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.
“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.
—Glenn Adamson
