WOVEN HISTOIRES: TEXTILES AND MODERN ABSTRACTION

Frau Fiber Vs. The Machine on view in Woven Histories @ MOMA Museum of Modern Art presents Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction an exhibition exploring the intersection of abstract art and woven textiles over the past century. The nexus of textiles and abstraction embodies key political, social, economic, and aesthetic issues that have shaped the history of the modern era. Beginning in the first decades of the 20th century, the exhibition presents a diverse range of genres, materials, processes, and technologies, which artists have utilized when probing these issues: painting; basketry; photography and film; woven, knitted and felted cloth; costume; attire; and tapestry. Further, it foregrounds the increasingly important role of textile heritages today as affordances in constructing identity, kinship, and community. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition assembles a roster of transnational and intergenerational artists. Works by pioneering women artists from the historic avant-gardes are put into dialogue with those of contemporary creators: Anni Albers, Jeffrey Gibson, Hannah Hoch, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Ulrike Mueller, Liubov Popova, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Rosemarie Trockel, Andrea Zittel, and others. Woven Histories is organized in seven sections: key moments of interchange, impact and confluence, between textile and abstraction, that unfold in a loose chronology. These sections include: Materialist Abstraction, Design, and Utopian Social Visions; Line Involvements; Pictorial Interlacings: The Grid, the Net, the Web; Basketry as a Textile Art; Labor and its Technologies; Self-Fashioning and Life Wear; and Community and the Politics of Identity. The exhibition is curated by Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator of Special Projects in Modern Art, National Gallery of Art. Generous support was provided by The Claire Falkenstein Foundation and The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation.