Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women
Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women at the Smithsonian Renwick Museum gathers the work and stories of 27 U.S. women artists who have found in fibre a powerful, beautiful, and implicitly or explicitly subversive means of expression. Drawing on the Smithsonian’s deep archive of fibre art, it is a confident exhibition, of extraordinary and beguiling pieces in lapidary display. It is also an embracing and inviting one, offering up insights into the journeys, struggles and dreams of each artist in her life and in her work.
Image: Lia Cook, Crazy Too Quilt, 1989, dyed rayon; acrylic on woven and pressed abaca paper, 63 1⁄4 x 86 7⁄8 in. (160.7 x 220.6 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the James Renwick Alliance and Bernard and Sherley Koteen and museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program, 1991.199, © 1989, Lia Cook. Image above: Miriam Schapiro, Wonderland, 1983, acrylic, fabric and plastic beads on canvas, 90 x 144 1⁄2 in. (228.6 x 367.0 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of an anonymous donor, 1996.88.
“Each artwork carries the story of its maker, manifesting—stitch by stitch—the profound and personal politics of the hand,” says Mary Savig, who with Virginia Mecklenburg and Laura Augustin Fox curated the exhibition. “Collectively, they highlight the depth and diversity possible in the medium of fiber.”
Each piece in the exhibition stands powerfully on its own, but then resonates even more in conversation with other works. Matilda Damon’s Protected in Bliss (1991), sits side-by-side with Marguerite Zorach’s My Home in Fresno around the Year 1900 (1949) – and they call across the room to Miriam Schapiro’s Wonderland (1983). Across the exhibition space, the glorious free-spirited Cee Cee in Faith Ringgold’s The Bitter Nest Part II: The Harlem Renaissance Party (1988) dances with Judith Scott’s humming mixed media and string windings. Gloriously lit, at opposite ends of an anteroom, Kay Sekimachi’s Nagare VII (1970) echoes in finely woven, dipping and twisting white nylon filament Neda Al-Hilali’s knotty, arresting Medusa (1975).
Image:
Faith Ringgold, The Bitter Nest, Part II: The Harlem Renaissance Party, 1988, acrylic on canvas with printed, dyed and pieced fabric, 94 x 83 in. (238.8 x 210.8 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1997.18, © 1988, Faith Ringgold.
As with the work, so too the stories of the individual artists speak to each other. There is the struggle to find the time and means and head- and hand-space to make work, amidst the crowding demands and expectations of daily life. The struggle to understand and assert oneself as an artist as a woman, and as an artist choosing the often underrated, ignored or even ridiculed materials and techniques of work with fibre. And the struggle to make work that feels true, to feel confident in that truth – and then to push forward again.
Image:
Marguerite Zorach, Untitled (Embroidered Bedspread), ca. 1918, linen fiber: tabby weave with plied wool yarn and chain stitch embroidery, 102 1⁄4 x 79 1⁄2 in. (259.6 x 200.8 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Helen Miller Obstler, 1985.52.
The accompanying texts speak to the choices of the artists about subject matter, method, materials. “I like to depict the family theme in a lot of my quilts just to remind me how precious family is, how important family is in the overall scheme of things” (Carolyn Mazloomi). “These works are built out of my life and the things that have touched my life” (Marguerite Zorach). “Of course, I’m going to do threads. I’m going to do threads. Every indigenous culture, the women do the thread work. They all do thread work. Why would I want to change now?” (Consuelo Jimenez Underwood).
And they reflect the search for the work that is true, the pushes technique and materials in the pursuit of truth. “What could I make weaving do that no one had done before?” (Lia Cook). “I wanted to see how far I could stretch the fiber and still have it say fiber” (Claire Zeisler). “The truest thing in my life was my work. I wanted my life to be as true” (Lenore Tawney).
Image: Alice Eugenia Ligon, Embroidered Garment, ca. 1949, embroidered muslin, cotton crochet; pencil; cotton rick-rack trim, 43 3⁄4 x 38 1⁄2 in. (111.1 x 97.8 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., 1989.78.2.
The exhibition does a powerful job of threading together work and words, artists of diverse background and focus but common means and dreaming – and the visitor, who can only leave with fingers itching to make.
The exhibition runs until 5 January 2025. It is accompanied by a podcast series based on conversations with 10 of the exhibited artists, and the Archives of American Art developed a digital presence for the exhibition that offers a deeper look into several artists’ lives (available here).
Text by Penelope Brook
Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women is on show at Smithsonian American Art Museum until 5 January 2025.