In the 1960s, after a decade making watercolors and weavings, Magdalena Abakanowicz began producing radical sculptures in woven fiber. Soft not hard, ambiguous and organic, these towering works hung from the ceiling and pioneered the new form of installation. They were a challenge to the conventional definition of sculpture and the traditional boundary between high art and craft. Abakanowicz stated that she wanted to obliterate the utilitarian function of tapestry and demonstrated the capacity of fiber to produce forms that were malleable yet structured and complex. 

Magdalena Abakanowicz
Pregnant, 1970-1980
Tapestry, sisal, hair
53 1/2 x 42 in; 135.89 x 106.7 cm
Harkey Family Collection, Dallas, Texas

Etel Adnan
Feux d’Artifice, 2014
Tapestry hand-woven by Atelier Pinton, wool
58 1/4 x 78 3/4 in; 148 x 200 cm
Collection of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, NY, Courtesy the FLAG Art Foundation

Etel Adnan’s paintings and tapestries use geometric forms and subtle variations of color to evoke abstracted landscapes, as well as striking geometric compositions. A renowned poet and essayist, Adnan started painting in the 1960s when she stopped writing in French as an act of protestation against the French colonization of the Arab world. She painted from memory, creating compositions that distilled the landscape to its defining features. This reflected her understanding of vision as a multidimensional and simultaneous phenomenon – a place where many images coalesce into one sensorial experience. 

El Anatsui
Telesma, 2014
Mixed media, found aluminum and copper wire
96 x 116 in; 244 x 294.7 cm
Collection of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, NY, Courtesy the FLAG Art Foundation

El Anatsui is well-known for this type of large-scale sculpture composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of metal. These are discarded liquor bottle caps that he sources from local recycling stations in Nigeria and binds together with copper wire. His intricate works are both luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated and malleable. One of his conceptual conceits is that the sculptures take different forms each time they are installed. In morphing to activate various spaces, they challenge long-held views of sculpture as something rigid and insistent.

Tabitha Arnold
Pure Finder, 2021
Tufted wool rug
72 x 42 in; 182.9 x 106.7 cm Tabitha Arnold

Tabitha Arnold created this goat-hide-shaped rug for the prayer room at Glen Foerd historic mansions and estate in Philadelphia. It depicts workers engaged in the long, dirty, and arduous process of refining leather at the Vici Kid factory, which employed hundreds of people from the late 1800s to early 1900s and founded the fortune of the Foerderer Family. The title of the work refers to the usage of the word ‘pure’ during that period as a polite term for dog and pigeon feces – essential ingredients in the process of removing hair from hides. A ‘pure finder’ was someone who made a living finding and selling these materials to tanners. 

Louise Bourgeois
Couple, 2004
Fabric, Stainless steel, glass and wood
74 x 24 x 24 in; 188 x 61 x 61 cm
Collection of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, NY,

Courtesy the FLAG Art Foundation

Louise Bourgeois’ art explores opposites: male/female, light/dark, rough/smooth, soft/hard. Powerful and ambiguous emotions lurk just below the surface of her works, often hinting at enigmatic feelings of sexuality, fear, anger, and isolation. Over an eighty year career, she worked in a diversity of media. Textiles figure heavily in both her work and life: since a young age, she worked in her family’s tapestry restoration workshop. Her own textile work was first shown in 1982 at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1999, she established a fabric workshop area in her studio and used her own old clothes, towels, and other fabrics to create sculpture and two-dimensional works. 

Diedrick Brackens
fire makes some dragons, 2020

Woven cotton and acrylic yarn

85 x 74 in; 216 x 188 cm

Hudgins Family Collection, NY

This tapestry is part of a series created in 2020 that contrasts the comfort and warmth implied by its softness and pliable textile structure with an iconography that illustrates the harsh realities of queer Blackness: issues of violence, the racially unequal impact of HIV/AIDS, and the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 took on communities of color. Weaving together themes of illness, vulnerability, healing and love, Diedrick Brackens’ work demonstrates the incandescent resolve of this community to confront its trauma and celebrates its unique joy, and kinship. 

