Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery of Canada to March 2, 2025, shows us what happens when makers, artists, sculptors and weavers stick to their knitting — as well as their looping, netting, looming, braiding and basketry.
Featuring more than 130 works by more than 45 creators from several continents, this show is an exploration of how woven textiles have meshed with and informed abstract art over the decades. It is also an acknowledgement of how textiles have often been considered inferior — as applied art, women’s work, or domestic craft.
“Textiles have fuelled and galvanized the history of modernism in the visual arts across the 20th century,” says Lynne Cooke, curator of the National Gallery of Art (NGA), Washington. “Textiles were fundamental to the way modern art and particularly abstract art as we know it has evolved.”
Woven Histories is organized by the NGA, Washington, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada, (NGC), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Olga de Amaral, “Cintas Entrelazadas,” circa 1969, wool and cotton, approx. 79" x 32" (courtesy of the artist, photo by Oriol Tarridas Photography)
The works range from lush and colourful such as Peluca verde (1960-61) by Sheila Hicks, to the eye teasing Cintas Entrelazadas (1969) by Olga de Amaral. Other works are whimsical and ethereal, or squat and functional such as some pieces by “virtuoso” weaver Ed Rossbach. It is a diverse show that challenges long-standing biases about textiles.
“This was a medium or a technology that artists turned to in exploring certain key issues — social, economic, political — whether it’s to do with identity and queer communities or labour, or with handmaking versus automated machine-mass production,” Cooke says.
A five-minute video by artist Senga Nengudi, for example, refutes the notion that all industrial fabrication is unskilled labour. The Threader (2007) shows a highly-skilled employee in a venerable American textile mill braiding silk thread into high-quality passementerie cords – the thick braids used to tie back velvet curtains.
“That’s a very specialized technique that this man has been doing at a high level for a long time,” Cooke says. “His movements are so fluid and economic, it’s really a choreography that makes manifest the value of high-level craftsmanship and specialization.”
Woven Histories also addresses the often-dark side of the textile industry. A photo taken by social reformer Lewis Hine in 1908 shows 17-year-old Mildred Benjamin hunched in front of a sewing machine, left shoulder awkwardly skewed lower than her right to complete her work.
Lisa Oppenheim, “Mildred Benjamin, 17 Years Old. Right dorsal curvature. Scoliosis. Right shoulder higher than left. Shows incorrect position required to perform this kind of work,” 2016
dye sublimation print on aluminum, 56" x 49.4" (photo courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery)
Artist Lisa Oppenheim uses this and other photos by Hine that record bodily injury — in this case scoliosis — suffered by young female workers. It is a sobering reminder of how the textile industry was — and continues to be — exploitive.
“We also see sweatshop conditions in Sascha Reichstein’s clandestinely shot footage of workers making lederhosen knock-offs for tourists in Germany in poor conditions, very low wages and long hours,” Cooke says.
Woven Histories also takes gallery-goers even further back to well before the industrial revolution to question whether weaving or netting began with non-human species – a chimp playing with a cord; birds weaving nests or spiders spinning webs. Weaver Ed Rossbach’s work — including Rag Basket, 1973 — makes a convincing argument that basketry is a pre-loom textile art.
“While many cultures had looms, not all did, but all cultures had basketry and it’s an interlace technology that precedes the weaving of cloth,” Cooke explains. “Paleoanthropologists tell us that hunter/gatherers started to knot rushes or grasses together so they could carry fish or eggs or whatever they were finding back to the group. Containers are fundamental to human cultures, and it starts with basketry. It doesn’t start with ceramics.”
Sheila Hicks, “Peluca verde,” 1960-1961, wool, 24" x 15" (collection of the artist, photo courtesy of Fundacion Amparo — Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico)
It is noteworthy that the NGC is the third and only Canadian stop on a North American tour of Woven Histories.
“It was seen as an important, ground-breaking feminist art history project that we knew Canadian audiences should see,” says Catherine Sinclair, the NGC’s Director, Exhibitions, Conservation, and Production. “Part of our mandate is to bring to the Canadian public art that they wouldn’t be able to see, unless they travelled the world.” ■
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