The art of fibers and fabrics

Subversive, Talented, Sublime: Textile Art Created by Women
Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC
until January 5, 2025

CARPETS ARE NO LONGER JUST FOR WALKING, and blankets do more than just keep us warm. These fabrics have gone from floors and beds to museum walls. Earlier this year, the National Gallery of Art held a huge exhibition, “Woven Stories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” in which fabric artwork was framed on walls and displayed in artifact cases—a direct challenge to the old tendency to dismiss textiles as marginalized “women’s work.” The PS1 Museum of Modern Art in Queens recently jumped on the textile-as-art bandwagon, exhibition displaying over fifty of the artist Pacita Abad’s signature “trapuntos,” or quilted paintings. And Textile Museum in Washington, which will celebrate its centennial next year, becoming one of the oldest museums of its kind, has long organized exhibitions that spotlight the craftsmanship of textiles from around the world.

The dismantling of the barricades separating art from craft reflects a larger shift in the way the art market operates. In the postwar decades, art criticism played an important role, and members of the art world rushed to kiss the ring of critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg became known as an “art czar,” evangelizing the importance of abstract expressionism and, in particular, Jackson Pollock. Greenberg also popularized the idea that art and craft belonged to two separate and insurmountable worlds. He could be heard growling loudly in disapproval that any functional textiles would be considered “art.”

But such proclamations and prejudices are now as outdated as the “art czars” themselves. Cultural criticism is now governed by a sense of interpretation, not judgment, and the only answers to the ever-present questions of art versus craft are: “Who says that?” or “Who cares?”

The Smithsonian Museum is particularly relevant to this discussion as the nation’s showcase for crafts. Founded in 1965 as a “gallery of art, crafts, and design,” the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., which overlooks the North Lawn of the White House, just opened an exhibit that adds an exclamation point to the significance of woven art. Subversive, Talented, Sublime: Textile Art Created by Women describes how fiber has long inspired female artists, but “has often been dismissed as domestic labor and therefore irrelevant to the development of twentieth-century American art.” This exhibition addresses the historical marginalization of fiber in contemporary art making by presenting the work of 27 artists who have mastered fiber art “and transformed humble threads into sublime creations.”

“It dates from 1918–2004,” says the museum. press release“The 33 works in this exhibition include sewn quilts, woven tapestries and rugs, beaded and embroidered ornaments, twisted and knotted sculptures, and mixed media assemblages.” All come from the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The curatorial team for the exhibition included Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Mary Savig, Lloyd Herman curator of crafts; and Laura Augustin Fox, coordinator of curatorial collections at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Mecklenburg told me that their goal was “always to foreground the artists—we wanted these incredible women to speak for themselves, rather than be conveyed through a curatorial lens.” Instead of a curatorial “voice of God” telling visitors what they were seeing, individual wall labels for each work are written in the artist’s own words and come from interviews in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art collection. In most cases, the curators also included a photo of the artist. Mecklenburg said they wanted visitors to “feel like they’re interacting with the artist as directly as possible in the exhibition.” For this viewer, these wall labels do exactly that—a welcome contrast to museums that present exhibition labels as didactic statements of “importance.”

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For the curators, the driving force behind the exhibition was that “critics and art world figures (mostly men) had ignored and dismissed fiber art as ‘women’s work’, unworthy of the same level of attention as paintings, sculptures, etc. It was ‘craft’ rather than ‘art.’” To disrupt this gender hierarchy, they wanted to show that fiber art is not only innovative and incredibly creative, “but also an important medium that speaks to the full range of human experience, especially that of women.” The resulting exhibition includes a cross-section of work by Native, African-American, Latinx, and Asian-American artists who share social and familial similarities but who also invoke “subversive feminist ideas” inspired by marginalization and exclusion.

There is a vibrant atmosphere of individual creativity throughout the exhibition. The artworks exude personal achievement; there is not a speck of “sameness” among these fiber works. Instead, there is a frenetic sense of the unexpected at the beginning, starting with Claire Zeisler Coil III Series Celebration (above). This freestanding structure of hemp, wool, and wire was created by the artist and her assistants in 1978, using knotting and wrapping techniques to carefully wrap thousands of threads around galvanized wire.

Other important exhibits in the exhibition illustrate the diversity of contemporary works of art related to fibres and fabrics:

• IN Victorious (1982) Emma Amos created a lively and joyful woman using a patchwork of woven samples, threads and ribbons.

• Lenore Tawney Falling Stars Box (1984) is made of cotton canvas, linen thread, acrylic paint, and ink. He calls the work an example of “vertical weaving”—instead of a loom, he uses a canvas support and pulls individual threads through the canvas, sewing each thread with a knot in a process repeated thousands of times. The shimmering threads are meant to mimic the way the heavens hold and bend light.

• Faith Ringgold was famous for her narrative quilts and is represented here by Bitter Nest Part II: Harlem Renaissance Party (1988). This is a painted quilt depicting an imaginary family having dinner with figures from the Harlem Renaissance, including Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, and Aaron Douglass.

• In addition to flat artworks such as painted quilts, the exhibition features beadworks such as the work of Joyce Scott Necklace (1994) – a huge necklace imbued with Native American, African-American and West African influences.

Overall, I was impressed by how well the exhibition was put together—the artworks were compelling, there was a sense of flow between them, and the access to the artists’ statements created an emotional connection with visitors. As Mecklenburg told me, “We started with the idea that each artwork was important on its own terms and in its own particular context. We were inspired by what we had learned from oral histories at the Archives of American Art. We didn’t try to conform to predetermined themes, but allowed the groupings to flow organically from the artworks. And the title is a result of that—some of the artwork was subversive when it was made, all of it is skillful, and all of it is absolutely sublime.”

What a classic description of curatorial art!