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Textile Design Exhibitions

 










Three Textile Exhibitions Prove Fabric Is an Enduring Medium For Storytelling

Joana Vasconcelos at MassArt Art Museum, Legacy Russell’s The New Bend at Hauser & Wirth, and Stitched at Paula Cooper Gallery examine the ways in which textile artists weave their stories today.


Pen and paper aren’t the only tools that have written American history. From legacies passed down orally to songs that carried otherwise bygone stories, American folk arts have reveled in unwritten yet unforgotten histories. Textiles have been among these critical forms of storytelling, particularly against the realities and experiences that the canon of art history has often excluded. Many artists—especially women of color—have turned to thread and needle to “write” what they saw and experienced. Three recent exhibitions trace these legacies and the hands that shape them.

Qualeasha Wood Ctrl+Alt+Del, 2021 Courtesy the artist and Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick


Joana Vasconcelos. Valkyrie Mumbet at MassArt Art Museum. Photo by Will Howcroft. Courtesy MassArt

Joana Vasconcelos: Valkyrie Mumbet at MassArt Art Museum, Boston, MA

After MassArt Art Museum’s (MAAM) gut renovation of its 15,000-square-foot venue located on the campus of Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the museum director Lisa Tung knew their inaugural exhibition had to emphasize the Boston-based firm Design Lab Architects’ transformation of their soaring ceiling. “We needed an artwork suspended off of the floor, which we could not exhibit before,” Tung tells Metropolis. The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos’s 2,205-pound mixed media textile sculpture, Valkyrie Mumbet, fit the bill while simultaneously absorbing the visitors in textiles’ powerful storytelling abilities.

The inflated tentacular sculpture is dressed in yarn, lace, velvet, pompoms, buttons, glitter, beads, sequins, and most importantly, capulana, an African fabric that is common in Portugal through its multi-decade colonization of Mozambique. The towering 48-by-48-by-37-foot sculpture hovers above the floor at different heights, and embraces the viewers with its twenty-two arms, or “elements,” as the artist calls them.

The visual and atmospheric joy—which is supplemented by Portuguese music permeating the gallery—is also a monument to  Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, the first enslaved woman who was emancipated under the Massachusetts Constitution’s Bill of Rights in 1781. Freeman’s lawsuit led to the abolition of slavery in the state two years later. The exhibition is an iteration of Vasconcelos’s fabric-based Valkyrie installations, which each honor a local female figure. 

In each iteration, fabrics directly or metaphorically illustrate the subject’s story, and in this case, the artist uses gold beads that reference a necklace Freeman dons in her portrait at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Tung highlights textiles as a critical part of MAAM’s programming and says, “Personal and collective stories, but especially of women’s, are woven in fabric and handicrafts.”

Source: https://metropolismag.com/viewpoints/textile-exhibition-roundup/