With a bounty of both in-person and virtual textile events, TSA shares some of our recommendations for the Fall season!
courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York
Africa Fashion *Closing Soon*
Brooklyn Museum
June 23 – October 22, 2023
In-Person Exhibition
As much of Africa won independence in the mid-twentieth century, a wave of liberated creative expression swept across the continent—and its evolution hasn’t stopped since. Showcasing a dazzling array of garments alongside music, visual art, and much more, Africa Fashion celebrates the ingenuity and global impact of African fashions from the 1950s to today. Works by iconic designers and artists illuminate fashion’s pivotal role in Africa’s cultural renaissance, which laid the foundation for an ongoing fashion revolution.
Making its North American debut in Brooklyn, Africa Fashion is the largest-ever presentation of the subject: more than 180 works, including standout pieces from the Museum’s collections. Organized thematically, this multisensory experience features immersive displays of haute couture and ready-to-wear apparel, as well as photographs, literature, sketches, music, film and catwalk footage, textiles, and jewelry. More than forty designers and artists from twenty African countries are represented, from the vanguards who first gained worldwide attention, such as Kofi Ansah (Ghana) and Shade Thomas-Fahm (Nigeria), to the newest generation of cutting-edge creatives, such as Thebe Magugu (South Africa) and Gouled Ahmed (Djibouti). Many of their works are on view for the first time in the United States.
A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York
July 7, 2023 – February 4, 2024
In-Person Exhibition
American textile designer, weaver, and color authority Dorothy Liebes (1897–1972) had a profound influence across design fields, helping to shape American tastes in areas from interiors and transportation to industrial design, fashion, and film. This exhibition reveals the scope of her achievements and adds a new thread to the story of mid-century modernism.
Sarah Zapata: So the roots be known
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art: Kansas City, MO
August 17th, 2023 – July 27th, 2024
In-Person Exhibition
For Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s eighth annual commissioned Atrium Project, New York-based artist Sarah Zapata (Peruvian American, born 1988) combines sculptural and textile techniques to create a vibrant and inviting site-specific installation. In her practice, she sources familiar materials—such as acrylic yarn and natural fibers—and traditional art forms including weaving, coiling, sewing, and latch hooking, to articulate the intersections of her plural identities: the daughter of a Peruvian immigrant; a first generation American born in Texas; and a queer woman raised in an Evangelical household.
In Sarah Zapata: So the roots be known, Zapata centers local lesbian and feminist histories from her research at the Gay and Lesbian Archive of Mid-America at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. In part, this installation pays homage to Womontown, a group of primarily queer women who established a revolutionary community in the Longfellow (Dutch Hill) neighborhood of Kansas City in the late 1980s. Zapata’s use of abstracted tulip forms and shades of lavender draw inspiration from the Womontown banner while simultaneously evoking histories of queer resistance, as the color lavender came to be associated with gay and lesbian communities, and thus stigmatized, in the mid-twentieth century. Ladders—a recurring motif in Zapata’s work alluding to ideas of fantasy and transitional spaces—here make reference to the national lesbian magazine The Ladder (1956–1970), founded by the Daughters of Bilitis and later operated remotely by recognized writer and publisher Barbara Grier in Kansas City.
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Sep 17, 2023 – Jan 21, 2024
In-Person Exhibition
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction foregrounds a robust if over-looked strand in art history’s modernist narratives by tracing how, when, and why abstract art intersected with woven textiles (and such pre-loom technologies as basketry, knotting, and netting) over the past century. Although at times unevenly weighted, the diverse exchanges, alignments, affiliations, and affinities that have brought these art forms into dialogue constitute an ongoing if intermittent narrative in which one art repeatedly impacts and even redefines the other. In short, the relationship between abstract art and woven textiles can best be described as co-constitutive, and their histories as interdependent. With over 150 works by an international and transhistorical roster of artists, this exhibition reveals how shifting relations among abstract art, fashion, design, and craft shaped recurrent aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political forces, as they, in turn, were impacted by modernist art forms.
Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center; Asheville, NC
September 29, 2023 – January 6, 2024
In-Person Exhibition
Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students will be the first exhibition devoted to textile practices at Black Mountain College (BMC). Celebrating 90 years since the college’s founding, the exhibition will reveal how weaving was a more significant part of BMC’s legendary art and design curriculum than previously assumed.
BMC’s weaving program was started in 1934 by Anni Albers and lasted until the College closed in 1956. Despite Albers’s elevated reputation, the persistent treatment of textile practices as women’s work or handicraft has often led to the discipline being ignored or underrepresented in previous scholarship and exhibitions about the College; this exhibition brings that work into the spotlight at last.
