Rich Tapestries and Loose Ends: ‘Woven Histories’ Is Unwieldy in Its Comprehensiveness

This year seems to be, among other things, the year of the textile. The past six months have seen a plethora of fiber-centered shows at major museums, from “Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to an exhibition of women fiber artists at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Blanton Museum just closed a show on Anni Albers; the National Portrait Gallery is currently displaying a quietly stunning collection of Amish quilts. And there’s “Threads to the South” at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art.

But the most comprehensive—and often unwieldy—of these shows is “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” a traveling exhibition that just closed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and is on its way to the National Gallery of Canada, after which it will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art. The show, which originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last fall, aims to recenter fiber art in the story of modernism—to reweave textiles, so to speak, into the fabric of art history. Its central claim is that “abstraction, modernism’s primary visual language, has been entwined with textile materials, technologies, and issues since its inception.”

There are several reasons textile art has been long sidelined in the Western, male-dominated narrative of art history. For one thing, fabric often has a practical purpose—it clothes people, holds objects and covers floors and furniture. For another, textiles have historically been the domain of women and domestic laborers. Weaving and other fabric-making techniques are also often seen as crafts, grounded in mechanical skill rather than artistic originality. Yet fiber art also has much in common with both painting and sculpture, perhaps the most vaunted media in the Western hierarchy of visual arts. Like painting, it is fundamentally about image; like sculpture, it is about material and touch.

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“Woven Histories” makes the case that textile art is not only equal to painting and sculpture but also that it played an integral role in the development of modern art. The exhibition’s early rooms (the show is organized by theme, roughly chronologically) trace the development of textile art in post-World War I Europe, where artists like Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp were challenging the boundaries of painting, design, and fashion. The focus here is pattern: the bold, geometric language of Delaunay’s and Taeuber-Arp’s paintings finds its way onto their dresses and designs, and vice versa. Anni Albers, perhaps the greatest textile artist of the 20th Century, also plays a central role. Like many of the show’s artists, she found her way into fiber art in part because other paths were closed to her; as a female student at the Bauhaus, she was forced to take classes in weaving rather than glassworking, architecture, or carpentry. “Fate,” she once declared, “put into my hands limp threads!” Albers’s early work is, in Bauhaus style, rigorously geometric: the show includes a small design for an early wall hanging, featuring crisp, interweaving strips of primary colors.

In the 1930s, Albers (along with her husband, Josef) fled Nazi Germany for the United States, where she helped usher in a new chapter of fiber art. The next generation of artists adopted a softer, more expressive style than their Bauhaus predecessors; Albers’s own work also became looser and more experimental. In one of the most interesting rooms of the show, a late Albers tapestry (Epitaph), in which black threads meander across a jute background, hangs beside Sheila Hicks’ Quipo Blanco, a white woven piece that transforms halfway down into twisted cords. Nearby, there’s a bas-relief by Eva Hesse, in which ropes emerge from the centers of dark mounds, arranged in a grid. The pieces strike a subtle balance between order and disorder, image and three-dimensionality. The opposite wall features another fascinating sequence: a small Agnes Martin painting–white vertical lines on a dark, cross-hatched ground–next to Leonara Trawley’s Vespers, a delicate, web-like wall hanging woven from black and blue threads. It’s not just that the textiles are as good as paintings (or, in some cases, sculptures)–it’s that they are paintings, and the paintings are, in their own way, textiles.

Sadly, “Woven Histories” begins to unravel in its second half. The tour through modernist painting and weaving is followed by a foray into basketry, where work by modern and contemporary sculptors—Ruth Asawa, Martin Puryear—sits beside woven baskets by Ed Rossbach and other, lesser-known artists. The room is interesting enough in its own right, but it feels awkward in an already overflowing textile exhibition. Things come apart further in the final sections, which contain art from the 1970s to the present, and mainly revolve around identity and social issues. Here we find a dress sewn from American flags, by Liz Collins; a geometric print by Jeffrey Gibson, inspired by the artist’s Chocktaw and Cherokee heritage, that contains the words “THE FUTURE IS PRESENT;” several long video installations; and a drawing by Rosemarie Trockel of what appears to be an ape. It’s not that the pieces aren’t interesting in themselves, but that they don’t hang together—or with the first half of the show—in any cohesive way.

A large part of the problem is that the show has failed to define the terms around which it is organized. Is basketry textile art? Is an American flag dress abstract? (Maybe, but abstraction doesn’t feel like its central impulse in the way it does for a Sonia Delaunay design.) Especially confusing is the show’s engagement with the term “modern,” which seems generally to refer to modernism–an art movement that ended, by most accounts, in the 1960s—but sometimes to the more nebulous “modern era.” Maybe it’s just semantics, but the result of this confusing terminology is that the exhibition seems to push two narratives at once and that the post-1960s work ends up feeling like a very long epilogue to the tale of modernism.

Indeed, sometimes the show belies its own confidence in textiles’ importance. No curator would organize an exhibition of 20th- and 21st-century painting–even abstract painting; such a show would fill an entire museum (as in fact, it does). But “Woven Histories” seems to claim that it can provide a coherent overview of fiber art from the same era. Since it can’t, it cherry-picks with abandon, presenting a mish-mash of media, techniques, and subjects. It also cherry-picks nationalities and identities, which can prove problematic. Textile art is obviously a wildly international enterprise, but the show’s random selections give the impression, for example, that Latin America’s only contributions to the fiber art of the last century have been a few lone basket weavers.

Still, individual pieces shine throughout the show’s later muddle. There’s a delightful selection of Gego drawings and collages, tucked away into a quiet corner. Ruth Asawa’s sculptures and drawings are always worth viewing, even if they don’t fit perfectly into the show’s narrative. If Rosemarie Trockel receives more wall space than she probably should, her collection of five fascist balaclavas is still darkly funny. And, in the last room, luminous abstract weavings by Igshaan Adams and Teresa Lanceta do finally draw a clear line from contemporary textiles to the early abstraction of modernism.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway of the exhibition is that 20th-century textile art is a subject so rich that it cannot, in fact, be covered in a single show or even a year’s worth of shows. Textiles deserve their place in the annals of art history—not at the margins, but in the center. If this particular show has more than a few loose ends, the overall tapestry is still a sight to see.