Through an intense manipulation of the weft-adding in heavy undyed wool and linen followed by selectively pulling out sections-Ricketts has created the appearance of an overlay, suggesting a larger geometric pattern with a central void. This piece is a diptych that comprises a woven red, white, and blue coverlet next to a simple wooden grid, suggestive of the frame that normally supports an artwork. 3 (2017–18) connects the materials of decorative arts-particularly indigo and cotton-to enslavement and imperialism. ” quilts illuminate multiple facets of life.Īmong the most investigative contemporary artists in “Fabric of a Nation” is Rowland Ricketts, whose Unbound Series 2. Do quilts function as autobiography, a manifestation of the maker’s vision, or a fundamentally communal expression of purpose and meaning? Do they visualize broader aesthetic trends and evolving techniques? Are they embodiments of economic forces that bring commercially produced cloth into homes? Do they represent gendered training and its possible subversion? The answer to each of these questions is “yes and. Yet quilts are multivalent things they speak different words to different ears. Previous exhibitions have primed us to accept that quilts hold history in their very threads. The show reflects the history of the United States over the course of some three hundred years through fifty-eight objects drawn primarily from the MFA’s own collection. String, Felt, Thread not only illuminates the centrality of fiber to contemporary artistic practice but also uncovers the social dynamics-including the roles of race and gender-that determine how art has historically been defined and valued.The goal of the new exhibition “ Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories” (on view through January 17, 2022) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, seems-at first glance-straightforward enough. In this full-color illustrated volume, Elissa Auther discusses the work of American artists using fiber, considering provocative questions of material, process, and intention that bridge the art–craft divide.ĭrawn to the aesthetic possibilities and symbolic power of fiber, the artists whose work is explored here-Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Claire Zeisler, Miriam Schapiro, Faith Ringgold, and others-experimented with materials that previously had been dismissed for their associations with the merely decorative, with “arts and crafts,” and with “women’s work.” In analyzing this shift and these exceptional artists’ works, Auther engages far-reaching debates in the art world: What accounts for the distinction between art and craft? Who assigns value to these categories, and who polices the boundaries distinguishing them? String, Felt, Thread presents an unconventional history of the American art world, chronicling the advance of thread, rope, string, felt, and fabric from the “low” world of craft to the “high” world of art in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence today of a craft counterculture.
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