Now on View at SAAM's Renwick Gallery |
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Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women
On view through January 5, 2025
Renwick Gallery
Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, NW Cotton, wool, polyester, silk — fiber is felt in nearly every aspect of our lives. The thirty-three artworks in Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women, now open at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, piece together an alternative history of American art.
The featured artists, including Faith Ringold, Miriam Shapiro, Emma Amos, Olga de Amaral, and more, mastered and subverted the everyday material throughout the twentieth century.
Accessible and familiar, fiber handicrafts have long provided a source of inspiration for women. Their ingenuity with cloth, threads, and yarn was dismissed by many art critics as menial labor. The artists in Subversive, Skilled, Sublime took up fiber to complicate this historic marginalization and also revolutionize its import to contemporary art. They drew on personal experiences, particularly their vantage points as women, and intergenerational skills to transform humble threads into resonant and intricate artworks. |
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| | Listen to Featured Artists Backstitch, new podcast from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, weaves together audio quotes from oral histories conducted for the Archives to narrate the lives of artists such as Adela Akers, Kay Sekimachi, and Lenore Tawney.
Backstitch looks at the lives of ten women artists who are weavers, sculptors, quilters, and more. Hear the artists in their own words in these short audio explorations. Learn how artists may embrace traditions or subvert expectations to create something beautiful, powerful, and even sublime. |
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| | The Smithsonian American Art Museum is able to create and share experiences like these thanks to funding from generous supporters like you.
Thank you for ensuring that American art is available to all. |
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Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum with the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. Generous support has been provided by The Coby Foundation, Ltd., The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation, the James Renwick Alliance for Craft, and the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. This exhibition received federal support from the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.
Image Credits: Emma Amos, Winning, 1982, acrylic on linen with hand-woven fabric, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Catherine Walden Myer Fund, 2019.15, © 1982, Ryan Lee Gallery, New York
Installation photography of Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2024; Photos by Albert Ting |
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