After training those artisans, Adams began working as he does to this day, unraveling Islamic prayer rugs and meticulously reweaving them with beads that evoke the zikr or Tasbih strand that Muslims use for prayer. It’s “a symbolic gesture,” he said, a way to make his own space within Islam as a queer mixed-race Muslim, and to consider “the aspects of my identity that were in conflict with each other.” Today Adams employs a team of 16, including his former painting students and their relatives, as well as his own family members, to help him finish sprawling tapestries that have the scale and wall-power of paintings. Several works incorporate worn-out linoleum flooring ripped up from friends’ and neighbors’ houses, a building material associated with working-class homes. His 2022 solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Desire Lines,” included the 10-foot-long, earth-toned Langa (2021), made from wood, plastic, glass, stone, nylon rope, wire, and cotton. The beige X across its center is based on an aerial Google Maps image of the footpaths grooved into the land between the Cape Town community of Bonteheuwel, where Adams grew up—designated for “Coloured” people during the apartheid era—and Langa, an adjacent Black suburb.

Recently, many early-career artists trained in fine art have been following a path similar to Adams’s, turning away from painting—along with the art historical baggage and limitations that come with it—and toward fiber. They’re using the materials of craft in ways that look a lot like painting. But these artists take the material as an invitation to center personal and social histories, often from historically marginalized perspectives. Queens, New York–based Natalia Nakazawa, an artist of Japanese and Uruguayan heritage, first trained as a figurative painter at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In critiques and studio visits, she experienced what she called “terrifying” conversations, rife with exoticizing tokenism, about the brown female bodies in her paintings. After exhibiting figurative work at the Queens International in 2006, she “close[d] … that chapter.” Today, she uses textiles to address cultural heritage, diaspora, digital circulation, and institutional power. “One reason why I gravitated toward textiles was to escape obsessive conversations about the body’s particulars,” she said, during a visit to her studio in Long Island City, New York. “I wanted to talk about ancestry, history, past, present, future. I wanted to talk about globalization and markets—how images are translated from one medium to the next and are sold.” A recent textile, Demons and Protectors: Say their names #GuiYingMa #ChristinaYunaLee #MichelleAlyssaGo (2022), features images of three Asian American women who were murdered in New York during the pandemic, alongside images of beasts and fragmented sculptural hands. There is a “fragile quality to how much we can honor and protect our own community members,” Nakazawa said.

Brazilian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Lila de Magalhaes initially studied painting, but turned to embroidery after being introduced to the technique while working as an assistant in a painter’s studio. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Southern California (where she focused on video art), she worked as a studio assistant for Ivan Morley, and came across his “rickety Japanese analog hand-guided embroidery machine.” The tool took her back to her childhood making crafts as a Waldorf school student in Switzerland, where she was raised. She now makes tapestries that, from a distance, are dead ringers for paintings. Only when you get close enough can you see their otherworldly imagery is embroidered onto dyed bedsheets or silks, and embellished with layers of chalk pastel. Her visual vocabulary— kittens, worms, insects, abstract body parts, and often, a woman riding naked astride a horse—plumbs the unconscious. A self-professed Jungian, she refers to the dyed thrift-store bedlinens she embroiders as “the place of the unconscious and dreams.”

This new generation of artists freely mixes fiber and painting, addressing formal and political concerns in works that are dyed, woven, embroidered, and sewn rather than rendered in oil or acrylic. Indeed, on a trip to galleries in downtown New York this past winter, tapestries often dominated the wall space typically given to painting. One standout show was an intergenerational exhibition at Kaufmann Repetto, “Re-Materialized: The Stuff That Matters.” Millennial artists working in figuration—like LJ Roberts, who makes embroidered portraits of queer and trans individuals; and Erin M. Riley, whose tapestries often depict her own tattooed body, captured in iPhone selfies—were included, along with veterans like 80-year-old knotted-rope artist Françoise Grossen.

The turn from paint to textiles is a trend that has been brewing for a while. The ground was laid by a series of exhibitions that celebrated both craft and the tendency toward ornamentation and decoration, both of which have long been associated with women and non-Western cultures. Nakazawa pointed to recent surveys like “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985,” which opened in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as influential for celebrating ornament in contemporary art. “A lot of people relegate women and people of color to a decorative realm,” she said; for this reason, she considers the medium of textiles a tool for formerly marginalized people to reclaim full humanity

Other landmark shows foregrounding textiles and craft include “Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present” (2014) at the ICA Boston; “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” (2018) at the National Gallery of Art; “Quilts and Color” (2014) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and “Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019” (2019–22) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Many of these exhibitions build on the legacy of feminist art history by reclaiming contributions to formal innovation created in domestic settings, celebrating collective practices, and leveling the hierarchy between fine art and folk art. In the process, they revealed how gender, race, and class underpin aesthetic biases.

Over two decades, major museum exhibitions have reframed works made in fiber as capital-A Art by showing how formal evolutions in painting developed alongside—and indeed borrowed from—patterns and compositions found in textiles. One touchstone is the groundbreaking survey “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” which traveled to 11 museums between 2002 and 2006. The show’s inventive geometric compositions, made from castoff fabric by a community of Black quilters in Alabama, were eagerly received as a particularly American style of abstraction. As Michael Kimmelman extolled in the New York Times, “Imagine Matisse and Klee … arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves.”

A new generation of artists’ work testifies to the Gee’s Bend quilters’ enduring influence. The 32-year-old artist Bhasha Chakrabarti, whose work was included in the group show “Fiber of My Being” last summer at Hales gallery in New York, studied textiles both in India and with the Gee’s Bend quilters in Alabama; her figurative portraits bring together textile and painterly techniques. Also in 2022, Legacy Russell organized “The New Bend,” a group show at Hauser & Wirth gallery that drew connections between the Gee’s Bend quilters and 12 risingstar artists, including Tomashi Jackson, Eric N. Mack, and Basil Kincaid. Russell described the Gee’s Bend makers as “artists and technologists,” positioning younger artists as their inheritors exploring the many links between textiles and digital tools. The warps and wefts of fabric, for instance, work like a grid of pixels, while their collage techniques recall the disjointed experience of browsing the internet.

The digital plays a significant role in much of the new textile work. Nakazawa turns digitally collaged images of artworks, often by non- Western makers, into jacquard-woven textiles made in North Carolina on recycled cotton. She then embellishes the fabric with hand-stitched elements like shisha mirrors and sequins. “Jacquard is the original computer,” she said, pointing out that women dominated computer programming before the field became lucrative. Digital imagery is also a source for New York–based Pauline Shaw, who studied sculpture at RISD before teaching herself felting through online tutorials. She now mines online museum collections, along with her personal history, to create textile works exploring cultural memory. A first-generation Taiwanese American, Shaw’s tapestries often rework motifs found in East Asian decorative arts. Taw (2022), made from felted wool and cotton scrim, features stylized forms representing a marble, a peony, a chrysanthemum—an emblem of good luck—as well as a poppy, symbolizing extraction and global trade. Small blown-glass objects, resembling flora, dangle from the tapestry’s bottom edge. “In the absence of heirlooms, familial stories and memories became folktales,” Shaw said during a walk-through of a two-artist show at Chapter NY gallery this past February.