One of the most influential conceptual artists of his generation, James Lee Byars created performances, installations, sculptures, and drawings. His creative persona has been described as “half dandified trickster and half minimal seer.” His gold lame suit, often worn with a top hat, blindfold, and black gloves, was a signature look for the artist. Assuming the role of a shaman and a magician who questioned the illegibility of a materialistic world that appeared to reject the sacred, his work explored possible meanings of life instead of trying to provide answers. 

James Lee Byars
Untitled, ca.1980s
Gold lame suit jacket and pants
64 x 27 in; 162.6 x 68.6 cm
Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London

Margarita Cabrera
Nopal con Tunas #2, 2006
Border patrol uniform fabric, copper wire, thread, terra cotta pot 39 x 46 x 46 in; 99.1 x 116.9 x 116.9 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Talley Dunn Gallery

Margarita Cabrera
Space in Between - Nopal #6, 2012
Border patrol uniform fabric, copper wire, thread, terra cotta pot 50 x 51 x 49 in; 127 x 129.5 x 124.5 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Talley Dunn Gallery

Margarita Cabrera
Space in Between - Saguaro (Maria Lopez), 2010
Border patrol uniform fabric, copper wire, thread, terra cotta pot 52 x 25 x 24 in; 132.1 x 63.5 x 61 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Talley Dunn Gallery

These three sculptures are part of Margarita Cabrera’s on-going collaborative, social-practice project with Spanish-speaking immigrant communities in the United States. The initiative promotes cultural dialogues around community, craft, immigration, cultural identity, and labor. Workshop participants work with Cabrera to produce sculptural replicas of desert plants indigenous to the Southwest. Made from border-patrol uniforms, each piece incorporates stories—stitched into the material itself—of the often-harrowing experiences of Latin Americans crossing the U.S. border. The participants are not artists but individuals who share the impact of these journeys on their own lives and those of their families. 

Nick Cave
Soundsuit, 2011
Mixed media including vintage toys, pipe cleaners, bugle beads, up- holstery, metal, and mannequin
109 x 34 x 30 in; 276.9 x 86.4 x 76.2 cm
©Nick Cave. Courtesy of the Artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

In 1992, Nick Cave began his series of ‘Soundsuits.’ Surreal and monumental, they were conceived as metaphorical suits of armor and created in response to the brutal beating of Rodney King by officers from the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991. Made using familiar everyday objects, they conceal the wearer’s personal identity (race, gender, and class) while simultaneously making their presence unavoidably visible. Playful and serious, the suits challenge the viewer’s biases and assumptions about the wearer. Cave has performed in these sculptures, activating them as costume, musical instrument, and second skin. 

Judy Chicago (drawing, hand painting, and color specifications), Di- anne Barber (batik), and Helen Cohen (appliqué, quilting, and embroidery)
The Crowning (quilt 4/9) Birth Project, 1982

Quilting and embroidery over drawing on batik fabric
35 1/2 x 50 1/2 x 1 3/4 in; 90.2 x 128.3 x 4.5 cm
Courtesy Through the Flowers, Belen, NM and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco

This work is part of Judy Chicago’s Birth Project. Between 1980-1985, Chicago collaborated with more than 150 needle and fabric workers from the United States, Canada, and as far away as New Zealand to create dozens of works illustrating different aspects of the birth process: from the joyous and miraculous to the overwhelming and painful. Chicago sent out questionnaires asking women about their experiences of giving birth and based her designs on their responses. Stylized and visceral, this series celebrates the birth-giving capacity of women along with their creative spirit. 

Chuck Close
Prototype for Phill, 1991
Woven silk tapestry (Produced by Regal Silk Tapestry Co., China Art Institute in Hangzhou and Hangzhou Tapestry)
51 4/5 x 38 1/2 in; 131.8 x 97.8 cm
Collection of Linda K. Alpern

Reproducing Chuck Close’s famous 1969 portrait of the composer Philip Glass, this work is the prototype for the first tapestry Close had made. In 1988 he suffered a collapsed spinal artery that left him paralyzed from the neck down. After a partial recovery, he was able to paint from his wheelchair, using brushes strapped to his hand. Close began collaborating on tapestries, which enabled him to continue his signature technique of merging intimate portraiture with rigorous attention to materials and surface. The tapestries were digitally woven on a Jacquard loom and drew from the same photographic sources that he had used for his paintings.

