This September, Parsons School of Design and Lidewij Edelkoort bring New York Textile Month to the city; a festival “designed to celebrate textile creativity and promote textile awareness.” Be sure to check out the website’s calendar for an extensive list of city-wide exhibitions, talks, and workshops! Here are a few events that we think should not be missed!
Work by AIR Cycle 9 resident, Lily Moebes.
Three Walls: Air Cycle 9 Final Exhibition
Gowanus Loft (61 9th Street, Brooklyn)
September 20 to 23, 2018
Come join us at the Gowanus Loft in Brooklyn, to celebrate the culminating exhibition of the 9th Cycle of Artists in Residence. An immersive experience in fiber arts, Three Walls explores the concepts of beauty, language, function, value, and protection through sculptural pieces, hand woven messages, garments, and embroidered creations. The installation features dynamic, connective works by Jamie Boyle, Rhonda Khalifeh, Junyu Li, Lily Moebes, Meghan O’Sullivan, Cory Siegler, Hannah Whelan, and Chang Yuchen.
Opening Reception: September 20, 6-9pm
Performance: September 21, 9pm
Artist Talk: September 23, 7pm
Work by Milton Sonday. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Secret Life of Textiles: The Milton Sonday Archive
September 1 through 30, 2018
Textile scholar, curator, and educator, Milton Sonday, is “one of the world’s foremost authorities on the structures of handmade fabrics, particularly woven textiles and lace.” The Secret Life of Textiles features a diverse selection Sonday’s hand-drawn “studies of lace structures and couched embroidery, loom models for patterned weaves, and diagrams made from classic handwoven textiles.” From color-coded drawings to paper constructions, Sonday’s creations take on an imaginative quality and blur the line between form and function.
Photo courtesy of New York Textile Month.
Textile Design Pop-Up Exhibition by Jefferson Textile Designers
September 15, 2018 (12-1pm and 2-3 pm)
Head to the Lori Weitzner Design Studio on Saturday, September 15 for a one-day, pop-up exhibition of work created by Textile Design students from Jefferson (Philadelphia University and Thomas University). This curated showcase features a series of undergrad and graduate Textile Designers’ pieces, “highlighting the marriage of artisanal processes and the latest technologies.” As described on the event website, the pop-up will be also be an opportunity to hear more about the Jefferson Textile Design programs!
Color Decoded: The Textiles of Richard Landis
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
September 1 through 30, 2018
Color Decoded: The Textiles of Richard Landis features weavings by Richard Landis, an American master weaver, including six recent acquisitions and textile pieces. “Complex systems of closely related full-tones and halftones of color,” Landis’ geometric double-cloth textiles reflect a “lifelong investigation of pattern and color” and the artist’s remarkable intricacy and mastery of double-cloth weaving. A number of Landis’ process drawings will also be on view — a glimpse into his process of designing patterns, tonal schemes, and weave structure.
Work by Liz Collins. Photo courtesy artist’s website.
September 5 through October 21, 2018
LMAK gallery presents Conduition this month, the first solo exhibition by Liz Collins at the gallery featuring her dynamic stitched paintings, jacquard woven and knit textiles, and needlepoint drawings. Together, these pieces invoke “electric currents, interconnectivity, and energy exchange,” as Collins explores new materials and experiments with scale and sculptural elements. As described in the press release, the title of the show combines ‘intuition’ and ‘condition’ with ‘conduit,’ as “objects and beings that carry things through them, such as energy, current, liquid, electricity, emotions, and more.”
September Fiber Book Picks
In conjunction with NY Textile Month, this month’s series of gallery exhibitions, workshops, and museum shows create a window into the artist’s process, color and design theory, as well as material construction. The hand-drawn renderings, diagrams, and patterns featured in Color Decoded and The Secret Life of Textiles as well as the Textile Design Pop-Up take us behind the scenes, continuing the longstanding tradition of sharing textile knowledge and craft. Exhibitions like Three Walls and Conduition prompt similar investigations into material processes through evocative, connective pieces that subvert and play with traditional textile forms. In “Fiber Book Picks,” we contribute to the textile-craft discourse by suggesting five books which resonate with September’s textile and fiber art picks:
- Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting (2008) by David McFadden. Available at NY Public Library.
- Textiles: The Whole Story (2011) by Beverly Gordon. Available at Thomas J. Watson Library.
- Color and Fiber (1986) by Patricia Lambert. Available at the NY Public Library.
- Collapse Weave: Creating Three-Dimensional Cloth (2008) by Anne Field. Available at Blue: Tatter Textile Library.