For Shaw, the technique of felting—one of the oldest known to humankind—evokes “spaces of the home, care and nurture,” as well as the large-scale textiles that illustrated cultural origin myths in medieval and dynastic China. For Knight Knight (2022), she reinterpreted a Chinese tapestry from the late 16th–early 17th century that depicts the world through land, sea, and sky. Panel with a Phoenix and Birds in a Rock Garden, from the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is barely recognizable in Shaw’s flipped, vertical interpretation, where stylized birds circle a reddish center, surrounded by magmalike whorls of beiges, blues, and oranges. A similar tension between legibility and abstraction animated Shaw’s 2021 work The Tomb-Sweeper’s Mosquito Bite, commissioned by the New York venue The Shed. In that monumental installation, a 24-foot-long felted tapestry was suspended from the ceiling by a metal armature and cables, its weight counterbalanced by multiple blown-glass orbs. The delicate glass vessels contained objects based on Taoist altar objects and Chinese zodiac signs, while the felted textile’s abstract design, resembling a tangle of branches, was based on an MRI scan of the artist’s brain. “I liked that this large, seemingly abstract work actually held a lot of specific information,” she said.

These artists haven’t entirely abandoned painting; instead, they are recombining it into an expanded visual vocabulary. Nakazawa still makes paintings, but usually as part of a broader mixed-media work: Her 2019 piece History has failed us … but no matter, includes jacquard-print found fabrics and collaged images of the Japanese internment site Camp Minidoka, where her grandmother and other family members were held during World War II. Here, found fabrics attest to the international digital distribution of patterns and the cannibalization of cultures in contemporary textiles. Nakazawa said these contemporary textile patterns, such as flowers and pleasant abstractions, derive from specific decorative arts traditions. Today, however, they are digitally shared and reprinted around the world, with slight tweaks to color or scale. “Even things that do have deeper cultural meanings also exist in a weird ether of diasporic longing,” she said.

Traditionally, decorative art has been considered less valuable than painting. For these artists, however, textiles, and craft in general, are liberating. De Magalhaes described her turn to craft—she also works in ceramics, inspired by time spent in her mother’s pottery studio—as a “desire to unlearn” the “heavy cerebral” way of working that she studied in art school. Nonetheless, her evocative dreamy works often draw comparisons to painterly pieces. Writer Gaby Cepeda has likened de Magalhaes’s imagery to Old Testament figures, while Andrew Berardini has noted her work’s relationship to the Symbolism of Odilon Redon. Her own goal, she said, is to “find joy and pleasure and meaning within the chaos that is the human condition.”

That approach isn’t unusual for an artist of Amaral’s generation. She started out in the late 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism was still a dominant style, and intuition—what happens “in the moment”—was prized above all else. But Amaral is, principally, a weaver. Her medium tends to a slow and structured progression. It rewards considerable forethought and patient execution. This contrast—between feeling and premeditation, impulse and handiwork—is a central animating dialectic of her work. As she has developed discrete but overlapping idioms, Amaral has consistently achieved what seems impossible: a luxuriantly expansive immediacy. Working at large scale with as many as seven assistants, she somehow manages to create textile art that appears instinctive, direct, and deeply personal.

These qualities shine forth in “To Weave a Rock,” a survey of Amaral’s work now at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, through March 20, 2022, and previously shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. (Another exhibition is currently on view at Lisson Gallery in New York through December 18.) The retrospective’s title, drawn from an assignment that Amaral set her students at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in rural Maine in 1967, nicely captures the ambience of her works. They feel not so much made as summoned into being. This is especially true when she uses gold leaf, a signature material she adopted in the 1980s, which turns her fiber works into shimmering apparitions. Amaral emphasized the otherworldly transmutation by calling the series “Alquimias” (Alchemies). The magic has continued in her subsequent “Bosques” (Forests) and “Brumas” (Mists), in which geometric forms appear to hover within diaphanous free falls of threads, as well as her “Nudos” (Knots), bundles of painted threads that stand upright on the ground, as decisive as any painted brushstroke.

Alquimia 42B, 1986, linen, gesso, and gold leaf, 64 7/8 by 27 1/2 in.

Amaral’s technology of enchantment (to borrow a phrase from anthropologist Alfred Gell) has developed over the course of an unusually cosmopolitan career. Though the artist has lived and worked principally in Bogotá, Colombia, where she was born in 1932, her professional pathway has been continually shaped by experiences in both the United States and Europe. After initially training in architectural drafting, she went to New York City in 1954 to study English. That fall, she enrolled at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, encouraged by a friend from Colombia, architect Hans Drews. As she recalls in the “To Weave a Rock” catalogue, he told her it was “more than a place to study design and crafts. . . . It was a place that valued freedom.”

Cranbrook’s textile department at the time was led by Marianne Strengell, one of the Nordic talents recruited to the Academy by her fellow Finnish designers, Eliel and Loja Saarinen. Strengell’s approach was definitely applied art: textiles in the service of architecture and industry. When Amaral returned to Colombia after just a year at Cranbrook, she set up a studio operating in that instrumental spirit, producing upholstery and furnishing fabrics as well as a fashion line. It was a full decade before she began creating “fiber art”—a term that hadn’t quite been invented yet.

That moment came in 1964, when Amaral traveled to San Francisco, to visit the family of her American husband. There she met up with fellow Cranbrook graduate, Lillian Elliott, at an unusually exciting time to be a weaver in America. The previous year the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York had presented “Woven Forms,” curated by Paul J. Smith as a showcase for Lenore Tawney, along with four other progressive weavers: Alice Adams, Sheila Hicks, Dorian Zachai, and Claire Zeisler. Tawney’s works, in particular, demonstrated a wholly new approach to textiles. They hung freely in space, with warps that traveled in graceful diagonals rather than straight up and down, and passages of openwork to let the light through.

Following Elliott’s initial prompting, Amaral soon formulated her own unique response to these currents. In 1965 she began creating hangings with interlaced forms. These were made on a vertical loom with a split warp. Amaral manipulated the resulting strips laterally, dividing and rejoining them, passing them under and over one another into plaits (done off the loom), sometimes integrating individual wrapped cords. The complex results offer a contrapuntal play against the typical textile grid—a weaving of weavings. Though this was a different technique from the one Tawney had used in her “woven forms,” it resulted in a comparable effect: a complex, rhythmic cascade.

Olga de Amaral, 1968, in an exhibition of her work at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Planetario Distrital de Bogotá.

The interlaces positioned Amaral at the forefront of her medium, and she was soon exhibiting internationally. She was included in the 1967 Lausanne Biennial, Europe’s premier event for experimental tapestry, as well as the landmark 1969 exhibition “Wall Hangings,” organized at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, by curator Mildred Constantine and textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen. Smith gave Amaral a show at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts the following year, focusing on her “Woven Walls,” a series of densely crisscrossed works, some of which are curvaceous and embracing in their overall form. At the time, Amaral was also experimenting with plastic—a readily available material that she used to pack her work in the studio—rendering it ethereally translucent by layering it atop itself, as in works like Luz Blanca (White Light), 1969.

The late 1960s were the peak years for fiber art on the international stage, and Amaral was a singular figure in that context. Though many weavers of the era—Tawney, Hicks, and Anni Albers among them—drew inspiration from historic Latin American textiles, Amaral was the only contemporary fiber artist from that part of the world who was of comparable stature. The geographically dispersed practitioners of the emergent field were her creative community; she did not have strong connections to other artists in the region, even those who were exploring abstraction in textiles. (Via email, she explained that she knew the work of the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto, but had no relationship with him. Meanwhile, she was unaware of what Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape were doing in Brazil.) Her affinities were elsewhere, some elemental and some highly sophisticated. On the one hand, she noted, “I was inspired by women in the countryside preparing the wool. And I loved rocks covered with moss.” On the other, she befriended the great Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (subject of a current exhibition at Tate Modern), whose supremely powerful, heavily textured, often figurative works doubtlessly influenced Amaral in the early 1970s, when the latter executed her pieces mainly in wool and horsehair, and even ventured briefly into freestanding totemic forms.

“Estela” (Wake) grouping, 2018, linen, gesso, acrylic, and gold leaf; each element 61-76 inches high.