Enrico David
Evenly Suspended Attention IV, 2004
Cotton, thread, wool
110 1/4 x 88 3/4 in; 280 x 225.4 cm
Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London

Totemic and fetishistic, the figure in this piece is both humanoid and otherworldly, hovering within a circle and geometric shape against a red and black background. It is nearly alien, and yet somehow still earthly or eerily familiar. There is a general sense of mystery to Enrico David’s work, in which a language of undefined symbols suggests, rather than states, possible interpretations. He has explained his intuitive process by saying: “...the daily practice of making work functions as an exercise to reveal something that feels and looks unknown but in reality, is simply neglected.” 

Louise Eastman
1/6 2/5 3/4, 2020
3 Monoprints on Rives BFK, Printed by Janis Stemmermann at Rus- sell Janis Projects, Brooklyn, NY
25 1/4 x 34 3/4 in (each); 64.1 x 88.3 cm
Louise Eastman, Courtesy of Planthouse Gallery

Working in weaving and ceramics, Louise Eastman explores the politics of material and craft. Dices have long interested her and as this piece’s title implies, the six sides of a die are represented in it. Using her six of her weavings as templates, these three monoprints are impressions of the stitches and textures of those original textiles. The woven pieces each have a repeating pattern of numbered dots that is distorted due to the properties of the wool and cotton in the warp and weft. However, as with dice, the 6 is opposite from 1, 3 from 4 and 2 from 5.

Angela Ellsworth
Seer Bonnet 1, 2008
11,448 pearl corsage pins and fabric

22 x 13 x 15 in; 55.9 x 30 x 38.1 cm

Private Collection

Angela Ellsworth’s Seer Bonnets is part of a series which reference the early history of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, representing the estimated thirty-five wives of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith. The form is based on the traditional bonnets worn by pioneer women. A decedent of Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the Mormon church, Ellsworth uses thousands of pearl-tipped corsage pins to form intricately patterned surfaces that hide a dangerous underside. The sculptures are a nod to the tools Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon. Ellsworth re-imagines this community of unrecognized women as individuals with their own agency, visions, and personal histories. 

Christina Forrer
Yellow/Red, 2019
Cotton and wool
91 1/2 x 65 in; 232.4 x 165.1 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Luhring Augustine, New York and Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago

Interested in fables and folklore, Christina Forrer creates vibrant weavings that feature fantastic characters with cartoon features rendered with keen attention to the boldness of her colors and patterns. Her charged imagery is steeped in pain, humor, anger, and grief. Balancing composition with technique, she conjures monstrous bodies, psychological battles, and interpersonal tensions that counter the heroism of the type of imagery historical associated with the medium of weaving, especially medieval tapestries. 

Tom Friedman
Small Dog, 2006
Yarn and wheat paste
15 x 37 x 24 in; 38.1 x 94 x 61 cm
Collection of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, NY, Courtesy the FLAG Art Foundation

Tom Friedman’s work explores the relationship between perception and logic. Celebrated for his playful and exacting approach to art making, he embraces everyday life by looking afresh at familiar objects and their assigned function. His pieces are modest in scale, technically rigorous, hyper-realistic, and unheroic. He uses common materials to confound expectations. As the artist has said: “Art, for me, is a context to slow the viewer’s experience from their everyday life in order to think about things they haven’t thought about. Or to think in a new way.” 

Helena Hernmarck
Folded Paper Once, 1988

Wool, linen, cotton
51 1/2 x 59 in; 130.8 x 149.9 cm

Helena Hernmarck

Helena Hernmarck began weaving in the 1960s and has pioneered several imagistic and technical innovations. Focused on the pictorial and influenced by pop culture, her mature style has been recognized for its monumental tapestries that depict complex illusionary space and a diversity of subject matter: trompe l’oeil, landscape, still life, and the human figure. Her primary technique is a discontinuous plain weave on top of which she hand-picks a supplementary pattern weft. The result resembles computer pixels and enables Hernmarck to produce images that expand the use of photographic imagery into territory that is both abstract and realistic. 

