On Weaving celebrates the many facets of woven textiles by exploring the traditions and innovations of works made both on and off the loom. By presenting these techniques as a focal part of creative practice, exhibitions and related program activities highlight weaving as key to the continued history of textiles and foundational to fiber art as a contemporary art discipline.
On Weaving deepens our engagement with the work of talented, diverse fiber artists with an invited cohort of nationally recognized artists who will be exhibiting, teaching, and talking about the processes and inspiration that feeds their practices. Of these artists, we have asked: what about weaving – woven structure, the freedom, constraint, complexity or simplicity of it – keeps you at the loom? We hope by engaging the broad sensibilities of weaving that the extraordinary works on exhibit will inspire our in-person and virtual community appreciators, makers, scholars, students, and professionals to recognize the significant contributions of textiles and fiber arts to the vocabulary and discourse of contemporary art.
On Weaving includes works that emerge from a simple frame loom to the complex structures of digital age hand-jacquard. Focus on woven structure is not just a physical aspect of fiber art work, but is an expression of the way artists think. Techniques employed in creative practice reveal a great deal about what motivates an artist and how they problem solve. From loom assisted and loom controlled weaving, to hand interlacing, from technology to anti-technology, from preserving tradition to innovating to both amplify and defy it, from cultural to environmental to social influences—the labor intensive processes used in weaving carry myriad personal narratives, shared by each artist through their featured works.
Exhibiting Artists:
Polly Barton, New Mexico
Marianne Fairbanks, Wisconsin
Neil Goss, North Carolina
Erica Lynne Hanson, Arizona
Kathe Todd-Hooker, Oregon
Michael Rhode, California
Wendy Weiss, Nebraska
Bhakti Ziek, New Mexico