Knot 28, 2016, linen, gesso and acrylic, 118 by 11 3/4 inches.

By the 1980s, the lights dimmed on fiber art. Organic handwrought abstraction, notably macramé, had been a perfect fit for the countercultural era, but it did not suit the media-obsessed, conceptually inclined period that followed. Fortunately, Amaral had light of her own to bring. Her “Alquimias,” particularly, won wide acclaim despite the general malaise afflicting her discipline. She arrived at them gradually, first adding gesso to her weavings (bringing them closer to the material state of paintings) and only later realizing that this move yielded an ideal surface for adding gold leaf. While her use of this precious metal has often been associated with pre-Columbian artifacts, Amaral stresses that she found its attraction primarily formal—a new color in her palette, introducing a play of reflectivity. Her repertoire became more refined in other ways too: she shifted principally to fine linen as a substrate rather than fibrous wool, and embellished threads with acrylic paint and pigmented clays. She also strove to create internal illumination, in ways that again recall Tawney’s works—this time the suspended “Clouds,” with their long, dangling fibers, which marked the culmination of the older artist’s career. Like those ethereal pieces, Amaral’s “Bosques” and “Brumas” are essentially unwoven textiles—warp threads without corresponding wefts, hung vertically to create a color-space.

The “Nudos,” which are among Amaral’s most recent works, are also her most concise. They bring to fruition her long-standing interest in “scaling up of the discrete components of the textile elements,” she remarked in another email. “The beginning of a fabric, the kernel of a textile, is a knot. I wanted to monumentalize this incredible technology.” The comment makes me wonder whether these works might be self-portraits of a kind. Vertically oriented and rising to a hairstyle-like topknot, they certainly could be read as figural. But Amaral says no—she was not thinking about the body when she made them, but about the intrinsic logic of the medium. Rather than self-portraits, then, perhaps it would be better to see them as statements of purpose, materialized manifestos, the exclamation marks of a long and amazingly generative career. When it comes to summarizing all she has achieved, it would be hard to put the case better than Amaral does herself: “I wanted to make the thread and the knot more visible, giving them the weight, the importance they deserve.”

View of the exhibition “Wall Hangings,” 1969, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The exhibition “Wall Hangings” was in some ways a very anti-modernist affair—even though it was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The year was 1969. By that time MoMA had been showing textiles for more than three decades, as part of its design program. In exhibitions like “Textiles U.S.A.” (1956), which was sponsored by a trade publication, the credited exhibitors were companies rather than individual weavers. As the curator of that project, Greta Daniel, explained, “the craftsman’s chief contribution now appears to be in the design of fabrics for mass production.” She shared a presumption, widespread in those days, that American craft’s destiny lay in close collaboration with industry. Rather than seeing handwork as a goal in itself, it could be understood as a stage in the design process. Weaving was the paradigm case. One could easily design a chair or a teapot on paper, then get it manufactured. But in textiles, handwoven prototyping is vital: a means to experiment with texture, materials, and color, without investing in the time and expense of setting up a machine loom.

The 1960s, and “Wall Hangings,” brought a different point of view. Just as the American textile industry began its inexorable decline in the face of globalization, artists like Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks, and Claire Zeisler decided to eschew the machine for other possibilities. They adopted off-loom techniques such as knotting, wrapping, and plaiting, as well as ingenious “hacks” of the loom itself. Their motivation was to find new vocabularies for the discipline, which ironically led them to techniques that were deliberately anachronistic. They borrowed ideas, for example, from ancient Peruvian textiles: the shock of the old.

This new direction in the field had first been announced in the exhibition “Woven Forms” (1963) at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, then located right next door to MoMA. That show, which gave pride of place to Tawney, was organized by the pioneering crafts curator Paul J. Smith (who died this past April at the age of eighty-eight).¹ “Wall Hangings” was MoMA’s slightly belated response. It was curated by Mildred Constantine in collaboration with weaver Jack Lenor Larsen, whose interests ranged far more broadly than his own commercial output did. Larsen remembers that the show was delayed so that it could be presented in MoMA’s premier gallery space: “We demanded the first floor, as it was a new subject. People were wondering, ‘why modern textiles when so much is going on in painting?’ But to get the first floor we had to wait.”

Peter Collingwood: Untitled (Black Macrogauze), 1973, black linen and stainless steel, 68 by 25 inches.

The exhibition was an explicit reversal of the institution’s previous involvement in the discipline. The participants were twenty-eight individuals from eight nations, unlike the “Textiles U.S.A.” roster of American companies; according to the curators, these independent studio weavers operated “not in the fabric industry but in the world of art,” and indeed, were “largely indifferent to certain recent developments which might supplement hand tools with machine techniques.” The degree to which “fiber art” departed from the flat matrix of the loom was dramatized by the display of Hicks’s Evolving Tapestry (1967–68) on a revolving turntable, visible from the sidewalk on 53rd Street.

It was up close, however, that the new textile sculptures offered their most salient aesthetic qualities. As Constantine and Larsen pointed out, unlike contemporaneous painting, the new fiber art was muted in color; emphasis was instead on structure and texture, mass and transparency. The material palette was broad: at one extreme, Magdalena Abakanowicz’s dramatic draperies of rough, knotted sisal; at the other, Kay Sekimachi’s diaphanous constructions of nylon monofilament (“a hyper-industrial material”). To truly appreciate these works, technical knowledge was helpful but not strictly necessary; it was just a matter of reorienting oneself to tactile nuance.

Ulay: 7 in a boat, 2000, hand-knotted silk, 158 by 108 inches.

Over the past five decades, “Wall Hangings” has had a fascinating historiographical trajectory. Initially it attracted little attention, with the conspicuous exception of a Louise Bourgeois interview that ran in the March/April 1969 issue of Craft Horizons, directly juxtaposed with an essay by Larsen. Bourgeois, who was not in the show, did a little policing of institutional boundaries: the works in the MoMA show, she noted, “if they must be classified . . . fall somewhere between fine and applied art.” Yet most of her comments were more evocative and elusive, raising doubts as to whether such classification was really worthwhile. When she first heard the exhibition title, the great Surrealist said, she thought of mail sacks hanging from a post office wall, “beautiful in their simplicity and practicality.”²

Larsen and Constantine knew that if they wanted their exhibition to leave a critical legacy, they would have to provide it themselves. In 1972 they published Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric, which enlarged on the MoMA catalogue (literally—the book is huge, and beautifully illustrated), and in 1981 released The Art Fabric: Mainstream (also a doorstop). The latter subtitle was certainly wishful thinking, for by this time the fiber art movement had receded from the limelight, dismissed as an outgrowth of hippie macramé (actually, it had been the other way around). The fact that women had been the primary protagonists of the fiber movement was doubtless a salient factor in its marginalization.

Jagoda Buić: Tapestry V, 1972, wool
99 by 53 inches.

This picture has changed in the past few years. Beginning with Jenelle Porter’s 2014 exhibition “Fiber: Sculpture, 1960–Present” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, attention has increasingly been paid to postwar fiber artists, with monographic exhibitions at museums and major galleries devoted to Hicks, Tawney, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Françoise Grossen, and Josep Grau-Garriga. In May, for its virtual viewing room at Frieze, the London gallery Richard Saltoun gathered works in explicit homage to “Wall Hangings.” The selection was interesting and offbeat: Olga de Amaral (from Colombia) and Jagoda Buić (from Croatia), who were both in the MoMA show; the British neo-Constructivist Peter Collingwood; little-known Cuban weaver Gustavo Pérez Monzón; and even Ulay, the late German-born performance artist best known for his powerful collaborations with Marina Abramović.