Candace Hill Montgomery
Forward Ho to the Land Where the Jumblies Live, 2021-2022 (Detail)

Weave with hand dyed sheep roving, fox & various objects on tree branch with Paulownia branches
Dimensions variable
Candace Hill Montgomery

Over her long career, artist and writer Candace Hill Montgomery has created innovative paintings, drawings, ceramics and sculptures that commented on social fragmentation, poverty, racism, violence, feminism, and the environment. She began weaving in 2014 and has embraced the technique because it forces viewers to slow down and ask questions. This large-scale totemic piece uses a broken tree branch to support an abstract weaving with collage elements. Her title references Edward Lear’s 1871 absurdist poem The Jumblies that tells the tale of green-headed and blue-handed creatures who go to sea in a sieve. 

Jim Hodges
For Once (For Tad), 1997
White brass chain with pins
14 1/2 x 14 in; 36.8 x 35.6 cm
Collection of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, NY, Courtesy the FLAG Art Foundation

Tucked furtively in a corner space and woven in metal, this gossamer spider web is paradoxically strong and long-lasting. Jim Hodges’ work frequently employs unexpected materials and techniques, from ready-made objects to metal chains, artificial flowers, gold leaf, and mirrored elements. His delicate installations mark the passage of time and highlight the ephemeral qualities of the natural world. Addressing overlooked and obvious touchstones of life, his conceptual practice poignantly meditates on the themes of loss, experience, and memory. 

Alice Hope
Murmuration 2, 2021
Used Coke can tabs, seine netting, resin

110 x 32 x 36 in; 279.4 x 81.3 x 91.4 cm

Courtesy of Alice Hope

The aluminum can tab is emblematic of consumption, pop culture, and obsolescence. Known for her extensive work shaping industrial materials into premeditated patterns, Alice Hope found 700 pounds of tabs in a recycling bin about a decade ago. Her works suggest an expansiveness, incorporating complex aesthetic and mathematical ideas and playing on the inherent properties of the material’s weight and size. As she said: “I like my work to appear as if it grew itself, as if the materials reproduced and multiplied... the materials seeming to colonize and take over space.” 

Mike Kelley
Arena #7, 1990
Found stuffed animals, wood and blanket
11 1/2 x 53 x 49 in; 29.2 x 134.6 x 124.5 cm
Private collection courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT

Working in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, Mike Kelley was first recognized for his performances and collaborations. In the late 1980s, he focused on sculpture. Shown in 1990, the Arena series employs used stuffed animals and children’s blankets, which he found in thrift stores and yard sales. The objects should convey joy. However, Kelley isolates these elements, emphasizing their loneliness and uncanniness rather than their cuddliness. Kelley explained: “...I played the inclination to project into the figures, to construct an inner narrative around them, against the viewer's awareness of his or her physical presence. This self-consciousness was produced by using extremely worn and soiled craft materials.” 

Laurie Lambrecht
[Series based on artists' works], 2016-2022
Woven archival pigment print on linen
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the Artist and The Drawing Room Gallery

Photographer and fiber artist Laurie Lambrecht has an affinity for the examination and observation of the patterns and textures of the natural world. She has explored this in her photographs, weaving, prints and knitting. This new series of works is something of a departure. For it, she prints images of celebrated paintings by famous artists on fabric. She then cuts the printed images into strips and reweaves them into new patterns. Some remain recognizable but others are completely altered. Although she has been working on it for several years, it has not been publicly shown previously. 

Dinh Q. Lê
Untitled from Vietnam to Hollywood (Floating Figure), 2004 C-print and linen tape
42 x 76 in; 106.7 x 193 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and P.P.O.W, New York

Dinh Q. Lê is a Vietnamese American multimedia artist whose family left Vietnam when he was 10 years old. He is known for his photography, photo-weaving technique, videos, and installations. In this work, he splices together and interweaves photographs taken during the Vietnam War with still images from Hollywood films about the Vietnam War. In this way, he interrogates the complicated political history, personal memories, and cultural representations of this painful event and challenges the viewer to parse historical reality from fiction and media portrayals. 

