Return, Revision, Repeat: Threaded Currents at the PAFA

In Philadelphia this winter, pattern takes the long view. At Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Threaded Currents unfurls across the second floor of the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building like a set of signals. Seven-foot banners, each carrying a hand-pulled screen-printed repeat balances rigour with risk, and precision becomes the very condition for invention. Organised with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, the exhibition brings together 20 artists connected to both institutions, mapping the charged space between atelier tradition and experimental workshop.

Margery Cercado

The premise is deceptively simple: what happens when artists schooled in life drawing, painting and sculpture submit their instincts to the mechanics of the screen? The answer, across more than 30 works, is neither polite nor predictable. Repeat becomes a method of enquiry. A motif migrates across cloth and begins to behave architecturally; a figure dissolves into pattern and reconstitutes itself through rhythm; a painter’s tonal subtlety meets the graphic clarity of ink pressed through mesh...

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Image Credits:

Lead: Heather Raquel Phillips. Nip, Tuck, Paint, Pluck, 2022. Pigment on bleached cotton yardage. Photo credit: Carlos Avendaño.

All further images as credited in captions.