This spring, three artists who have been awarded the Brandford/Elliott Award for Excellence in Fiber have solo shows in New York City galleries and museums. Given since 1995 and administered by TSA since 2016, the award honors innovative fiber artists in the early stages of their careers and supports them with an unrestricted gift. See the Brandford/Elliott Award page for more information and a full list of past recipients.
TSA congratulates Sonya Clark (awarded 2000), Diedrick Brackens (awarded 2018), and Melissa Cody (awarded 2020) on their exhibitions! The Brandford/Elliott awardee for 2024 will be announced this summer.
Sonya Clark, We Are Each Other
Museum of Arts and Design
Through September 22, 2024
Gallery view of the exhibition. Photo: Jenna Bascom. Image via Museum of Arts and Design.
Highlighting thirty years of artmaking dedicated to the Black experience in America, Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other is the first comprehensive survey of the communal art projects that form the heart of the artist’s pioneering creative practice. Accompanied by a selection of Clark’s photographs, prints, and sculpture, the exhibition features five of Clark’s large-scale, collaborative projects, including her barrier-breaking The Hair Craft Project (2014) and the ongoing performance, Unraveling.
Read more on the Museum of Arts and Design website.
Diedrick Brackens, blood compass
Jack Shainman Gallery (two locations)
At 513 West 20th Street through June 1, 2024
At 46 Lafayette Street through May 24, 2024
Installation view via Jack Shainman Gallery.
Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present blood compass, a solo exhibition of new work by Diedrick Brackens. In these weavings, the artist maps an imagined place —visualizing the internal mechanisms and symbols that animate his work while removing the anchor of direct narrative. The scenes depicted in each weaving exist out of time, suspended between a distant past and a world to come. The works in this series are set at dusk, twilight, and deep night—hours that become vehicles for ritual and interiority. The silhouetted inhabitants of this in-between realm are archetypes that Brackens once described as ciphers, or ‘needles through which I slip the threads of biography and myth, and pass through a mesh of history and context.’
Read more on the Jack Shainman Gallery website.
Melissa Cody, Webbed Skies
MoMA PS1
Through September 9, 2024
Melissa Cody. Untitled. 2022. Wool warp, weft, selvedge cords, and aniline dyes. 8′10′′ x 56′′ (269 x 142 cm). Image via MoMA PS1.
The first major solo museum presentation of fourth-generation Navajo weaver Melissa Cody (b. 1983, No Water Mesa, Arizona) spans the last decade of her practice, showcasing over 30 weavings and a major new work produced for the exhibition. Using long-established weaving techniques and incorporating new digital technologies, Cody assembles and reimagines popular patterns into sophisticated geometric overlays, incorporating atypical dyes and fibers. Her tapestries carry forward the methods of Navajo Germantown weaving, which developed out of the wool and blankets that were made in Germantown, Pennsylvania and supplied by the US government to the Navajo people during the forced expulsion from their territories in the mid-1800s. During this period, the rationed blankets were taken apart and the yarn was used to make new textiles, a practice of reclamation which became the source of the movement. While acknowledging this history and working on a traditional Navajo loom, Cody’s masterful works exercise experimental palettes and patterns that animate through reinvention, reframing traditions as cycles of evolution.
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