Charles LeDray
Catcher’s Vest, 2005-2006
Fabric, thread, cotton batting, leather, elastic, grosgrain ribbon, met- al, metal patina, wood, wood stain, paint
14 3/4 x 8 1/8 x 2 3/4 in; 37.5 x 20.6 x 7 cm
Collection of Mickey Cartin

​Over his career, Charles LeDray has created a highly distinctive and powerful body of work using simple materials such as sewn cloth, carved wood, ribbons, stains, and paints. Manipulating scale, he creates seemingly familiar objects that engage the collective memory. His techniques have precedents in the traditions of folk art and rise to a level of unprecedented virtuosity and artistic invention. Regardless of size, his objects are infused with needs, desires, histories, and dreams. They tug at the heartstrings without being cute or twee. 

Daniel Lind-Ramos
Armario de la Memoria (Wardrobe of Memory), 2012 Assemblage of found objects from Puerto Rico
108 x 65 x 36 in; 274.3 x 165.1 x 91.4 cm
Courtesy of Max Levai

Daniel Lind-Ramos creates altarlike assemblages with everyday objects: cloth, utensils and tools for cooking, building, gardening, and celebrating. Coming from the majority black, Puerto Rican town of Loíza, which has a strong Afro-Caribbean culture that still venerates orishas, divinities drawn from Yoruba religion, and where the percussive musical genre, bomba, flourishes, the artist grew up making vejigantes, festival figures wearing outfits and masks made with palm fronds and coconuts. In his work, he mixes the organic and industrial, ancient and anodyne, saying “I like that contrast and the tension that it creates.” 

Liza Lou
Blanket, 2005
Glass beads on polyester resin
14 x 43 x 27 in; 35.6 x 109.2 x 68.6 cm

Private Collection

Liza Lou has been making sculptures with glass beads since the early 1990s. She explained: “I have a completely different relationship to the material than I did then... a more profound relationship. But those earlier days set in motion this connection to labor, to craft, to women’s work that would end up opening up outward into working with other people, working with women, working, and thinking about community.” Created in 2005, this figure lying in the fetal position under a blanket may reference homelessness and the 2004 images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War. 

Christa Maiwald
Alan Greenspan, Musical Chairs: Economic Crisis in G Minor, 2009

Thirteen children’s chairs, hand-embroidered cushions

Dimensions variable
Christa Maiwald

Christa Maiwald’s broad artistic career has spanned work in video, painting, sculpture, and installation. Since 2000, she has focused on embroidery and photography. Her embroidered works are mostly narrative portraits and juxtapose the dainty feminine craft of sewing with politically charged and often difficult subject matter. This work features an installation of thirteen children’s chairs with cushions that are embroidered with portraits of the financial leaders who played a leading role in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 that severely affected the economy of the United States and most of the world. 

Charles McGill
Patriot, 2012
Reconfigured golf bags
48 x 48 x 15 in; 121.9 x 121.9 x 38.1 cm

Courtesy of the Estate of Charles McGill

Charles McGill trained as a figurative painter and taught art and golf professionally. His experiences as a golf pro of the sport’s legacies of exclusion became a central tenant in his art when he started using golf bags as canvases and including parts of vintage bags in abstract and figurative compositions. One day, looking at a cluster of hooded bags filled with clubs, he was reminded of KKK marauders. This led him to anthropomorphize the bags and explicitly confront the sport’s racism. These compositions also have a symbiotic relationship to painter Phillip Guston’s iconic paintings of Klansmen. 

Ann Morton
Proof-Reading 1, 2017
Handmade handkerchief with embroidery

Edition 5/5

15 x 4 x 3 in; 38.1 x 10.2 x 7.6 cm
Private Collection

Ann Morton works primarily in fiber arts, often inspired by social issues and politics. She draws on the rich history of community and storytelling within the making of textiles which traditionally entailed women gathering together to work. Morton’s practice spans large-scale public projects as well as handcraft techniques that she practices alone in her studio. Her on- going proof-reading series uses embroidery and editing notations to reflect on our turbulent “post-truth society” in which fact-checking can be seen as a survival mechanism. 