In addition to Albers, Trude Guermonprez taught her first classes in the U.S. at BMC, and Marli Ehrman and Tony Landreau brought their own perspectives on the discipline through their work and teaching. Among their students, some went on to find work as weavers, teachers, and textile designers, including Else Regensteiner, Lore Kadden Lindenfeld, Marilyn Bauer, Don Wight, and Joan Potter Loveless. Other students did not pursue future work in weaving but became successful artists and designers in their own right, including Ray Johnson, Don Page, Claude Stoller, Jane Slater Marquis, and Robert Rauschenberg.
ReVIEWING 14: Thematic Focus: Material + Structure
Co-hosted by BMCM+AC and UNC Asheville
UNC Asheville’s Reuter Center, Asheville, NC
October 13 – 15, 2023
International Conference
ReVIEWING Black Mountain College conference is a forum for scholars and artists to contribute original work on topics related to Black Mountain College and its place in cultural history.
The format is designed to be interdisciplinary, with sessions that will include panels, presentations, performances, and workshops. BMC itself was a uniquely interdisciplinary organization, generating output from its faculty and students that often involved the melding of the visual, performing, and literary arts. Each year, conference participation reflects this; past presentations have explored wide-ranging, fruitful intersections such as (to name just a few of the most recent examples) how Charles Olson’s “projectivist” poetics inspired works on the stage and screen; the influence of choreographer Merce Cunningham on Abstract Expressionist painters trained at BMC such as Pat Passlof and James Bishop; the photography of poet-publisher-artist Jonathan Williams; the path from BMC’s first Summer Institute in honor of Arnold Schoenberg, to the design and philosophy of contemporary summer arts programs today; a performance connecting Ruth Asawa’s sculpture to contemporary dance; and a workshop offering attendees the opportunity to weave on looms with found materials, as Anni Albers’ BMC students did.
Museums Today: This Is America: Re-Viewing the Art of the United States
George Washington University Museum, Washington DC
October 18, 2023
6pm EST
Virtual Conversation
This Is America: Re-Viewing the Art of the United States is a new, inclusive introduction to American visual culture from early history to the present. Reimagining the traditional survey of American art, the book provides expanded coverage of underrepresented stories through the inclusion of marginalized makers, diverse media and vast geographic regions. By combining close visual and historical analyses with discussion of how works of art operated within specific cultural contexts and for us today, this publication prioritizes art’s critical role in social discourse.
Join authors Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Keri Watson as they discuss the development of the project and share tips for engaging with its culturally relevant themes.
About Keidra Daniels Navaroli
Keidra Daniels Navaroli is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in the Texts and Technology Ph.D. program at the University of Central Florida. She is the former assistant director/curator of the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts at the Florida Institute of Technology and currently serves on the boards of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, and Surface Design Association.
About Keri Watson
Keri Watson is associate professor of American art history at the University of Central Florida and co-executive editor of Panorama, journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Terra Foundation of American Art, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and Society for the Preservation of American Modernists.
Rug and Textile Appreciation Morning: Past Present and Future of Chilkat Weaving
George Washington University Museum, Washington DC
December 9, 2023
1pm EST
Virtual Conversation
Originating in the Pacific Northwest, Chilkat weaving uses a complex finger-twined technique requiring immense skill, time and dedication. These boldly patterned robes, also called “dancing blankets,” are worn for ceremonial occasions by dignitaries and high-ranking tribal members of the Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit and other Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples of Alaska and western Canada. A single Chilkat robe can take years to weave, and the knowledge of how to complete them has always been held by only a small number of weavers.
Join Chilkat weaver Lily Hope and researcher Zachary Jones for a virtual conversation about the past, present and future of this complex weaving tradition.
About Lily Hope
Lily Hope is Tlingit Indian and a Chilkat weaver, one of the few designers of dancing blankets working today. Her contemporary works in textiles and paper collage blend Ravenstail and Chilkat design. She teaches both finger-twined styles in the Pacific Northwest, and lectures internationally. Hope is president and co-founder of Spirit Uprising, a nonprofit dedicated to maintaining, recording and teaching weaving with integrity.
About Zachary Jones
Zachary R. Jones, Ph.D., is a historian and curator based in Alaska. His research focuses on Northwest Coast art history, including on historic artists from the Tlingit community. Dr. Jones has published widely in history, anthropology, art history and museum journals. He currently works for the National Park Service’s Museum Program in Anchorage, Alaska.
