Fabric and textiles lovers have plenty to look forward to in the rich feast on view at the National Gallery in Washington DC this summer.
Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, on exhibit through July 28, 2024 in the East Wing, offers a tactile and sensory dive into some of the most compelling ways that (mostly female) textile artists confronted rapid changes in politics, economy, manufacture, and social and gender roles in the early 20th through the early 21st centuries.
The show features border-pushing ideas in indigenous textile art too, as well as work by males and LGBTQ+ artists.
I saw the exhibit this Spring and can assure you it’s well worth planning a visit to DC before it leaves in mid summer. If you go, make it a whole “thing” and plan to also see Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women at the Smithsonian, and round it out by popping into the Textiles Museum at George Washington University.
At Woven Histories, work from early 20th century female fiber artists, particularly between the two great wars, reveal that their making of garments, prosaic everyday weavings, or a distinct decorative art piece (not that these are mutually exclusive), always contained a pointed intellectualism and intentionality that commented on their times. These artists approached and integrated “fashion” or “home interiors” at levels well beyond the superficial connotations that such decorative pieces might suggest. Go see to believe.
Below are some raves and a rant about various pieces. There’s way more in this exhibit than I can touch on in a blog post. I’m picking a few pieces to highlight while there’s so much more to see and contemplate in this wide-ranging installation.
Woven Histories Highlights
Before heading out — or if you can’t make the show — check out the National Gallery’s online slideshow of select pieces and several short but compelling related articles and videos:
- Who is Anni Albers? 8 Things to Know
- Artists at Work: Liz Collins Weaves a Promised Land
- Zoe Leonard on Rigorous Conceptual Art
- Unveiling Contemporary Artist Ann Hamilton’s 30-Year Odyssey
- Gallery Talk: LGBTQ+ Artists in Woven Histories (time sensitive, June 14-22, 2024)
While the show spans about a century, and explores the topics listed above, I found myself most taken by the underlying premise of textile’s link to abstract painting.
The show includes abstract prints and paintings, often of planned weavings, which threw me at first. But as I took time with the pieces and reflected on the historic and cultural contexts elucidated on the placards, my appreciation for — and understanding of — the dialogue between weaving and painting grew, illuminating a new way to see how they’ve informed each other in the deep background of art’s evolution as well as in specific ways by the intentions of artists straddling the mediums.
A Rave: Anni Albers
My biggest interest was the work of Anni Albers, a German Bauhaus artist whose broad influence in America began when she made textiles art and taught weaving at the legendary Black Mountain College in the 1930s and 40s.
Albers is so amazing — conceptually brilliant, daring, technically virtuoso, a mentor to a generation of early 20th century textile artists, and mindblowingly ahead of her time — that I looped back again and again to meditate on her pieces anew, trying to get into the mind of someone who clearly responded to the mystery of life with how it made sense to her in fabric, the act of weaving, garment-making, and textile objects.
Call me a fan!
For Albers, the medium itself drove her creative process. Different types of fiber elicited different weaving techniques, different artistic aims, and a wide range of textile outcomes.
Some of her geometry was so complex it wasn’t possible to weave it in its own time.
The hidden language of fiber mediums was also central to her mode of teaching — listen, lean in, and let the fiber and loom teach you what it wants to become.
As a deeply spiritual person tuned to the manifest immanence pervading the world I couldn’t help but feel that Albers was dialed in to a numinous wavelength in her relationship to fiber and the ancient art of weaving.
While drinking in her patterns and pieces I imagined her deeply engaging with the rhythmic repetition and full body movements of weaving, the slow revelations of crossed colors and pattern, leading her into that mystical, meditative, transcendent, seer-like realm long associated in myth, lore, and ordinary parlance alike in the largely feminine lineage of the art and practice of weaving.
On display in this show are a range of Albers’ pieces, including examples of her work for industrial interior fabric and textiles production. You’ll also see drawings for planned weavings, small but intriguing samples of various woven fabrics, wall hangings, prints, and an array of her vivid, energetic geometric configurations. In seemingly ordinary pieces of cloth are embedded deeply complex patterns that reveal a mind of soaring vision.
Albers was the first female textile artist whose work was shown at Moma. It’s an understatement to suggest she deserves a touring solo retrospective.
A Rant: The Confused and Confusing Frau Fiber
One piece in the show I found to be a confused bit of twaddle.
Carole Frances Lung’s 2015 video Frau Fiber vs. The Circular Knitting Machine purported to send up the culture of slow-knitting — and by extension slow- (insert your handmade textile medium here). From the piece’s placard,
“In Frau Fiber vs. The Circular Knitting Machine, Carole Frances Lung lampoons a romanticized view of handcrafting as anti-capitalist and self-empowering, championed by the Craftivist movement around 2007. This video — recorded in real time — features the artist as their alter ego, Frau Fiber, laboriously hand-knitting a sock. In motion just behind Frau Fiber is a high-tech, computer-automated knitting machine, Over the course of the video’s 4 hours and 32 minutes, Frau Fiber completes a single tube sock while her mechanical rival produces 99 pairs.”
One assumes we’re supposed to chuckle at the artist’s revelation of the irony of her own work, and perhaps bow down in humility and awe at the astounding pace and output of machines, even digitized ones styled to appear as old clunky East German ones.