It may be easy to guess why fiber art has come back into focus. The gender dynamics of the movement, long an obstacle, now forms its own argument for reassessment. Its sheer internationalism, unusual at a time when most art movements were anchored in specific cities and nations, also feels relevant. Then, too, there is a broader reappraisal of craft’s role in fine art, signaled by the Whitney Museum of American Art’s current (though temporarily suspended) exhibition “Knowing Making: Craft in Art, 1950–2019.” Contemporary artists have also been making the case for fiber art’s legacy, with such figures as Josh Faught, Diedrick Brackens, and the Chicago artist kg (Karolina Gnatowski) explicitly drawing inspiration from the movement.

Gustavo Pérez Monzón: Amarillo (Yellow), 2013, handmade tapestry with animal wool, 71 by 106 inches.

While the increased attention is welcome, greater precision would be even more so. For example, the Saltoun selection, while intriguing, was also ahistorical, its components linked by little more than medium specificity. The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Taking a Thread for a Walk,” which opened this past October, reviewed the history of textiles and fiber art, including the institution’s own past contributions through shows like “Wall Hangings.” Viewers were fortunate to see so much material from the collection at once, but the exhibition had such a broad purview, juxtaposing so many different and contrasting textile idioms, that it could easily have been three times the size. As awareness develops further, the key formations of textile history—as with ceramics and other genres formerly ghettoized among the crafts—will become as familiar as those of painting and sculpture. Meanwhile, it is useful to look back at precedents like “Wall Hangings.” The exhibition may have taken place five decades ago, but all of a sudden, it looks a lot like our future.

1 Tawney’s work occupied the ground floor galleries, and the title “Woven Forms” echoed the term she often applied to her work. The show also included Hicks, Zeisler, Alice Adams, and Dorian Zachai.

2 Louise Bourgeois, “The Fabric of Construction,” Craft Horizons, vol. 29, no. 2, March/April 1969, p. 33.

In the early 1970s, Hammond—like many artists of the time—moved away from the male-dominant traditions of painting in which she was trained. Her materials were “rags”—her preferred nomenclature, as opposed to the tonier “textiles”—given to her by her friends or scavenged from the streets and bearing the history of their use. There were eight works called “Presences” in her first solo show; we see seven of them in an upstairs gallery here. Shaped vaguely like heavily draped female figures, they comprise bundles of miscellaneous dyed and acrylic-dipped rags (she called them “3D brushstrokes”) suspended from clothes hangers. They are a spooky crew, muted in palette and serious in tone. Also reunited for the first time since their debut, in 1974 at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, are five of six “Floorpieces”: colorful, concentrically braided rag rugs that Hammond deemed lesbian in content, “like kind touching and being woven together for strength.” She considered them to be paintings that, in being removed from the wall and placed on the floor, undermined hierarchies. They carry a whiff of Pattern and Decoration in their embodiment of women’s work.

Refocusing on actual paint, Hammond began to explore textures and patterns, working the medium like relief in her “Weave Paintings” (1973–77). She has often referred to the surfaces of her work as skin, and here her gouging and incising troubles a monochromatic layer to reveal colors underneath that resemble seeping blood or viscera. In Pink Weave (1974), Hammond created a messy but oddly elegant lattice by digging into oil and wax medium with the hard end of her brush. The lozenge-shaped Black Leaf (1976) presents a churning black surface with bits of red underpainting exposed. We see her carrying this principle into later works such as Sieve (1999), in which a rusty metal plate roughly punctured with sharp-edged holes is attached to canvas. It resembles a common kitchen grater—the kind you might scrape yourself on while shredding a potato—so that we almost wince in pain as we notice the thick red paint below, some of it oozing through the holes. It’s a small work, just 17 by 18½ inches, that has an outsize impact, and it is installed with a group of other effective modestly scaled selections. Among them are wall works composed of densely layered straw through which red paint and acrylic medium emerge, as if the traces of some bodily violence. In at least one series of works on paper, “Blood Journals (Giorno I–IX),” 1994, Hammond literalized her metaphor by incorporating, among other materials, actual menstrual blood.

Between 1977 and 1984 Hammond made what are perhaps her best-known works: the “Wrapped Sculptures,” in which she swathed wooden armatures in cloth and coated the results in rubber or latex. The massive, black rubberized Kong (1981), displayed in the museum’s front atrium, resembles a giant four-fingered hand emerging from the wall, a menacing presence that brings to mind the sculptures of Nancy Grossman, just as, upstairs, a tender pair of ladder-shaped forms wrapped in pinkish gold and dark green and leaned against the wall, Hug (1978), conjures Joseph Beuys. Again, Hammond evokes the feminine, calling the ladder duo her “mother and daughter piece.” Sometimes incongruously sprinkled with bits of glitter, the “Wrapped Sculptures” feel at once robust and vulnerable, and Hammond describes them as bodies, with the wooden structure as skeleton, the “fabric as muscle or flesh,” and the outer latex or rubber as skin.

Hammond’s most monumental and impressive work was to come, after her 1984 move to the Southwest, beginning with a group of assemblages incorporating the rusted, corrugated metal one sees in rural towns and urban barrios. From 2000 onward, her work took a rigorously abstract turn in monochromatic series combining textured fabrics such as burlap and old tatami mats she gathered from her aikido practice. Strips of grommeted fabric adhered to the surfaces, either gridded or crisscrossing, give many of these works a tense presence, as if they are strapped and belted. Grommets are also directly embedded, and laces and ropes might hang loose, as in Rib (2013), in which two ropes leave the canvas and coil on the floor below. Corsetlike components spanning the width of certain paintings in the show, such as Cinch 1 (2011–12), are laced up like bodices, but kept very flat and coated in the same uniform colors as the backgrounds, so that the works seem constricted both laterally and in terms of depth. With the recent, very large “Near Monochromes” and “Chenilles” hung in the biggest gallery, we feel that the bodily metaphor that Hammond has pursued over the course of five decades becomes most convincing. We stand close to the works, fascinated by their raw, textured surfaces, and then step away, to be swept into a vast scale, moving, as it were, from skin to landscape. It is a grand sweep, hard-won over time.

Apart from the exhibition venues’ own authority, what accounts for this embrace of Albers (1899–1994) by the critical fold—extending even to her estate’s representation, as of 2016, by David Zwirner, one of the world’s most powerful art dealers? Part of the answer lies in Albers’s intriguing biography. She studied and later taught at the Bauhaus—in the weaving workshop, one of the few roles open to women at the school—and in 1933 joined the exodus of Jewish people to America, going first to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The early stage of her career, then, positioned her at two of the best-known centers of the modernist avant-garde. (The cultural difference between the schools is conveyed by two photographs reproduced in the exhibition; one shows eleven earnest Weimar-era faces peeking through a big Bauhaus loom, the other, students clad in bathing suits, using simple backstrap looms on Black Mountain’s sun-splashed roof.) Partly thanks to her institutional connections, Albers was given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949. Her books On Weaving (1965, recently reissued in an expanded edition) and On Designing (1959) made her thinking available to anyone who wished to understand it.

