This year, the art world went on a high fiber diet. Abstract weavings, knotted sculptures, expressive basketry, shaggy wall hangings: all are coming out of artist’s studios and museum storerooms, lending much-needed warmth and complexity to exhibition spaces. The moment has been a long time coming. Textile, of course, is among the most ancient of human endeavors; tapestry once outranked painting in the hierarchy of the arts. But modern fiber art has rarely gotten much respect. It’s one period of ascendancy came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Lausanne Tapestry Biennale was at its height, and the American counterculture, with its earnestly handcrafted aesthetics, was in full bloom. That was only a brief episode, though. A genre rooted in ancient techniques, adjacent to amateur pursuits, and—above all—mainly practiced by women and people of color? That was never going to command elite institutional attention for long.
Art history has a way of correcting its mistakes, though, and those aspects of fiber art that once marginalized the medium now make it feel relevant. Just like ceramics, which has enjoyed a parallel rise to prominence, textiles offer much of what the art world wants right now: under-explored histories, personal narrative, material intelligence, and demographic diversity.
The revival has taken ten years to gather strength. Arguably, it was initiated by curator Janelle Porter’s pioneering exhibition “Fiber Sculpture 1960-Present,” held at the ICA Boston in 2014. Since then, curator Ann Coxon has mounted well-received retrospectives of Anni Albers and Magdalena Abakanowicz at Tate Modern, and the discipline’s grande dame, Sheila Hicks, has been the subject of several major shows. (She has one this year, too, in Dusseldorf.)
2024 has been truly unprecedented though, with a thick pile of projects to unpick. Here are ten of the best.
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“Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Image Credit: photo © Museum Associates/LACMA It makes sense that, as a follow-up to her influential 2018 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, “Outliers and American Vanguard Art,” curator Lynne Cooke would have wanted to do a show about textile: it is, after all, a whole outlying discipline. Among the 50 artists included are names easily recognized by those fiber-familiar. Unlike the year’s other big surveys, though, basketry also had an important place in the show, with innovators like Lillian Elliott, Shan Goshorn and Ed Rossbach given attention.
Another welcome distinguishing feature is the excellent catalogue, featuring essays by several of the field’s leading scholars. Fiber art’s golden age would be all but irretrievable, today, were it not for a series of ambitious books organized MoMA curator Mildred Constantine and textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen (fittingly, “Woven Histories” makes a MoMA stop in the spring). Similarly, Cooke’s volume, together with the excellent publication for Unravel (#9 on this list), will serve as a permanent record of this expansive moment in the history of an unjustly neglected art form.
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“Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art,” at Barbican Art Gallery, London, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Image Credit: ©Jemima Yong / Barbican Art Gallery It’s unfortunate that “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art” happened to be on view when the Barbican Centre was plunged into controversy over the sprawling Centre’s disinvitation of speaker Pankaj Mishra, who had intended to address Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. That decision happened independently of the Barbican’s art gallery and “Unravel”’s curators, though several artists (Diedrick Brackens, #6, among them) felt compelled to pull their work in protest nonetheless.
The irony was that the show was itself about dissent, focusing on textiles as a vehicle for political consciousness. A collaboration with the Stedelijk in Amsterdam—which also staged one of the most significant fiber art exhibitions of the postwar era, “Perspectief in textiel,” in 1969—the exhibition was an energetic gathering of 45 artists with a strength in storytelling. Presiding over them all, above the gallery’s main stair, were several beaded banners by Jeffrey Gibson, who also represented the United States this year at the Venice Biennale. In these divisive times, his poetic, deeply thoughtful work has been a beacon. As he puts it one of his beaded banners: “Speak to me so that I can understand.”
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“Lee ShinJa: Weaving the Dawn” at Tina Kim Gallery, New York
One of the most impressive aspects of postwar fiber art was its international breadth. As if emulating their own working procedures, weavers criss-crossed the world, exhibiting together and learning from one another’s work.
Lee ShinJa is a perfect example. She first began making textile art during the difficult years of the Korean War, applying techniques she’d learned from her grandmother to burlap sacks and used sweaters. By the early 1960s she was making expressionist wall hangings, alternating passages of openwork with coursing rivulets of wrapped thread (one conservative critic accused her of “ruining traditional Korean embroidery”).
A key turning point came when ShinJa visited the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, where international fiber artists were featured at a Textiles Pavilion; she also showed at the 1983 Lausanne Biennial. “Weaving the Dawn,” at Tina Kim Gallery, was the artist’s first solo gallery exhibition in New York, at the age of 94. The show traversed her career, from early experimental pieces to her 1990s series “Spirit of the Mountain,” banded in the radiant colors of a sunrise.
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Foreigner’s Everywhere,” the 2024 Venice Biennale
Image Credit: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews The year’s biggest fiber art show was hiding in plain sight: inside the Venice Bienniale. For curator Adriano Pedrosa, textile seemed to serve as an overarching metaphor for connection, and he included an unprecedented number of artists working in the medium, including many from the Global South. Visitors to the Arsenale entered underneath an awe-inspiring canopy of reflective safety tape by the Mataaho Collective, comprising Māori women artists Bridget Reweti, Erena Baker, Sarah Hudson, and Terri Te Tau; the installation won the Golden Lion. Argentine artist Claudia Alarcón worked with other members of the textile collective Silät to transform fibers from the native chaguar plant into gorgeous compositions, suggestive of mountains and rivers. New York–based artist Liz Collins provided another knockout moment with her diptych Rainbow Mountain (2024). Made on digital looms at the TextielLab in Tilburg, in the Netherlands, the enormous weavings conjured a queer utopia tantalizingly within view, yet still out of reach. (Collins also had a concurrent monographic show at Candice Madey Gallery in New York City.) Taken as a whole, the Biennial sent the resounding message that fiber art is no longer at the art world’s margins—indeed, that marginalization itself is finally being overcome.
