Helena Hernmarck (born in Stockholm, Sweden, 1941) 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. [1]
Helena Hernmarck (born in Stockholm, Sweden, 1941) 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. [1]
Hernmark's parents were Carl Hernmarck, curator of decorative arts at the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts, and Kerstin Simon, a journalist. [2] Her uncle, Swedish modernist architect Sven Markelius, was one of five authors of the modernist manifesto, Acceptera, published in 1931. [2] Hernmarck studied weaving in Stockholm, first at the Swedish Association of Friends of the Textile Arts, and later at Sweden’s University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. [3] Her primary teacher was Swedish textile artist Edna Martin. She apprenticed with textile designer Alice Lund. [4] [5]
Hernmarck lived in Canada from 1964–1972, followed by England 1972–1975, eventually moving to New York in 1975. [6] Hernmarck married industrial designer Niels Diffrient in 1976. [4] She participated in the Lausanne Biennales of 1965, 1967, and 1969, received a solo exhibition at MoMA in 1973, and a second solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974. [7] In 1973, she received the American Institute of Architects Craftsmanship Medal. [1]
Hernmarck began producing monumental tapestries for corporate settings in the late 1960s, eventually working with architects such as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei and Partners, Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), [8] George Nelson, Ulrich Franzen, Hugh Stubbins, John Carl Warnecke, Kevin Roche, and others. [9] One of her earliest commissions was for the executive offices of the Weyerhaeuser Company in Seattle, Washington (1970–71) [9] and one of her later commissions was for the Time Warner Center in New York. [10] In 1999, Hernmarck had a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, "Monumental and Intimate," which traveled to Waldemarsudde in Stockholm, Sweden later that year. [11] She participated in the “Sourcing the Museum” exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2012. [12] In 2018 the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum held an exhibit entitled Weaving in Progress. The exhibition included a weaving studio where Hernmarck would weave. [13] Her work is held in private, corporate, and museum collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, [14] the Metropolitan Museum of Art, [15] the Minneapolis Institute of Art, [16] the Museum of Modern Art, [17] and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. [18]
Hernmarck was among the first tapestry artists to use photographs as the basis for her designs, which rely on optical illusions to create photorealistic effects. [11] Her work in the 1960s reflected the influence of pop culture with tapestries such as Newspapers (1968) woven from a composition of newspaper clippings and Little Richard (1969) simulating a 7 by 8 foot album cover. [19] In the 1970s, Hernmarck began working from enlarged color photographs, rendering the effects of light on water in tapestries such as Sailing (1976), which was produced for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. [7] Her 1990 Urn, a tromp l'oeil tapestry made for Philip Johnson’s Peachtree Tower in Atlanta, Georgia, replicates elements of the surrounding architecture. [20] Hernmarck has also used paper collages, watercolors, and photographic details as the basis for her designs. [4] Hernmarck’s technique differs from traditional gobelin tapestry weaving in that it uses texture, color, and value contrast to establish line, rather than sharp lines and patterns. [21] Before each major commission, Hernmarck works with Wålstedts mill in Dala-Floda, Sweden to spin and dye yarn. [22] Some of Hernmarck's tapestries are woven, with assistants, at her studio in Connecticut. [4] Others are subcontracted to Alice Lund’s Textile Studio in Dalarna, Sweden. [6]
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.
Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, is a university college for higher education in the area of art, crafts and design in Stockholm, Sweden.
Lenore Tawney was an American artist working in fiber art, collage, assemblage, and drawing. She is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive. Tawney was born and raised in an Irish-American family in Lorain, Ohio near Cleveland and later moved to Chicago to start her career. In the 1940s and 50s, she studied art at several different institutions and perfected her craft as a weaver. In 1957, she moved to New York where she maintained a highly successful career into the 1960's. In the 1970s Tawney focused increasingly on her spirituality, but continued to make work until her death.
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.
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Cynthia Schira is an American textile artist and former university professor. Her work is represented in the collections of many major public museums.
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.
Annika Ekdahl is a textile artist who designs tapestries marrying Renaissance and Baroque practice with more modern techniques, creating large-scale works in her own contemporary style. She has exhibited in Europe and Australia and was the 2013 Nordic Textiles Awardee.
Minna Carolina Mathilde Louise "Loja" Gesellius 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.
Emilie Anna Maria Kornerup née Bruzelius (1918–2006) was a Swedish-Danish textile artist who specialized in embroidery and tapestry. She produced works for decorating public buildings and churches, including the Danish Parliament and Roskilde Cathedral. Kornerup was also active as a teacher with the Haandarbejdets Fremme textile guild and the Danish School of Arts and Crafts.
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.
Lili Blumenau (1912–1976) was an American fiber artist. She was a pivotal figure in the development of fiber arts and textile arts, particularly weaving, in the United States during the mid-part of the 20th century.
Dominic L. Di Mare is an American artist and craftsperson, known for his weaving, abstract mixed-media sculpture, watercolor paintings, cast paper art, and fiber art. His work touches on themes of personal spirituality. He is based in Tiburon, California.
Mary Zicafoose is an American textile artist, weaver, and teacher who specializes in ikat, an ancient technique in which threads are wrapped, tied and resist-dyed before weaving. Zicafoose is the author of Ikat: The Essential Handbook to Weaving Resist-Dyed Cloth (2020). Her works are part of private and public collections, including at least 16 embassies around the world as part of the U.S. Art in Embassies Program.
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