The Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts was an internationally recognized center for the textile arts at 1940 Bonita Avenue, Berkeley, California. [1]
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The Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts was an internationally recognized center for the textile arts at 1940 Bonita Avenue, Berkeley, California. [1]
Founded in 1973 by Hungarian-born artist Gyöngy Laky, Fiberworks included a wide range of contemporary and experimental approaches based in the textile arts medium. The Fiberworks gallery showcased textile art in the early 1970s, a time when most other commercial galleries and museums gave textile medium scant exposure.
Foremost was the year-round Community School, the Special Studies program and the Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts accredited programs in conjunction with Lone Mountain College of San Francisco. Many of the school's faculty, lecturers, exhibitors and students were, or would go on to become, influential leaders in the arts including Joanne Segal Brandford, Lia Cook, Mildred Howard, David Ireland, Gyöngy Laky, Jack Lenor Larsen, Nance O’Banion and Morgan O’Hara, Ed Rossbach, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, and Katherine Westphal, to mention only a few.
The international impact of the Center became evident when it hosted the Symposium on Contemporary Textile Art, 1978, which attracted notable presenters, faculty, lecturers and participants from around the world. From Tapestry to Fiber Art, [2] published 2017, recognized this Symposium as one of the two important conferences of the decade. Magdalena Abakanowicz [3] and Sheila Hicks, [4] internationally renowned artists, were keynote speakers.
Fiberworks flourished for 15 years, but, due to funding issues, it closed in December, 1987. [5]
Textile arts are arts and crafts that use plant, animal, or synthetic fibers to construct practical or decorative objects.
Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz-Kosmowska was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist of Tartar descent. She was known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and her outdoor installations. She is widely regarded as one of Poland's most internationally acclaimed artists. She was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland, from 1965 to 1990 and a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984.
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.
Lenore Tawney was an American artist known for her drawings, personal collages, and sculptural assemblages, who became an influential figure in the development of fiber art.
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. Zeisler's non-functional structures were constructed using traditional weaving and avant-garde off the loom techniques such as square knotting, wrapping, and stitching. Zeisler preferred to work with natural materials such as jute, sisal, raffia, hemp, wool, and leather. The textiles were often left un-dyed, evidence of Zeisler's preference for natural coloration that emphasized the fiber itself. When she used color, however, Zeisler gravitated towards red.
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.
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.
Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznan Poznań is one of the major fine-art academies in Poland. It was founded in 1919 as the State School of Decorative Arts.
Polly Barton is an American textile artist. She was born in New York City. As a student she studied art history at Barnard College and has lived and traveled in Paris, Florence, and Rome. In 1981, she moved to Kameoka, Japan, to study with master weaver Tomohiko Inoue, living in the religious heart of the Oomoto Foundation. She returned to New York in 1982 and continued to weave on her Japanese tsumugi silk kimono looms.
Urszula Plewka-Schmidt was a Polish artist and teacher, a co-founder of the "Polish school of tapestry", creator of monumental wall compositions.
Katherine Westphal was an American textile designer and fiber artist who helped to establish quilting as a fine art form.
Lia Cook is an American fiber artist noted for her work combining weaving with photography, painting, and digital technology. She lives and works in Berkeley, California and is known for her weavings which expanded the traditional boundaries of textile arts. She has been a professor at California College of the Arts since 1976.
Erin M. Riley is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work focuses on women and women's issues primarily in hand-woven hand dyed wool tapestries.
Françoise Grossen is a textile artist known for her braided and knotted rope sculptures. She lives and works in New York City. Grossen’s work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Jagoda Buić is a Croatian visual artist best known for her monumental fiber art installations and tapestries.
Jane Kidd is a Canadian textile artist based out of Salt Spring Island, Canada.
Nance O'Banion (1949-2018) was an Oakland based American artist who "pioneered creative explorations of handmade paper". She is known for her sculptural paper works and book works which focus on themes of change and transformation. A retrospective sample of the arc of her work may be viewed at: https://nance-obanion.com
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.
Gyöngy Laky is an American sculptor living and working in San Francisco, California. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S., Europe, Asia and South America. She gained recognition early in her career for her linear sculptures constructed in the architectural methods of textile arts. “Laky’s art manifests architectonic sensibility. She is as much an engineer as she is an artist in the conventional sense.” She is also known for her site-specific, outdoor, temporary installations.
Tracy Krumm is a textile artist, craft educator, and curator based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Krumm's work combines metalworking and crochet; crafting items such as curtains and clothing out of metals and wire.
Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art