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“Diedrick Brackens: Blood Compass“ at Jack Shainman, New York.
Last time Diedrick Brackens geared up for a show at Jack Shainman Gallery, in 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic was still raging. As I noted in this magazine at the time, the timing was strangely appropriate, as Brackens had conceived the exhibition as a mediation on the long-term impact of AIDS.
This year Brackens’ exhibition arrived in more auspicious circumstances; it was presented in two locations with Jack Shainman, including the gallery’s beautiful new Tribeca space. Bare silhouettes, rendered in hand-dyed cotton, bespeak a private mythology akin to that of other African American artists (Bill Traylor, Kara Walker, the historic quilt maker Harriet Powers). His works are possessed of deep mystery, as if speaking to matters that cannot be put into words, yet also a tremendous urgency, which comes only when an artist really has something to say.
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“Julia Bland: Rivers on the Inside,” Derek Eller Gallery, New York City
Julia Bland also looks to the past, if not quite as far back as ancient Peru. She returns us, instead, to the visionary paintings of the early twentieth century, with their diagrammatic transcendentalism; and to the 1960s, releasing the era’s hippie tie-dye from its cocoon of cliché, then allowing it to emerge a big, beautiful butterfly.
Her exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery in New York was her finest to date, populated by compositions of great contrapuntal sophistication, openwork alternating with density, traceries of cord describing figures within the kaleidoscope of color and pattern. In Bland’s gorgeous hangings, terms normally thought to be oppositional—craft and fine art, opticality and materiality—are held in suspension, as if in a dream state.
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“Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Image Credit: Photo Hyla Skopitz. Where do you get your ideas? It’s a question artists tend to dislike, perhaps because it prompts the anxiety of influence. Weavers, though, tend to love talking about their sources, and their medium’s continuity across time.
This continuity was the subject of this stunning exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Curated by Iria Candela and Joanne Pillsbury, it was a show of two parts. One focused on ancient American textiles, including featherwork, baskets, and other weavings—abstractions predating those of Hilma Af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky by over a millennium. The other showcased postwar fiber art explicitly inspired by those traditions. Leonore Tawney was a star, with two of her monumental “woven forms” dominating the space. Also included was Anni Albers, who once noted that “the Peruvian back strap loom has embedded in it everything that a high-power machine loom today has.” The Met sometimes struggles to make its tremendous weight felt in contemporary circles; this cross-cultural, cross-temporal dialogue showed how it could do that most effectively. Like another show at the institution this year, “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now,” it advanced the idea that art history is a single “long now.”
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“Lenore Tawney and Toshiko Takaezu: A Remarkable Friendship” at Alison Jacques Gallery, London
I’ll admit to a complete lack of objectivity when it comes to Lenore Tawney and Toshiko Takaezu, having written the biographies of both artists. But the perfection of this pairing at Alison Jacques Gallery this autumn was undeniable. Tawney, the breakthrough innovator in American fiber art, was close friends with Takaezu, who was equally influential as a ceramist. They often showed their work together in their lifetimes, and even cohabited for a few years in the late 1970s.
Theirs was a case of opposites attracting. Tawney was a birdlike, ethereal mystic, Takaezu as solidly practical as they come. Tawney’s fine linen weavings float, swaying gently in any passing current, while Takaezu’s ceramic “closed forms” are compressed in the extreme, holding their dark air within. Yet in this juxtaposition, one had the profound sense of two entirely kindred spirits.
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“Barbara Chase-Riboud: Everytime A Knot is Undone, A God is Released” at Musée d’Orsay, Palais de la Porte Dorée, Musée du Louvre, Philharmonie de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée du Quai Branly, Musée Guimet, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris
You can scarcely go to a Parisian museum right now without encountering Barbara Chase-Riboud. No fewer than eight institutions have teamed up to present her work simultaneously. This multifarious approach is fitting, for Chase-Riboud is a true polymath. She has worked in a variety of artistic disciplines, and initially came to prominence as a writer via her 1979 novel Sally Hemings; the new exhibition’s title is taken from a book of her collected poetry.
But silk—the finest and strongest of the fibers, an obvious stand-in for human hair—has always played a leading part in her sculptural drama. Chase-Riboud typically combines it with cast bronze or aluminum, creating a juxtaposition of soft rope-like tresses and hard armor plating. Glowering and glamorous, they are personal responses to African sculpture, emblems of Black political consciousness, totems of a future world to come. In granting her an unprecedented platform, Paris is making an extraordinary statement: this American expatriate may just be the greatest French artist of our times.
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Olga De Amaral at Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris
Image Credit: Photo Marc Domage Who knew that one of the postwar era’s most powerful sculptors was still alive and well and working in Colombia? Well, a few us did. In 2021 I wrote about her touring exhibition “To Weave a Rock,” shown at the MFA Houston and Cranbrook Museum of Art. But it was only with the revelatory presentation of Olga De Amaral’s work at the Fondation Cartier in Paris that the magnitude of her achievement came to wider attention. The exhibition featured several of her monumental “woven walls,” works of architectural scale and incredible density, which had never traveled outside Colombia before. A wealth of other works—smaller by comparison, but still majestic, often limned with gold leaf—demonstrated that abstraction could still be a vehicle for spiritual transcendence. Beautifully installed by the architect Lena Gotmeh in Jean Nouvel’s high-tech jewel box in the 14th Arondissement, this was—at least for me—the monographic exhibition of the year, regardless of medium.
