Hello Ground weavers. Veronique and I flipped a coin to see who would be the first of us to write the opening blog post for Groundweave. I lost? Won? Anyway, I am the author of this post. 

I recently saw the show Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was a thoughtfully curated, big, multi-discipline show that included pieces by many of my artistic idols such as Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl, Lenore Tawney, Agnes Martin, Paul Klee, Ruth Asawa and Sheila Hicks, as well as many artists that I didn't know much about like Ed Rossbach, Andrea Zittel and Olga de Amaral. There are woven, knitted and knotted pieces, assemblages, baskets, paintings and photographs. I was moved by the show and thought I would use this post to try to parse some of my reactions and thoughts focussing on (surprise!) the woven pieces and the weaverly paintings.

I could look at Anni Albers' Black White Grey for hours thinking about how she managed to make such a dynamic woven piece with such a limited palette and simple, geometric forms. 

Anni Albers, Black White Grey, 58" x 48", 1927/1964, MoMA

Olga de Amaral, Transparencia dorada, 67" x 79", 1971/1984, Lisson Gallery

Black White Grey along with a "meta" piece by Olga de Amaral  and Ed Rossbach's piece Tapestry were my three favorite woven pieces (among many stars). 

Ed Rossbach, Tapestry, 71" x 45", 1964, MoMA

And Agnes Martin's Untitled is a piece that has fully captured my imagination. It's is oil on canvas but clearly has a connection to weaving (Martin was roommates with Lenore Tawney at an early point in her career).

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 12" x 12", 1960, RISD Museum of Art

I was trying to assess what it is about these pieces that captivated me, and I believe the "grid" may be the answer. We weavers are set up with a system of parallel lines (warp) as our canvas. If we are weavers, we obviously find something enticing in that system. Coming from a family of artists, I personally loved the restriction of the grid. The freedom of a blank canvas and a palette of paint was daunting, but the loom and its "limitations" gave me a sense of creative freedom. 

One of the things I admire about the pieces I have chosen is that they have an obvious love for and connection to the grid, but have magically, through mastery and vision, made that system of parallel and perpendicular threads important and moving. The grid is present, but not a limitation for these artists. Albers' piece adheres strictly to the grid, but brings excitement and movement with the placement and repetition of the blocks. Olga de Amaral uses scale to create a giant basket weave in which the floats are unconfined and shift to create waves and movement. Ed Rossbach uses discontinuous weft to disrupt the grid while still invoking it. From a distance it appears to be pieced cloth, but one is surprised upon closer inspection to see that it is a one-color tapestry.   

We weavers are, of course, destined to defy the grid, and I have taught a course on structures that help us do that, but when discussing my relationship with "the grid" with my husband recently, he said, "maybe defy not deny" should be your mantra.

Anni Albers writes about "the grid" and how she preferred the pre-colombian textiles which honored the grid in contrast to the European tradition of tapestry, in which weavers used great ingenuity to subvert the grid and mimic the freedom of paint on canvas.

Detail of the Tapestry of the Lady and the unicorn (circa 1500), Musée de Cluny, Paris.

Precolombian art, Nazca civilization: fragment of fabric with zoomorphic representation. 100 BC-800 AD. Goteborg, Ethnographic Museum.

I think that Albers' admiration of the pre-Colombian weavers was in part because their bold, graphic style appealed to her modernist eye, but it would be hard for any weaver not to admire the immense skill and inventiveness that the pre-Colombian weavers brought to their looms.

But back to the grid. Albers' work, which was mostly bound by the woven grid, was being designed and made during an era that was eschewing extraneous ornamentation, breaking down art and architecture into simplified shapes and forms and believing that (after the catastrophic world wars) the new system would truly save the world from the excesses of emotion that had caused the horrors of WWI & WWII. The weight of these beliefs is imbued (I believe) in the work of Albers and Stölzl and it is not surprising that their work is still relevant and valued. 

I wish I believed in an aesthetic that could save the world. But even without that conviction, this show was an immense inspiration. I am a utilitarian weaver, but it was so gratifying to see high-impact woven art and to feel the power of our humble grid in the hands of masters.