Yet for decades, like many other women artists of her generation and earlier, Albers seemed overshadowed by the men around her, most of all her husband, Josef, he of the concentric squares. Even in the very positive coverage of this new retrospective, the marginal status of weaving is ritually asserted, and indeed overstated. The medium is still “sidelined by the world’s major museums,” according to the New York Times, which must have surprised curators at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, and particularly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Met alone has staged three blockbuster textile shows in recent years; if there is an ongoing prejudice against the medium, it exists only within the relatively narrow confines of modern art.⁶ In 2006 Tate Modern itself presented an exhibition on Josef Albers, in tandem with fellow Bauhausler László Moholy-Nagy, a polymathic genius. The comparison unfortunately made Josef seem rather fussy and inhibited, overwhelming the dry and subtle wit of his experiments, and made scant mention of Anni at all (or, for that matter, of Lucia Moholy). With the important exception of textile specialists Sigrid Wortmann Weltge and T’ai Smith, the Bauhaus weavers—not just Albers, but her teacher and colleague Gunta Stölzl, and fellow students like Léna Meyer-Bergner—were largely ignored by art historians.⁷

Over the past decade, however, this comparative neglect has steadily been remedied. An influential project in this respect was “Modernism: Designing a New World” (2006), curated by Christopher Wilk at the V&A. This international survey included many figures who infused craft disciplines with modernist aesthetics, Anni Albers among them. Then came “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity” (2009) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which stressed the school’s previously overlooked roots in craft and folk art. The so-called African chair (1921), a rediscovered collaboration between Stölzl and Marcel Breuer, was one of the revelations of that exhibition. Despite its name, this throne-like object is forged from traditional European elements: a high Gothic arch executed through simple joinery, with a bright blocked color scheme on the oak frame and in the upholstery. Anni Albers was splendidly represented in the MoMA exhibition by three major wall hangings, among other works. And she was again prominent in “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957,” curated by Helen Molesworth at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2015—a show that reinstated crafts to their rightful centrality in the college’s story.⁸

Meanwhile, other twentieth-century textile narratives have been reaching wide audiences, beginning with the hugely successful exhibition “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” a revelatory look at the creations of a community of Alabama craftswomen, which began its triumphant tour of American museums in 2002. Among curators and artists alike, there has also been a reevaluation of postwar fiber art—for decades unfairly parodied as hippie macramé writ large. Here, the bellwether show was “Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present,” curated by Jenelle Porter at the ICA Boston in 2014. If the disciplinary playing fields have not quite been leveled, they’ve certainly become intramural.

IT’S AGAINST THIS backdrop that the positive reception for Anni Albers should be understood. Though critics have tended to treat her as a unique case—an attitude perhaps encouraged by the Tate’s reductive tagline “an artist who changed weaving, a weaver who changed art”—in fact her work evolved within a much broader set of developments in the textile discipline. Albers, no egotist, recognized this. Fortunately, so did the retrospective curators. As Cooke noted, the Albers show successfully “limns a genealogy for her manifold vision,” contextualizing her through the inclusion of several other modernist textile artists. Stölzl in particular emerged as an artistic personality of great interest. Her palette was as adventurous as Paul Klee’s, her compositional sensibility an anticipation of Piet Mondrian’s “Boogie Woogie” paintings of the early 1940s. It was also Stölzl who, in 1964, collaborated with Albers to re-create several of her lost Bauhaus wall hangings, and made fascinating alternate variations on their themes.

At the exhibition’s heart was a section inspired by Albers’s On Weaving. This included not only her notes, diagrams, and photos for the book, but also works by other major fiber artists she featured in its pages, like Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks (who had briefly studied with Albers at Yale), as well as a selection of historic textiles, some of which Albers collected on her travels, that informed her own designs. A serape from Querétaro, Mexico, with the visual knockout punch of a Bridget Riley painting, was one of several artifacts on view that demonstrate how textiles can illuminate our aesthetic universe. In fact, the most salutary aspect of the show was not so much that it incorporated a weaver into the modernist canon—as welcome as that may be—but rather that it unveiled a side of modernism that was intrinsically syncretic. Oppositions that now seem obviously simplistic and misleading—art/craft, autonomous/applied, form/decoration, tradition/progress—never had any traction for Albers in the first place. As Fer notes in the exhibition catalogue, On Weaving is “a visual atlas” premised on an anti-linear view, “demonstrated through a wide range of technical and aesthetic virtuosity from a global textile culture.”⁹

WHEN TEACHING at Black Mountain, Albers would often ask her students to imagine arriving in the Americas thousands of years ago, via the Bering Strait. Without any developed tools or technology at their disposal, what might they be able to make? She would then leap from this thought experiment to discussion of the mind-bending achievement of ancient Peruvian textiles, which she always held as the supreme expression of the medium, for their combination of technical intricacy and coherence of design. These artifacts inspired some of her own greatest works. Ancient Writing (1936), created shortly after the first of her many visits to Mexico with Josef, features floating supplementary weft threads that meander through the weave, rather than shuttling side-to-side in the usual manner. The effect is that of a free drawing against a textured ground. This was an intuitive reaction to the communicative function of ancient textiles, rather than a direct adaptation of their structures. More firmly grounded in Peruvian precedent were her later “pictorial weavings,” like Open Letter (1958), which feature passages of intricate leno weaving. In this technique, the warps are twisted together, as in a braid. Each twist binds one or more wefts fast, and allows for additional space to be left between them while holding them in place. Albers’s handling of the process is tightly regulated yet extraordinarily various. Up close, these works feel like universal lexicons, manifesting every conceivable interlocking configuration of threads. 

Albers’s masterpiece is arguably Six Prayers (1965–66), commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York, when that institution was at the height of its engagement with Minimalism and other contemporary art movements. The project again shows Albers’s imaginative response to historic textiles. The vertical panels have a clear resemblance to prayer shawls, and thanks to the use of silver thread, seem imbued with spiritual luminescence. Supplementary wefts—black and white yarns—maneuver stepwise up the compositions. These could be taken as writerly, perhaps a reference to Talmudic practices in which encoded messages are pulled from scripture. Yet, as Coxon notes, Albers was a secular person who approached religious commissions like this one with “characteristically ambivalent play between the courting and resisting of symbolism.”¹⁰ The display of Six Prayers, in which the panels were shown alongside a woven study and a variation with more exaggerated vectors within the grid, called Epitaph (1968), was one of the glories of the show. Together, these works offered a reminder that textiles are ideally suited for the exploration of a central modernist tactic, that of using the grid as an armature for expressive aesthetic gestures.

In later years, partly due to waning physical strength, Albers did less weaving and increasingly turned her attention to printmaking and embossing. This brought her closer to her husband Josef’s manner—cool and assured, but somewhat mechanical. (Not so the preparatory drawings she made, which have her familiar intensity.) She also found ongoing success as a designer for industry. This had been a primary intention ever since her years at the Bauhaus, but one she realized regularly only in the context of America’s postwar prosperity. Another highlight of the exhibition was a presentation of the scheme she devised in 1949 for the Harvard Graduate Center dormitory, at the invitation of her old colleague Walter Gropius. The curators wittily reversed the common presentation of architecture, in which one sees the building but not its furnishing fabrics; here, the room itself was indicated with a bare frame, just enough to suggest the functionality of a bed cover and room divider. (In a later filmed interview, Albers explained her pragmatic approach to this all-male environment: she developed fabrics that would not show a cigar hole.) From the 1950s onward, Albers continued to apply herself to designs for Knoll and other companies, often incorporating new synthetics like Lurex and cellophane. When seen in proximity to her pictorial weavings, these manufactured yard goods do tip toward blandness; on the other hand, alongside furniture by Breuer and Mies van der Rohe, they helped make the Bauhaus dream of domestic modernism a reality.

There were many other well-judged moments in this thoughtful and beautifully executed exhibition. There were little asides, like the inventive jewelry Albers made with a Black Mountain colleague out of ribbon, bobby pins, eye hooks, corks, and an aluminum strainer—child’s play elevated. There was the bold choice to bookend the show with two looms, an unapologetic assertion of Albers’s artisanal foundations. The one in the first gallery was set up with red, white, and black threads—as if the artist had just stepped away from her work for a moment. The loom in the last gallery, Albers’s own, happened to be of a brand called Structo Artcraft, as if in summary of her career. There was, too, the inclusion of a film showing artist Ismini Samanidou working on that very loom, shot at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut, which has done so much to sustain both artists’ legacies. Such were the numerous satisfactions of this show; every artist of Albers’s quality deserves an exhibition so finely wrought. She was one of many craftspeople who made signal contributions to the artistic currents of their day. Most are still underappreciated. This is not (quite) the first show to recognize that fact; let’s hope there will be many more to come.