TSA BOARD SELECTIONS
Fall recommendations from the TSA Board
Gio Swaby: Fresh Up
Peabody Essex Museum; Salem MA
August 12 – November 26, 2023
In-Person Exhibition
Gio Swaby grew up in the Bahamas surrounded by the materials her seamstress mother used. She chose to work in textiles—a medium traditionally associated with domesticity and femininity—as a means to imbue her works with both familiarity and labor-intensive care. She upends tradition with her often life-size portraits, which give a sense of monumentality to the techniques of embroidery and piecing. She also presents the reverse side of her intricately rendered canvases so that the stitching process of her freehand style—the normally hidden knots and loose threads—is visible. While there is a vulnerability to Swaby “showing the back,” she embraces and elevates these imperfections.
“Fresh up” is a Bahamian phrase often used as a way to compliment someone’s style or confident way of being. Swaby remarks, “It holds a lot of positivity and joy. It also speaks to the tone of confidence and power that I want to create with these works.” Personal texts from the artist introduce each series and punctuate the visitor experience in the exhibition.
The People’s Quilting Bee Series
The Tatter Textile Library
September 6, 2023 – December 20, 2023
All lectures are from 2 pm – 3:30pm Eastern Time
Virtual Lecture Series: Zoom
Stories have always been told at quilting bees: stories of legacy, of resistance, and of community care. This autumn we invite you to join Dr. Sharbreon Plummer and Dr. Jess Bailey as they re-imagine the quilting bee, creating an online space in which to learn about the rich and diverse histories of patchwork in North America while perhaps making your own quilt. Across six lectures featuring a range of writers, researchers, and quilters, you will learn why and how artists in this tradition are so connected to quilt histories. Guests will share their knowledge and experience of topics that are integral to how we understand quilting in the past and in our present such as through a deeper consideration of materials, diaspora, indigenous knowledge, and queering quilt legacies. Participants will leave with a renewed understanding of both the diversity and vitality of quilt histories in passing down artistic traditions. While we hope you will join us for the full duration of the class, you are also welcome to sign up for individual lectures on topics that interest you.
Quilters make in order to know. This virtual quilt history lecturer series would not be complete without an opportunity to both discuss the stories we hear and make more quilts. While enrollment in the People’s Quilting Bee lectures series is unlimited, Dr. Sharbreon Plummer will be guiding an intimate group through the processes of making a quilt while exploring our relationship to materials, storytelling and communal creativity. She will facilitate discussions that blend the heart, mind and hands, showcasing how quilts are a tool for self discovery and archive the beauty of our humanity.
Program Details
Intro: Why Learn Quilt History? – September 6th, 2023
Honoring the Foundation on Which We Stand – September 27th, 2023
Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt – October 18th, 2023
Honoring our Ancestors – November 8th, 2023
Quilts, Queerness, and Community – November 29th, 2023
Closing: Quilting New Futures with the Past – December 20th, 2023
Colcha Embroidery of the San Luis Valley
Arvada Center; Arvada, CO
September 14, 2023 – November 12, 2023
In-Person Exhibition
Artist Talk and Opening Reception
Arvada Center; Arvada, CO
September, 14, 2023
5-9 PM MDT
The Arvada Center exhibition of colcha embroidery features the work of embroiderers living and creating in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. These stitchers rely heavily on the colcha stitch, a couching stitch (one of the oldest stitches in the world) associated with the settler culture of the Southwest to create pictorial narratives about Hispanic life in the San Luis Valley in southcentral Colorado. Themes include renderings of historical and contemporary landscapes, cultural reenactments, folk religious practices, memories of place, and storytelling.
Common Thread
Santa Clara University; Santa Clara, CA
Nov 13, 2023 – Feb 2, 2024
In-Person Exhibition
Artist Talk and Reception
Dowd Lobby, Santa Clara University; Santa Clara, CA
January 18, 2024
5-7pm
In the Silence Between Mother Tongues by Kira Dominguez Hultgren, 2022
Silk from a salwar and chunni that my grandmother wore; two nalas; rope from my favorite Utah climbing gym; paracord; found wood, plastic, and metal loom bars, heddle rods, and shed rods; eye bolts; handspun wool; skin dyed and acid dyed wool; digital-hand woven fabric in mostly cotton, mohair, and metallics; various other yarns and cut up fabrics in cotton, wool, acrylic, linen, and mohair.
92″ x 55″ x 12″
Curated by Marianne McGrath, this exhibition weaves three artists together through their shared interests in textiles and the narrative qualities found in their works. Each artist’s practice involves working in mediums considered traditional modes of female creative production. Yet, they present refreshingly non-traditional themes, complex intentions, diverse materials and innovative methods. Fabric, stitches, warp, and weft reveal concerns both personal and universal, while exploring identity, social justice, relationships, and memory. Common Thread is curated by Marianne K. McGrath, M.A. art curator and consultant. Featuring Artists: Alice Beasley, Michelle Kingdom, Kira Dominguez Hultgren.
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