When we see a painting, we don’t generally ask ourselves, “Is this art?” A work on canvas is almost always inherently seen as such, but what about mediums like ceramics, photography, or that also often serve functional or decorative purposes and historically have not been considered “?” Why are some textiles considered art while others are not, and what system are we using to determine this “value?” What makes a tapestry a tapestry, and a rug a rug?
Thread Count, a large-scale group exhibition curated by Charlotte Grüssing at , aims to illuminate the beguiling nature of textiles—something of a dark horse in the contemporary art world. The show is organized as an ode to the work of trailblazing artist , a modernist weaver who studied at in Germany and later taught alongside her husband, Josef Albers, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Thread Count, the title for which nods to the number we often see on bedsheet sets to indicate quality, brings together work by more than two dozen contemporary artists working with fabric and fiber.
“Fiber practices may be having a cultural moment, yet they remain widely misunderstood,” the gallery says. “Thread Count invites a slower kind of looking: attention to surface, texture, knots, dyes and the physical logic of how things are built.” The show serves as a reminder, despite the rise of textiles in modern and contemporary art, “of how inadequate such quality measurements are for describing the complexity of textile work.”
The artists each approach fabric, thread, rope, dyes, and found objects with a huge array of techniques. , for example, creates undulating large-scale wall pieces made of woven strips of silk, and creates stunning color gradients by stretching thin embroidery thread taut within a frame. ’ tight, structural weavings also emphasize the material characteristics of silk and cotton thread—individual strands of which may seem inconsequential, but woven and wrapped together into chunky textures, they transform into an intimately detailed object.
Thread Count also highlights the work of artists for whom textiles are a conduit for powerful imagery, a kind of cross-pollination between fiber art, painting, and even digital processes. , for example, creates digital collages which are then woven with a jacquard loom. ’s sculptural form evokes a lidded basket, incorporating knitting. And ’s meticulously rendered geometric compositions, augmented with acrylic, evoke Op Art of the 1960s.
Colossal readers will also likely be familiar with ’s textural, tufted surfaces and ’s hyperrealistic oil paintings that resemble scrunched carpets. You may also recognize work by , , and more.
See Thread Count in New York City at The Hole’s Bowery location through January 11. Learn more and plan your visit on the gallery’s .
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