Jeffrey Gibson
By Julie Schneider
By confronting old, narrow definitions of what abstract modernist art is, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the National Gallery of Art makes the case that textiles are an integral part of this history. A multitude of intertwined concepts (textile techniques and technologies, social and labor movements, politics, communities, culture and identity, cross-generational influence) come together to illuminate the ways craft, fashion, and design have intersected and melded over the past century — and ultimately to present an expanded, fiber-forward vision of how modern abstract art came to be.
Featuring about 160 artworks made by 57 artists, the sprawling exhibition, curated by Lynne Cooke, is composed of seven distinct sections. It kicks off with works made by European artists in the aftermath of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the 1918–20 flu pandemic. Garments by painter and textile designer Sonia Delaunay, paintings by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, weavings by Bauhaus stalwarts Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, and other artworks set the stage for the next generation of modernist weavers, displayed in the following room. Among those artists are Olga de Amaral, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney, all of whom drew inspiration from Albers’s philosophies and passion for pre-Columbian textiles. (Artworks by these weavers were also featured in The Met’s Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art earlier this year.)