Endnotes

1. Tanya Harrod, “Anni Albers Weaves Her Magic at Tate Modern,” Apollo, October 2018, apollo-magazine.com.

2. Lynne Cooke, “Anni Albers,” Artforum, October 2018,artforum.com.

3. Ben Luke, “Anni Albers Review: A Brave New World Is Weaved in History at Tate Modern,” Evening Standard, Oct. 12, 2018, standard.co.uk.

4. Nancy Durant, “Anni Albers at Tate Modern,” Times (London), Oct. 11, 2018, thetimes.co.uk.

5. Adrian Searle, “Anni Albers Review—Ravishing Textiles That Beg to Be Touched,” Guardian, Oct. 9, 2018, theguardian.com.

6. Farah Nayeri, “At Tate Modern, an Anni Albers Retrospective,” New York Times, Oct. 8, 2018, nytimes.com. The Met’s textile exhibitions were “Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence” (2002), “Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Magnificence” (2007), and “Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800” (2013).

7. Sigrid Wortmann Weltge, Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop, London and New York, Thames and Hudson, 1993; T’ai Smith, Bauhus Weaving Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

8. The parallel story of the potter Marguerite Wildenhain, trained at the Bauhaus and briefly in attendance at Black Mountain, is told in Jenni Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2016, pp. 55–104.

9. Briony Fer, “Close to the Stuff the World Is Made of: Weaving as a Modern Project,” in Anni Albers, Ann Coxon, Briony Fer, and Maria Müller-Schareck, eds., New Haven, Yale University Press, and London, Tate Modern, 2018, pp. 21–22.

10. Ann Coxon, “Temple Commissions and Six Prayers,” ibid., p. 147.

“Hot Mess Formalism” can be seen as more a sampling than a survey per se—not least because of the aforementioned ephemeral quality of some of her work. The five large-scale installations in the exhibition are not of that sort, but have been loaned from various collections. The earliest piece on view dates to 1983, and the latest, 91 BCE ⌛ Not So Good for Emperors, was commissioned by the Phoenix Museum of Art for the show’s debut in fall 2017. Displayed on big tables are dozens of Pepe’s “Votive Moderns” (1994–): engaging little assemblages, each with a distinct personality, that combine art materials and industrial castoffs. Throughout the show, in works large and small, Pepe combines architectural nerve, material dexterity, and an appealing, awkward choreography.

Beginning as a thin trickle of blue cord in a stairwell, 91 BCE rises into a corridor and two rooms on the second floor, morphing into stretches of metal chain mail and tan-colored crocheted patches. Some portions rest against walls; others proliferate into a room-blocking chaos of stuttering lines and shapes. Such works feel like drawings in space, as much sketched as constructed—an intentional effect; and a large group of gouaches (wonky geometric abstractions alluding to urban infrastructure) offers a pictorial counterpart to these three-dimensional acrobatics. In a documentary video playing at the show, Pepe discusses some of the ideas behind 91 BCE. In the title year, as alluded to by the chain mail in the work, violent uprisings against ruling powers occurred in both Italy and China. The work demonstrates Pepe’s typical tough attitude, itself a form of resistance: deeply feminist and queer in sensibility, she challenges the dominance of monumental form with patient, accretive labor.

A veneration of women’s work has undergirded Pepe’s structures from the start. In Women Are Bricks: Mobile Bricks (1983), triangular bricks mounted on ceramic rollers are arranged in a grid on a stretch of found carpet. They could almost be toys, but for the rough, industrial quality of the brick and the rigor of seriality and gridding. Here we see Pepe’s origins as a ceramist and a devotee of the Post-Minimalists, particularly Eva Hesse. Pepe speaks often of her post–Vatican II Catholic childhood, and of being raised by industrious Italian American parents, who owned a restaurant in New Jersey; we see homages to these milieux in the imposing Second Vatican Council Wrap (2013), a quasi-figurative installation incorporating metallic thread and a fragile baldachin, and in a video showing her hands rolling meatballs and placing them in a grid. The ubiquitous shoelaces refer to her cobbler grandfather, the crocheting to her mother’s craft. Still, Pepe pushes her tributes to an extreme, her obsessive energy transforming the most ordinary materials into the great “hot mess” that is their strength and appeal.

Elsi Giauque, Élément spatial (Spatial Element), 1979, linen, silk, wool, and metal, 20 elements, 35⅜" x 37⅜" x ¼" each, installation view.

©CHARLES MAYER/MUDAC–MUSÉE DE DESIGN ET D’ARTS APPLIQUÉS CONTEMPORAINS, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND

Opening with two towering “woven forms” (1961 and 1966) by Lenore Tawney, among the first to break from the planar basis of textiles, the show unfolded across several thematic groupings. With Elsi Giauque’s volumetric lattice, it demonstrated how color in fiber art inheres in the weave, rather than being applied retroactively, as in painting. Exploring the grid and the physical force of gravity, both structural to most textiles as well as to strains of 20th-century abstraction, was Robert Rohm’s 1969 wall-mounted matrix of knotted rope. Severed at various points, it exploits loft, weight, and pliancy to both capitalize on the grid and defy it. Fiber art’s feminist implications came to the fore in Faith Wilding’s landmark Crocheted Environment from 1972 and Josh Faught’s sequined garden trellis from 2009, each of which breaks down the gendered dyads of art and craft, public and private, and inside and outside. Sheila Pepe’s monumental, blue-green, rafter-hung work further crystalized the medium’s architectural potential, asking: Who is licensed to take up space, or claim shelter?

The exhibition provided indispensible historical insight into the recent resurgence of fiber in contemporary art. Why, the question remains, have such practices again become timely? One reason may lie in renewed concerns about labor, value, and production in late-capitalist society. Among several works pointing in this direction was Haegue Yang’s 2013 sound piece, in which a podcast-loaded iPod tracks the artist’s time invested in the making of an intricate pair of suspended macramé spires.

A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2015 issue of ARTnews on page 88.

Entering the metal-scaffold framework of Jakkai Siributr’s cryptically titled 78 (2014), one was surrounded by multi-tier bamboo bunk beds, each holding a single white kurta (Muslim tunic), draped so as to display a number between one and 78 embroidered on a sleeve in shimmering gold thread. While never quite claustrophobic, the structure evoked the spiritual gravitas of an ancient Middle Eastern tomb tower—or even Islam’s holiest shrine, the Kaaba in Mecca.

Over the past two decades, Siributr, who was born in Bangkok in 1969, has produced hand-stitched textiles, drawings, prints, paintings, resin sculptures, videos, installations and performances. This solemn new piece explicitly references a particularly haunting event: a 2004 incident in which upwards of 1,000 Muslim antigovernment protesters in the town of Tak Bai, in Thailand’s perpetually troubled South (comprising several provinces hugging the northern border of Malaysia), were summarily rounded up and stripped naked by Thai security forces, and then stacked like lumber in a flatbed truck for transport to a regional military camp. Seventy-eight of the detainees perished in the hours-long trip to a neighboring province, purportedly having suffocated.

Siributr’s Hong Kong installation implicitly criticized the policies of Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006, who is said to have summarily excused the deaths of the Tak Bai prisoners as being due to their physical weakness from fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The Thai script on the exterior of 78 names those victims who were later identified; the tunic numbers designate those who remain anonymous. The golden tubular forms refer to the takrud, a type of protective talisman commonly used by Thai soldiers, whether worn around the neck or sewn into their uniforms.

