Modernist art history undervalues and marginalizes the status of textile arts with respect to fine art – to painting and sculpture. Considered applied art or handicraft, and gendered as feminine, textiles are consequently largely absent from its canonical narrative. The exhibition, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, contests those deeply entrenched hierarchies by tracing key intersections between textiles and abstract art across the past century, and by offering a multivocal account, comprised of a chorus of once minoritized makers. Among the timely subjects the exhibition addresses are the role of textile cultures in preserving heritage and constructing community today; ways in which abstraction, once deemed the pre-eminent modernist language, has been periodically revitalized through interchanges with textile forms, mediums, and subjects; and contemporary labor practices used in the production of cloth and clothing, including their harms to ecological and sustainability. Centering artists formerly erased or dismissed from mainstream chronicles by reference to gender, race, ethnicity and class, it puts their work into dialogue with their long-established peers.

Beginning with the historical avantgardes at the onset of the first World War in Europe in 1914, this lecture highlights the contributions of such pioneering women artists as Anni Albers, Sophie Taeuber Arp, Sonia Delaunay ad Liubov Popova. In the post-war era it situates artists working with fiber, including Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks and Olga de Amaral, alongside their better-known contemporaries, Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin and Yayoi Kusama, and others. Key to its analysis of the current efflorescence of textile as a technology, material, and thematic in art practices world-wide are such seminal figures as Rosemarie Trockel, Igshaan Adams, Jeffrey Gibson, and Ann Hamilton.

Lynne Cooke is Senior Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. From 2012-2014 she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. Prior to that she served as chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid from 2008 to 2012 and as curator at Dia Art Foundation from 1991 to 2008. In 1991, Cooke co-curated the Carnegie International, and has helmed numerous major shows since, including the 10th Biennale of Sydney (1996), Rosemarie Trockel: Cosmos (2012) and Outliers and American Vanguard Art, 2018. She has published widely, including texts on Agnes Martin, Francis Alys, Zoe Leonard, James Castle, and Bridget Riley.