Sure, machines are amazing. But is that the whole calculus of human life with themz?
Frau Fiber, a character rendered with a deadened and lifeless beige-itude bordering on the depressive, and costumed in hints of communistic prison-wear, can obviously never keep pace with two needles and a skein against mechanization of any sort, even a Mattel Knit Magic, (to say nothing of today’s computer-driven speed).
Duh! Is this news?
There was a real Why bother? vibe to the video, with the character Frau bathed in dull hues and embodying joylessness in her process and output, with the incongruent suggestion that in relation to industrial productivity any pleasure in making outside of the machine will always be eclipsed — and ultimately superfluous — if not downright arrogant and pretentious.
Pitched against the artist’s stated intent, the video wasn’t even mesmerizing, nor contemplative. The score was already known, the fix was in.
This, mixed with a confused central premise — are we to compare ourselves to industrial output and find ourselves wanting? Or are we being reminded, yet again, that not all knitters have the same opportunity to knit for — or with — pleasure when another essential, inescapable tube sock awaits for those without the means to make a tube sock for the pure thrill of knitting?
Talk about a lack of original insight and context. Let’s break it down.
Life on earth is varied in the extreme and so are our life stories and conditions. This is tragic, perhaps, perhaps not, but also too obviously true to be missed and too jejune a gripe to be overly bemoaned by grown artists. What else ya got?
I found the piece littered with blind spots and puffed up with the sneering disdain that’s too often directed at the slow-fiber movement (which could basically be the rest of the pieces in Woven Histories — and its artists).
Slow-making critiques, like that it’s the sole domain of the so-called privileged, or that those doing slow arts must acknowledge their so-called privilege and do the public perp walk and apologize to those who purportedly “can’t” find the time/money/supplies to do it or are merely resentful tantrums rather than cogent insights into the human condition or human possibilities. The muddled and uninspired Frau Fiber suggests slow-making is a joke in the face of an industrial tempo and might when one can easily and cheaply pick up tube socks at The Dollar Store (or the once-upon-a-time East German queue).
Nevermind the earth-despoiling fossil fuel-guzzling that it takes to produce industrial textiles, or the belching pollution on the other side of what’s made. Frau Fiber ignores that.
Forget that typically, modern-day wage slaves perform most of the textiles jobs across the globe today and that a new (or revived) slower labor and consumption model is a meaningful part of the real answer against both over-consumption and exploitative work.
Don’t include the soul-edifying or tactile pleasures built into the act of works made by hand, even those performed routinely and specifically for income. Myriad models of collectives and cohorts wed slow-arts with fair trade to redefine this work space, particularly for female workers.
Eschew the political, economic, and slavish time-regimentation critiques and conscious redirection that the social defiance of formal Craftivism and everyday slow-making alike asserts.
But fine, machines make faster socks…and bras, and undies, and sheets, and kabillions of tons of landfill-destined fast-fashion products. Bravo, the machine is faster! Woo hoo!
If Frau Fiber intended to cleverly assert something else, it totally escaped me. The piece read as a dead end of self-referential hopelessness, and a stance devoid of perspective, context, insight, and most of all wisdom.
Woven Histories IS Hand Work
Labor, particularly female labor, looms in the background of all textiles work since the first fiber was ever hand harvested, hung to dry, turned and cured over the course of a half a year or more, and was then rewetted, fondled, coaxed and woven into a necessary carrying vessel, a basket.
It’s all labor. It all hangs on labor. That very subject is at the heart of the talk I give, A Brief History of Fabric.
Many, if not all the artists in Woven Histories speak to labor both directly and indirectly simply by the nature of their work as non-industrial weavers and textile artists. Or in making their work outside of the expected domains of pure utility, or in boldly asserting that fiber can be bent — or woven — to this or that unexpected end. Even in the past century this has thankfully remained dominated by the use of mere hands and plodding time. With digitization and increased mechanization that might change, temporarily, but given the arc of history and the role of energy, as well as the yearning to join hands to fiber, I would doubt it would ever change for long.
The primacy of a world made by hand defines every society across the globe and across all known time, making our 200-year +/- industrial blip the anomaly and not the norm. And even that hasn’t escaped that making things takes actual time. Our current historic anomaly should be the critical reference point in the gamut of possible labor conversations and constructs rather than accepting industrialization as the acme of human achievement. Overcoming a past of perceived drudgery and labor subjugation mistakenly presumed to be inherent in acts of textile-making — or any work by hand — is a modern day lie.
/Rant over/.
So Much To See
This review hasn’t even scratched the surface of Woven Histories given its many other focal points — intellectual, ideological, cultural, or identity-based — that might speak to different audience members in ways both personal and societal. It’s a truly wide-ranging exhibit.
Here’s a small gallery of pics I took, sans captions:
Woven Histories will give you plenty to ponder and explore, all of it prompted from myriad fibers woven into myriad objects (and other fiber art expressions, too). Check it out, unhurriedly — it’s a feast for the eyes, heart, mind.
After it closes in DC the show will be at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, November 8, 2024–March 2, 2025 and then The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 20–September 13, 2025.
Enjoy!
— Lindsay Curren, Lady Virginia Vintage Fabrics
Shop my curated antique and vintage fabric and textiles collection on Etsy.