The towering 78 is not the only Siributr work to reflect the now widespread phenomenon of contemporary artists taking up archival methods and eulogistic themes. (One thinks of exhibitions like Okwui Enwezor’s 2008 “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” and such well-known figures as Christian Boltanski, Walid Raad, Vivan Sundaram and Thailand’s own Montien Boonma, as well as more recently noted artists like Minouk Lim or the team of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.) For example, Siributr’s spring 2014 exhibition “Transient Shelter,” his third solo show with Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York, updated a Siamese tradition rooted in the royal circles of the late 19th century.

At Thai Buddhist funerals it is now common to distribute an album commemorating the deceased’s worldly accomplishments via photographs of the newly departed in earlier times wearing a military or civil-service uniform, reprints of published writings, personal mementos (including coveted kitchen recipes) and written testaments to his or her meritorious endeavors. Mimicking the funeral book’s element of personal mythology, ¹ “Transient Shelter” took the form of 10 mannequins garbed in civil-service uniforms ponderously bedecked with fictitious medals, ribbons and commemorative sashes, and embroidered copiously with passages of text: Buddhist chants relating to the impermanence of all things, oaths of allegiance taken by the nation’s army and police forces, and recitations for the sick and dying. Accompanying the uniforms were 10 portrait photographs of the artist wearing each jacket, his poses loosely based on actual ancestor portraits from his own household. ² In some shots, the artist has donned numerous palad khik (phallic talismans promising fertility or bodily protection) and amulets bearing the effigies of revered Thai monks, a gesture satirizing spiritual claims and suggesting their origins in hollow sorcery.

This suite of photographic and textile works was complemented by a looped video in which a suit embroidered with references to the artist’s ancestors is submerged beneath coursing waters, to the sound of liquid rush or the crackling fires of a typical Thai funeral pyre. It recalls an earlier video, 18/28 (2010), which features images of Siributr’s royal ancestors in ghostly, dreamlike sequences.

Siributr traces his bloodline on his maternal side to King Mongkut, or Rama IV (reigned 1851-68), of the modern (and current) Chakri dynasty. King Mongkut is widely recognized in the West for hosting British governess Anna Leonowens (1831-1915) at court as a tutor to his four children from 1862 to 1867. Leonowens later wrote of her court experiences in The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870), which was popularized in the 1940s and ’50s through various adaptations, among them the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I (1951) and the Hollywood film Anna and the King (1956).

Descent from this line of highly decorated military and palace-based civil servants prompted a royal gift of land in central Bangkok to Siributr’s family some 80 years ago. Today the property accommodates a leafy compound, where the artist (the youngest of three siblings) resides with other family members. Less documented, but of equal pride to Siributr, is the Isaan region ancestry of his father—until recently a civil servant in the Thai ministry of education—which links him to the northeastern, rice-growing area of Chaiyaphum, a distinctly agrarian region of the country.

If “Transient Shelter” evoked a discomfiting mélange of worldly pride and spiritual apprehension, the artist’s 2013 solo exhibition “Plunder,” at Yavuz Fine Art, Singapore, was hardly as equivocal. Doubtless his most caustic condemnation of human folly to date, the show was Siributr’s response to a troubled history of Thai political and social corruption. It contained 39 civil-service uniforms bearing stitched portraits of present and past Thai parliamentarians, all suspended in the open space of the gallery as though simply hovering there, having lost their stuffing. ³ At the time, Thailand was experiencing a protracted political impasse, dating from 2006, when Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted by the armed forces on grounds of political corruption and other charges. The sustained governmental paralysis was among the causes of yet another military revolt—which took place last May against the exile’s democratically elected sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand’s first female prime minister. The country has experienced 19 coups d’état since converting from absolutism to a constitutional monarchy in 1932.

Both “Plunder” and “Transient Shelter” additionally featured wall hangings, resulting from Siributr’s engagement, since the mid-1990s, with stitching, quilting, embroidery, appliqué and other fiber techniques, all of which set his practice apart from painting and sculpture while nonetheless borrowing from both disciplines. Siributr was initially drawn to industrial textile production by the example of an aunt who ran her own batik business in central Bangkok in the 1970s. After completing high school at a United World College campus in New Mexico, Siributr entered the textile program of Indiana University in the late 1980s, where he found himself suspended between the artistic and the industrial streams of the textile discipline. The relationship between craft and fine art was then undergoing close scrutiny by artists working in the shadow of postwar figures like Eva Hesse, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Lenore Tawney, who had carved out a niche, sometimes with distinctly feminist implications, for a sculptural fiber art against the backdrop of 1960s Minimalism and Conceptualism. ⁴

In Indiana, Siributr studied under Budd Stalnaker, an advocate of abstraction, whose own “hard edge” fiber work occasionally allows for the integration of found objects as abstruse metaphors for—in his own words—”issues of risk, such as rape awareness, domestic violence, HIV transmission, and things that bombard us on a daily basis.” ⁵ Stalnaker’s insistence that fiber artists (and, therefore, his students) desist from imitating representational painting epitomizes the anxieties of a generation struggling to reconcile “truth to materials” with an urge toward social or cultural critique, all the while steering clear of decorative aestheticism. “I hated his class,” Siributr recalls. “We just didn’t see eye-to-eye; nothing I had experienced in Thailand had prepared me for nonrepresentation . . . although I can see now that I learned a lot from him.” ⁶ Stalnaker, an avid collector of African kente cloth, ultimately made an indelible mark on Siributr, who, once back in Thailand, would execute a series of abstract hangings that obliquely reference flags or symbolic chevrons.

Siributr speaks more generously of fiber artist William Itter, who, he recalls, “taught me how to draw properly.” Another mentor was Ronald Markman, whose raucous integration of graphic and representational elements of pop culture in his own paintings initially repelled Siributr but arguably would, years later, show up in his own amalgam of emblematic forms with abstract fields of eye-popping pattern and color (both are typical of everyday Thai “street” or folk fabrics).

In 1992, after graduating from Indiana, Siributr made an eight-month sojourn in Italy. Visiting Naples, Rome and Siena, he was drawn, above all, to fresco painting and the work of the Italian primitives, especially Giotto. Siributr’s fascination with what he calls “naive figures on flat, gold-leafed backgrounds” is evident in his work of more recent years, even though many observers are intent on positioning his work solely and securely within the Southeast Asian context. Certainly parallels can be drawn with traditional northern Lanna textiles and Hmong story cloths, as well as Thai temple mural painting.

Siributr’s graduate studies at the Philadelphia College of Textiles & Science (since renamed Philadelphia University) brought him into the classes of renowned textile historian Joyce Storey, whose Manual of Dyes and Fabrics (1978) served as one of his principal textbooks. She ultimately nixed his career plans. As the artist recalls, “Storey taught me how to pay attention to details, and she always encouraged me to paint, but she finally told me I was never going to be a designer.” With the deadline for his thesis approaching, Siributr—a canine enthusiast since early childhood—churned out a series of iconlike dog portraits against patterned fields that evoke high-end wallpaper. He subsequently printed presentation yardage derived from the mutt pictures, “when everyone else was repeating flowers.”

While in Philadelphia, Siributr made frequent trips to regional galleries—especially the pioneering Fabric Workshop and Museum—as well as New York’s SoHo district, Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Craft Museum and American Museum of Folk Art. When the Met hosted the traveling “Picasso and the Weeping Women” exhibition in mid-1994, Siributr found himself newly admiring Picasso’s The Studio (1934), a picture with which he was already familiar from Indiana (it belonged to the university’s art museum). In retrospect, Picasso’s canvas probably, if only subliminally, tutored Siributr in how to harmonize bold patterns and emblematic motifs across the picture plane.

