Fiber art refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fiber and other components, such as fabric or yarn. It focuses on the materials and on the manual labor on the part of the artist as part of the works' significance, and prioritizes aesthetic value over utility.
JoAnn Giordano is an American textile artist and curator who has exhibited since 1977.
Claire Zeisler was an American fiber artist who expanded the expressive qualities of knotted and braided threads, pioneering large-scale freestanding sculptures in this medium. Throughout her career Zeisler sought to create "large, strong, single images" with fiber.
Mary Walker Phillips, was an American textile artist, author and educator. She revolutionized the craft of hand knitting by exploring knitting as an independent art form. Her hand-knit tapestries and other creative pieces are exhibited in museums in the U.S. and Europe. She was honored as a fellow by the American Craft Council (ACC) in 1978.
Olga de Amaral is a Colombian textile and visual artist known for her large-scale abstract works made with fibers and covered in gold and/or silver leaf. Because of her ability to reconcile local concerns with international developments, de Amaral became one of the few artists from South America to become internationally known for her work in fiber during the 1960s and ‘70s. She is also considered an important practitioner in the development of postwar Latin American Abstraction. She currently lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.
June Claire Wayne was an American painter, printmaker, tapestry innovator, educator, and activist. She founded Tamarind Lithography Workshop (1960–1970), a then California-based nonprofit print shop dedicated to lithography.
Goshka Macuga is an artist based in London. She was one of the four nominees for the 2008 Turner Prize.
Chunghi Choo is a jewelry designer and metalsmith who was born in Incheon, Korea in 1938. She received a BFA degree from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea, where she majored in Oriental painting and studied philosophy of Oriental art and Chinese brush calligraphy. She moved to the United States in 1961 to study metalsmithing, weaving, and ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she received an MFA in 1965.
Leza Marie McVey (1907–1984) was an American ceramist and weaver. She is known for her large hand-built organic forms.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Irene Barberis, is an Australian/British artist, based in Melbourne and London. She is a painter primarily, working also with installation, drawing, and new media art. She is also the founding director of an international arts research centre, and is an international curator and writer.
Viola Frey was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.
Marianne Strengell was an influential Finnish-American Modernist textile designer in the twentieth century. Strengell was a professor at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1937 to 1942, and she served as department head from 1942 to 1962. She was able to translate hand-woven patterns for mechanized production, and pioneered the use of synthetic fibers.
Helena Hernmarck is a Swedish tapestry artist who lives and works in the United States. She is best known for her monumental tapestries designed for architectural settings.
The Franses Tapestry Archive and Library in London is devoted to the study of European tapestries and figurative textiles. It is the world’s largest academic research resource on the subject.
Dafna Kaffeman is an artist and a senior lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. She works with glass and various materials and techniques such as embroidery, print ,drawing, to produce what the David Owsley Museum of Art describes as "beautiful crafted surfaces and disturbing text about aggressors and victims". She lives and works in Israel. Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions, and she has won, or been nominated for, a number of international prizes and awards.
Ruth Adler Schnee was a German-born American textile designer and interior designer based in Michigan. Schnee was best known for her modern prints and abstract-patterns of organic and geometric forms. She opened the Ruth Adler-Schnee Design Studio with her spouse Edward Schnee in Detroit, which operated until 1960. The studio produced textiles and later branched off into Adler-Schnee Associates home decor, interiors, and furniture.
Minna Carolina Mathilde Louise "Loja" Gesellius(March 15, 1879 – April 21, 1968) was a Finnish-American textile artist and sculptor. She founded the weaving department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She also led her own studio, the Studio Loja Saarinen, which designed many of the textiles used in buildings designed by her husband, the architect Eliel Saarinen.
Joan Livingstone is an American contemporary artist, educator, curator, and author based in Chicago. She creates sculptural objects, installations, prints, and collages that reference the human body and bodily experience.
Nelly Homi Sethna was an Indian weaver, textile designer, researcher, writer and a crafts activist. She worked on the crossroads of Scandinavian modernism and Indian crafts tradition, which shaped her guiding philosophy. Her close association with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay played an important role in the revival and promotion of traditional Indian crafts.
