Textiles change into prints and prints change into textiles in Line & Thread, a brand new exhibition on the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Constructing. Throughout parallel partitions and in show circumstances, a number of historic items and artworks by fashionable and up to date artists comes collectively to disclose the free-flowing cross-pollination between the 2 kinds.
The overlaps between these modes of creating have deep roots, in each the etymological and horticultural senses. Cotton, harvested and spun into thread to make material or overwhelmed into pulp to make paper, has lengthy been an necessary plant for print and textile manufacturing. And, as a wall label explains, the phrases “textual content” and “textile” each stem from the Latin phrase texere, which implies “to weave.”
It’s a pleasure to find the interconnected thematic threads amongst the artworks within the exhibition, which line the third-floor hallway-gallery of the Rayner Particular Collections Wing. On one finish of the periwinkle-painted corridor, a tidy assortment of historic items in a largely sepia palette showcases early examples of the mixing of printing and textile arts, reminiscent of embroidered books and etchings with appliquéd silk.
Stroll by way of the remainder of the area, and also you’ll see hit after hit in an eclectic number of more-recent artworks: an artist’s e-book by Religion Ringgold (“Seven Passages to a Flight,” 1995); a costume by designer Graham Baldwin printed with archival imagery sourced from the library’s close by Pforzheimer Assortment; folios from a group by Sonia Delaunay (c. 1925); prints by Kiki Smith, Sanford Biggers, and Anni Albers, amongst others. Groupings embody artwork prints that incorporate hand stitching, prints as textiles (and textiles as prints), artist’s books, and meditations on clothes and mending. Collectively, the works converse in texture and method, thread and ink.
The visible languages of collage and quilt present up in a number of works. In Gee’s Bend quilter Loretta Pettway’s etching-and-aquatint piece “Keep in mind Me” (2006), made in collaboration with Paulson Fontaine Press in San Francisco, beautiful jewel tones saturate the paper. An summary association of rectangles meanders throughout the web page — a quilt rendered in print, a house textile changed into an artwork object. In “Arrival” (2023), an assemblage of vivid, fabric-like patterns printed on Japanese paper with a Risograph machine and sewn with zig-zag stitching and dangling threads, artist Jacquelyn Strycker gleefully toys with notion. By taking part in up the amorphous qualities of paper and material and melding the outputs of a stitching machine and a chunk of retro workplace tools, her paintings could possibly be seen as a quilt itself, a print of a quilt, or a collage — one thing not simply hemmed right into a single realm of creating.
A boundary-busting spirit bubbles on the cauldron coronary heart of the present. Throughout the hallowed halls of this historic analysis library, famend for housing intensive archives and books (and each are quintessential examples of textiles and print united, throughout printed pages and covers and collections) this present feels proper at dwelling. Each embracing custom and shedding its confines, Line & Thread invitations creativeness and experimentation, providing a peek at what occurs when concepts, supplies, and inventive processes collide and recombine, when traces meander and threads tangle in surprising methods.
Line & Thread: Prints and Textiles from the 1600s to the Current continues on the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Constructing within the Rayner Particular Collections Wing (Fifth Avenue and forty second Avenue, Manhattan) by way of January 12, 2025. Madeleine Viljoen curated the exhibition.