Maria Nepomuceno is a sculptor and installation artist whose labor-intensive practice is based upon traditional weaving techniques from her native Brazil. Using bright colored fibers, she makes soft forms that are then assembled into pieces in an additive process. Sometimes with the help of volunteer artists and artisans, Nepomuceno creates installations that extend into the exhibition space. Certain forms recur in her work, including vessels, hammocks, beads, bulbs, and tubes. She considers the spiral to be a central and unifying motif, in part because: “It always makes the same movement but always towards a new path.” 

Maria Nepomuceno
Little Delilah, 2018
Rope, beads, ceramic, fiberglass, and resin
86 1/5 x 63 x 47 1/4 in; 219 x 160 x 120 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Ernesto Neto
Winter Flower, 2016
Cotton voile crochet, cotton voile thread balls, bamboo, semiprecious stones, wood and dry leaves
138 x 147 x 147 in; 350.5 x 373.4 x 375.9 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/ Los Angeles

Throughout his career, Ernesto Neto has engaged with the idea of social interaction. His work is defined by his unconventional choice of sensuous materials, often using herbs, spices and other materials known for their aromatic qualities. Early in his career, he was influenced by Minimalist sculpture and New Brazilian Objectivity of the 1960s -1970s. His work seeks to transport the viewer into immersive, multi-sensory environments where time seems to slow down. Constantly producing new formal and conceptual developments, Neto describes his sculptures as living organisms that transgress all limitations. 

Mark Olshansky
Foppish Yak. One in Every Hoyd, 2021

Needlepoint Persian wool
18 x 24 1/2 in; 45.7 x 62.2 cm
Mark Olshansky

Mark Olshansky
Courtyard Kaleidoscope, 2021

Needlepoint Persian wool
17 1/2 x 11 1/2 in; 44.5 x 29.2 cm

Mark Olshansky

Mark Olshansky
Sub Marine Penthouse with Fountains, 2020

Needlepoint Persian wool
11 x 13 1/2 in; 28 x 34.3 cm
Mark Olshansky

In the 1960s, a friend at a party introduced Mark Olshansky to the craft of needlepoint. It was a light-hearted accompaniment, as the artist recalled, “to the more serious activity of downing martinis with stylish canapes.” He was hooked. For a decade he produced tapestries, pictures, a large rug, and more, designing his compositions in process and working with Persian wool. In 1980 he took a two-decades hiatus due to professional obligations. After retiring in 1999, he picked up where he had left off. Using Persian wool, he continues to design compositions intuitively and work in series. 

Sheila Pepe
Atmospheric Conditions, 2022

Courtesy of the Artist

Sheila Pepe is best known for crocheting large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculptures from domestic and industrial materials. For more than 30 years, she has drawn on a variety of cultural touchstones that include the canonical arts of the 20th century, home crafts, lesbian, queer and feminist aesthetics, issues of climate change and social politics, 2nd Vatican Council American design, an array of Roman Catholic sources as well as their ancient precedents. She created the piece as Artist in Residency, working with the rafters of the building to produce The Church’s first ever site-specific installation. 

Erin M. Riley
Desire, 2021
Wool, cotton
40 x 48 in; 101.6 x 122 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and P.P.O.W, New York

Erin M. Riley’s hand-woven hand dyed wool tapestries primarily focuses on women and women’s issues. Her work challenges society's comfort with art by depicting shocking images including nudity, drugs, violence, self-harm, sexuality, and menstruation in the craft-associated medium of tapestry. These meticulously crafted, large-scale weavings are intimate, erotic, and psychologically raw, and reflect upon relationships, memories, fantasies, sexual violence, and trauma. Collaging personal photographs, images sourced from the internet, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera to create her compositions, Riley exposes the range of women’s lived experiences, sexuality, and the weight of trauma on the search for self-identity. 

