Repetition is the spice of life for Korean-American artist Ran Hwang. She practices an art of obsessive accumulation, deploying buttons, beads and crystals with a fierce exactitude. Impaled on pins, these tiny sewing notions coalesce into culturally laden imagery of plum blossoms, Buddhas and architectural edifices. Some of the slow, painstaking work of pounding her …
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Thank you to everyone who made this year at SDA possible! Without the work from our dedicated staff, board, volunteers, committees, and members, none of our events and exhibitions would have happened. While we continue through an international pandemic, many artists continue to make and find inspiration in all sorts of places, and in-person exhibitions …
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Explorations in Felt, organized by the Hunterdon Art Museum in partnership with the Fiber Art Network/Fiber Art Now (FAN), considers a versatile fibrous material from a wide-angle view. Drawing from a pool of submissions for a feature on felt in the print publication Fiber Art Now, the museum’s exhibition committee selected 28 works by an …
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Without Boundaries: Fiber Sculptures and Paintings by Women Artists is a one-stop-shop exhibition, and I liked it. Packaged in a single gallery, this is as smart and as suck-me-in a show as I have seen in a while. With material, color, and scale at the forefront, it establishes a visual matrix for understanding the linkage …
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The term “outsider art” refers to art which is learned in a setting outside the formal academic arena. In The State of Hand Stitch: New Embroidery by Texas Artists, an exhibition at UTSA (1604 Campus) through August 9, 2019, many of the 11 participating fiber artists were taught to embroider at a mother’s or grandmother’s …
Read More »“We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.” ― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose In today’s era of immediate gratification and hi-speed internet, where the word has become tantamount to extinction, shortened to the barest of acronyms and further replaced by emojis and gifs, paper collage artist Meg …
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Drawing on the Victoria and Albert Museum’s world-class collection of Indian textiles, The Indian Textile Sourcebook: Patterns and Techniques (Thames & Hudson, 2019) is a beautiful collection of images that feature a wide variety of textile designs, techniques, and colors. It includes many close-up shots of the reverse of fabrics allowing readers to see precisely …
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The Textile Society of America’s 16th Biennial Symposium The Social Fabric: Deep Local to Pan Global was held in Vancouver, Canada from September 19–23. The conference consisted of concurrent sessions for maximum enjoyment of top-notch content, keynote and plenary speakers, poster sessions, and all sorts of well orchestrated surface design related events. There was one …
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This past summer, Bellevue Arts Museum (BAM) presented AMPM (2.0), an exhibition by the Seattle and Los Angeles-based fashion collective: FEMAIL. The show–which ran June 1st to September 30th, 2018–featured garments, textiles, childhood mementos, and keepsakes reinterpreted into new works of clothing, furniture, wall hangings, and sculpture. Collaborators Janelle Abbott and Camilla Carper work in …
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LAIKA’s studio sits just outside Portland, Oregon, so it’s naturally fitting the exhibition Animating Life: The Art, Science, and Wonder of LAIKA was housed at the Portland Art Museum. The show was on display October 14th, 2017 to May 20th, 2018, and featured behind-the-scenes photography, video clips, and physical artwork from its four films. Animating …
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