Textiles

Diana Guerrero-Maciá: Paintings for Birds

Each year more than 325 avian species use the Mississippi Flyway, a migratory path that extends from Canada through the Midwestern United States to the Caribbean and South America. Their seasonal movements, threatened by climate change and urban development, served as metaphors for displacement, unity, and exchange in Diana Guerrero-Maciá’s commanding exhibition of more than twenty works. Throughout her textile-based paintings and vibrant mixed-media collages, the artist simultaneously invoked histories of modernist abstraction and the natural world from which they derive.

Chris Larson: The Residue of Labor

Shunning mere esthetic representations of industrial ruin, the strength of Chris Larson’s project is the artist’s deep engagement with the material conditions of the factory itself—from its textile remnants to its architecture to its deserted machinery—and with the residual traces of human labor that such objects bear.

Nick Cave: Forothermore

At once a celebration of beauty in all its opulence and material forms, Nick Cave’s Forothermore, the artist’s largest museum survey to date, is also a eulogy to Black lives lost to police violence and those harmed by societal bigotry and racism.

Bisa Butler: Portraits

The subjects who populate the 22 quilts that comprise Bisa Butler’s exhibition Portraits transcend their historical sources–vintage photographs of anonymous African Americans, whose visages Butler transforms through vibrant layers of fabric and thread.

Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe

Revealed throughout Mirror of the Universe, a suite of four exhibitions recently on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center exploring the life, work, and influence of Lenore Tawney (1907–2007), is an artist whose creative and everyday lives were intimately intertwined.

Anne Wilson: a hand well trained

Throughout her prodigious work, Anne Wilson employs human hair and found cloth (damask fabrics, table linens, family heirlooms, remnants of clothing), as stand-ins for the body and as fragments of memory imbued with their own personal and collective histories.

Diane Simpson: House Images

Both the work and the viewer are caught within a subtle warp of spatial dislocation, whereby two dimensions unfurl into three, and three dimensions fold into flatness.

Toward Textiles

Toward Textiles sets out to reclaim fiber art from disciplines of mainstream contemporary art that have appropriated, and perhaps misappropriated, material-based practices. As such, it attempts to deliver fiber art back to the realm of the physical and the experiential.