Faith Ringgold
Coming to Jones Road Part II #3 Aunt Emmy and Baby Freedom, 2010
Acrylic on canvas with fabric borders
46 1/2 x 34 in; 118.1 x 86.4 cm
Courtesy of ACA Galleries, NY

Faith Ringgold is a painter, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, writer, teacher, and lecturer. Her 1960s paintings addressed questions of race. A decade later, she began working in mixed media - notably fabric - to avoid the male, Eurocentric associations of painting. She made tankas, inspired by Tibetan paintings with brocaded fabric frames, as well as soft sculptures and masks for her performances. Collaborating with her mother, Madame Willi Posey, she began quilting in 1980. The title Coming to Jones Road alludes to Ringgold’s 1992 move to Englewood, New Jersey, where, she recounted, the neighbors “...saw my presence on Jones Road as a threat to the ‘quality’ of their lives.” 

Scale was always import for James Rosenquist. In 1965, he created his monumental painting F- 111 – a room-scale painting in 51 parts. Juxtaposing American consumer goods with the eponymous fighter-bomber, it was one of the defining works of its generation and rocketed the artist to fame. Rosenquist’s sculptures are lesser known. Inspired by the tumbleweeds he saw looming in his car’s headlights during late night drives in Texas, Rosenquist produced two Tumbleweed sculptures in barbed wire and neon from 1966-1968. The neon tube in this sculpture is operational, but due to the piece’s age and stringent conservation needs, it will be turned on only three times during this exhibition. 

James Rosenquist
Baby Tumbleweed, 1967-68
Mixed media sculpture with neon and barbed wire

18 x 12 x 12 in., 45.72 x 30.48 x 30.48 cm

Courtesy of the Estate of the Artist

Toni Ross uses diverse material and site-responsive installation to explore themes of political and social distress. In 2017, she created sanctuary entwined at LongHouse Reserve, building three large-scale cubes around three mature trees in the garden. Ross' objective was to change the viewer’s relationship with the trees and nature. After that installation, she broke the cubes down into their constituting panels of metal and twine and over the years since, nature has been her collaborator with a number of these panels which she left outside, allowing them to react to the natural environment and develop a patina. In this work, what we think of as destruction forces became creative partners, conjuring beauty and uniqueness out of time and place.

Toni Ross
Time and Again II, 2017-2021

Hemp twine, steel armature

84 x 108 in; 213.4 x 274.3 cm

Courtesy Toni Ross

Tomás Saraceno

Arachne’s handwoven Spider/Web Map of Cygnus A, with one Ne- phila clavipes - one week, and three Cyrtophora citricola, one week, 2021
Handwoven black thread on cotton canvas

44 x 65 3/4 x 2 in; 111.8 x 167 x 5.1 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/ Los Angeles

The integration of art, technology, nature, and the environment is central to Tomás Saraceno’s work. This piece and the series to which it belongs offer a different way to read and interpret the architecture of the spiderweb: as a topological map of movements and temporalities that trace the intricate complexities of these natural silken sculptures. This is a 2-dimensional manifestation of 3-dimensional webs. It retains the structural complexity and depth of the spiderwebs and becomes a real-life map of the suspended cities created by superimposed spiderwebs.

Alan Saret
Zinc Cloud, 1967/ 1990
Galvanized steel hex netting
66 x 72 x 84 in; 167.6 x 182.9 x 213.4 cm

Courtesy of the Artist and Karma, New York

Alan Saret’s sculpture has focused on the ways inorganic materials can seemingly take on organic qualities. In this work, first created in 1967 and recreated by the artist in 1990, he used sheets of chicken wire, folded over one another to imbue the sharp and angular material with lightness and softness. For Saret, archetypal methods of joining materials, such as looping, twisting, and knotting, unlock infinite possibilities. Wire networks emerge with an organic logic, recalling chemical bonds, synapses, and constellations, among many others. 

Bastienne Schmidt
Measuring Time, Grid Calendar, 2020
Muslin fabric and sewn pigmented tracing paper

44 x 88 in; 111.8 x 223.5 cm
Courtesy Bastienne Schmidt

Bastienne Schmidt uses the grid as a minimalist meditation on space, perception, and systems. She sees art as part of the realm of archeology, exploring layers of history and meaning and reassigning value to them. She is interested in the documentation and creation of artifacts that carry the patina of memory and time. Using her signature humble materials of muslin fabric, string and thin transparent paper, this piece was created during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. It records the passage of time in a period of uncertainty and disquiet. 