When Siributr resumed his life in Thailand in 1996, he initially worked as an illustrator. (A colorful chronicle of his own overseas travels, published in Thai, was a best seller). In the studio, he worked on a series of abstract fiber-based wall pieces but soon felt unsatisfied by their cool detachment from everyday life. Turning once again to painting, he produced, in 2002, a series of whimsical canvases that depict a set of characters—towering rabbits, street hounds and a single male figure—interacting mysteriously in tight, Vuillard-like interiors. By the time of his solo show “Strange Land” at H Gallery, Bangkok, in 2005, he had developed a personal mythology in which human personages play in an upside-down world, their costumes signifying alter-egos of depraved character, or—at the opposite end of the spectrum—moral enlightenment. As one of Siributr’s early supporters, H Gallery founder H. Ernest Lee recalls, the work “seemed uniquely Southeast Asian, and yet like nothing else we had seen here; at the same time, he seemed in no way ‘inspired’ by the West.” ⁷

Since then, Siributr has addressed a number of social and political issues dogging Thai society, including the rise of a hyper-consumerism that not only threatens the ascetic ideal of the Thai Buddhist Sangha (monastic order) but collides rudely with broader Siamese traditions. Indeed, the explosion of Western-style marketing and luxury-brand obsession within a society traditionally schooled in Buddhist principles of modesty and social discretion—lessons customarily drawn from jataka tales, fable-like stories recounting former lives of the Buddha—is a source of continuous collective tension.

A practicing Buddhist himself since returning to Thailand, Siributr was initially critical of Thailand’s syncretic strain of Theravada Buddhism, which accommodates Dhamma, or the essential teachings of the Buddha, as well as animist and mystical traditions (some deriving from Hinduism), numerology, fortune-telling and other vernacular practices. ⁸ While having recently grown more tolerant of this dizzying quality of Thai Buddhism, Siributr remains critical of its more apparent excesses. He describes his own practice as a continuous search for “mindfulness” and the “middle way” in all things, as well as the cultivation of compassionate behavior free of righteousness and sanctimonious ritual. Siributr recognized much of his lifelong sense of Buddhist mores in Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1992), and cites the Thai reformist ascetic Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (1906-1993) as a deep influence on his search for spiritual equilibrium.

In exploring these themes in fiber-based tapestries since the early 2000s, Siributr has portrayed emblematic figures cavorting in Hieronymous Bosch-like dispersal among montaged and appliquéd amalgams of colorful Thai street fabrics, many displaying their stitching. His New York debut, “Temple Fair,” at Tyler Rollins in late 2006, offered a panoply of wall pieces poking fun at corrupt monks and their gullible laity. In 2010, his second solo at Rollins, “Karma Cash & Carry,” featured a host of sequin-encrusted wall hangings, again parodying decadent Buddhist monks and the crass, materialist society that supports their trafficking in amulets and yantra cloths (fabrics printed with cabalistic designs and allegedly invested with powers to ward off bad luck or bodily injury).

At about this time, Siributr began his “Somdet” series—its title referring to Somdej Phra Puttajarn Toh Phrom-rangsri, a revered 19th-century monk whose amulets are currently the most coveted among Thai collectors. Mesmerizing for their visual incarnation of Buddhist chants, “Somdet” wall pieces comprise multiple rows of unblessed clay amulets, each impressed with the image of a spiritual master encased in a threaded frame. Ironically, a “Somdet” work that the artist recently sold to a boutique hotel in Thailand had several amulets crudely hacked out of the larger weave and spirited off by superstitious opportunists.

Such themes reached a crescendo in Siributr’s 2011 solo exhibition “Shroud,” at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. Only months before the show opened, the artist had been following nightly news reports of street protests by “red shirts” (largely rural supporters of the recently overthrown government of Thaksin Shinawatra). The collective hysteria grew over months of demonstrations and finally culminated, in May 2010, with widespread rioting and arson in the Thai capital, which led to a lethal crackdown by the government of then-prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Siributr channeled his frustrations into sociopolitically inflected wall hangings, stitched handkerchiefs, freestanding assemblages and resin sculptures. Several of these works also provide a window onto the artist’s sexual escapades. In the sequin-encrusted wall hanging Love (2011), Siributr muses over the fickle nature of the affections offered by go-go-boy sex workers; in two sculptures, he depicts himself as a successful, “smart casual” artist armed with cell phone and fashionable hand luggage. To some observers, Siributr seemed momentarily knocked off his creative center. Yet as Singapore-based curator Iola Lenzi has recently commented, “Examining the different conceptual and thematic strands in that show, it is clear to me now that if the exhibition was difficult to read. . . . The various works it presented were the foundation of the next decade of [Siributr’s] development.” ⁹

In recent years, Siributr has participated in many important museum shows, among them the Asian Art Biennial (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), “Here/Not Here: Buddha Presence in Eight Recent Works” (Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2011), “Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past” (Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 2012) and “Exploring the Cosmos: The Stupa as a Buddhist Symbol” (Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore, 2012-13). In each case, Siributr’s work has been acquired by the host institution. Such acquisitions have allowed his art to take its place on the global scene alongside the stitched, feminist-inflected paintings of Ghada Amer, the embroidered intimacies of Tracey Emin, the story quilts of Faith Ringgold, the hand-woven tapestries of Sheila Hicks, the woven bamboo and rattan forms of Cambodian sculptor Sopheap Pich and the monumental, wall-hugging assemblages of El Anatsui. These artists and others have prompted today’s art theorists to come to terms with the resurgence of craft as a fundamental aspect of much 21st-century art. ¹⁰

Perhaps a stranger in his own “strange country,” Siributr is, one suspects, ultimately more the itinerant poet than the political pundit, the tireless peripatetic in search of spiritual equilibrium precisely where quotidian shopping, the saving of souls and political wrangling all vie for our attention simultaneously. Coming upon 78 at Art Basel Hong Kong last May, one couldn’t help thinking that this foursquare cube of fabric decisively put to rest any reservations about the use of fabric and the “simple” act of stitching as a potentially sublime artistic gesture. Unquestionably, Siributr had set before us a milestone.

Endnotes

1. Siributr’s preoccupation with Thai funeral albums is shared by Chatchai Puipia (b. 1964), who adopted the format for his self-published artist’s book Chatchai is dead: If not, he should be, Bangkok, 2010.

2. It is not uncommon for Thai households to devote considerable space to ancestor portraits as a tribute to the spirits’ enduring habitation of the family premises; a similar sentiment underlies the saan phra phum (spirit house) found on many private and commercial properties, paying tribute to unrelated former occupants of the property.

3. See Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thaksin, Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 2004; second ed., 2009.

4. The topic is currently examined in the exhibition “Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present” at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Oct. 1, 2014-Jan. 4, 2015. Curator Jenelle Porter generously shared her framing essay with me well prior to its publication in the exhibition catalogue (Munich and New York, Prestel Publishers, 2014).

5. Budd Stalnaker, “Safety, Danger, Relationships” (1996), artist’s statement, Indianapolis Museum of Art, online catalogue.

6. All Siributr quotes are from conversations with the author at the artist’s Bangkok studio, July 30 and Aug. 7, 2014.

7. H. Ernest Lee, telephone conversation with the author, Aug. 26, 2014.

8. See Justin Thomas McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand, New York, Columbia University Press, 2011.

9. Iola Lenzi, e-mail to the author, Aug. 4, 2014.

10. For a sampling of the burgeoning literature on the resurgence of craft-based practices, see Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, London, Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2007; Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Sewing Notions,” Artforum, February 2011, pp. 72-75; Jessica Hemmings, ed., The Textile Reader, London, Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2012; and Maria Elena Buszek, ed., Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2011.