crammed with small baskets, together with a number of by Ed Rossbach and Lillian Elliot, line one wall, and Martin Puryear’s wire-and-rattan “Greed’s Trophy” (1984) emerges from one other like a whale fin.
The present takes a detour into the realm of “self-fashioning” and life put on, outlined within the exhibition textual content as “fashioning each a self and a worldview,” in addition to industrialized textile manufacturing and labor points. In these rooms, the fashionable abstraction theme that buttresses the present appears to fade earlier than reemerging within the finale with a set of daring and vivid modern artworks. Diedrick Brackens, Jeffrey Gibson, Ulrike Müller, Concord Hammond, and others delve into present-day problems with id, neighborhood, sovereignty, and residential, whereas showcasing the monumental inventive prospects of textiles as medium and metaphor. As American fiber artist Liz Collins describes in a video on the exhibition’s webpage, constructing cloth doubles as a type of structure and of portray; it’s a course of that’s wealthy and limitless. And, because the works in Woven Histories exhibit, cloth making and artwork making are inseparable and unruly pursuits that defy tidy labels.
Woven Histories: Textiles and Trendy Abstraction continues on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, East Constructing (4th Avenue NW, Washington, DC) by July 28. The exhibition was curated by Lynne Cooke.