Alan Shields
Tanta Luna, 1969
Acrylic, thread, beading on canvas
104 x 104 in; 264.2 x 264.2 cm
Courtesy of Van Doren Waxter Gallery, New York

Alan Shields is best known for his radiantly hand-stained, sewing-machine stitched, three- dimensional paintings. They convey a playful, deconstructive impulse through the incorporation of un-stretched canvas, rope, yarn, beads, and wood. Shields was grouped with the Postminimalists, but the joyous quality of his work undermined notions of painterly machismo and was at odds with the often cerebral approach of many of his contemporaries. Extending his process into 3-dimensions, his sculptural works are reminiscent of small tents, hanging labyrinths, or simple strands of beads or strips of canvas. 

Kiki Smith
Sojourn, 2015
Cotton Jacquard tapestry
9’ 5” x 6’ 3”, 287 x 190.5 cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Pace Gallery

This work is one of twelve tapestries that Kiki Smith has created in collaboration with Magnolia Editions. Her tapestries depict a mythical world where human and animal forms entwine with natural phenomena. All of them are united by the series of horizontal bands that pass through the top and bottom of each tapestry, as if to suggest that within each ‘realm’ there exists the same strata of sky, land, and underground. Kiki Smith is known for a psychologically acute, non-narrative approach to her work that addressed the themes of morality, sex, birth, and regeneration. 

Julianne Swartz
Void Weave (tremor), 2017
Enameled copper wire, magnet, amplifier, audio player, sound com- position (not audible), wooden box
50 x 5 x 7in; 127 x 12.7 x 17.8 cm
Courtesy Julianne Swartz

Julianne Swartz creates sculptures, installations, and photographs with materials that can be purchased from your local hardware store: wire, mirrors, magnets, periscopes, speakers, and glass. As she has explained: “I am interested in the intersection of the physical and non- physical and making what is not physical somehow palpable.” The non-physical in her work is varied—light, memory, sound, kinetics, and the passing of time. The woven wire in this work carries both an electrical current and an inaudible sound file. These excite an imbedded magnet to produce periodic shudders and vibrations in the sculpture. 

Hank Willis Thomas
Champion, 2017
Mixed Media including sport jerseys
72 x 96 in; 182.9 x 243.8 cm
Collection of Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, NY, Courtesy the FLAG Art Foundation

Collaging together the official sporting jerseys of several soccer teams in the English Premier Football League including Chelsea F.C., Manchester City and Arsenal F.C., the composition of this work has multiple references including the bold, colorful, proto-pop work of the American modernist painter Stuart Davis. Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. He has referenced sports in previous works and created works that use the logos of Nike and teams in the NBA to raise questions about race and masculinity in sports.

Rosemarie Trockel
Studie zum Fleckenbild, 1987

Acrylic on wood with a plexicap

19 7/10 x 19 7/10 in; 50 x 50 cm

Skarstedt, New York

Rosemarie Trockel’s work is diverse in themes and media, including works on paper, ‘knitted’ paintings and sculptures. She is interested in the role of women role in society, trademarks and symbols as social signifiers and decorations, and ethnographic and scientific studies. Trockel is best known for her machine-generated ‘knitted paintings' of knitted woolen fabric mounted over a stretcher. These works, like the piece before you, challenge classic notions of painting and traditional art-making practices.

Lucy Winton
Rabbit Moon, 2019
Acrylic paint, embroidery thread on found tapestry

30 x 59 in; 76.2 x 149.9 cm
Nick Winton

Lucy Winton’s mixed media works can be gently otherworldly. She has mused about the prevalence of nighttime scenes in her art, saying: “Many of my pieces have been nocturnal, perhaps because I worked for more than a decade on the midnight shift,” when she was a paramedic in New York City. She creates a sense of intimacy in her work and often references children’s book illustrations as a nod to her own first experiences of visual excitement. She explained: “I’m drawn to the romantic tradition and enjoy the sentimental with a touch of mischief.”