JoAnn Giordano (born 1949, in Newark, NJ) [1] is an American textile artist [2] and curator who has exhibited since 1977.
Giordano has studied at Purdue University, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 1988, she earned an MFA in Fiber from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. [3]
Giordano has shown her work internationally in Mexico and Japan. [3] She has been exhibited in the Cleveland Museum of Art, [4] and the Ohio Craft Museum. [5] She had a one-person exhibitions at the Womans Building in Los Angeles and at Artemisa Gallery [6] in Chicago. [7] Her work was included in an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington, DC. [7]
An art educator, Giordano has taught since 1979, including classes sponsored by the Cleveland Museum of Art, LaGuardia Community College, Young Audiences of Greater Cleveland, Kent State University and Case Western University. [8]
Feature articles on her work have appeared in Surface Design Journal and FiberArts magazine, [9] and her work has been reviewed in the New Art Examiner . [7] Surface Design Journal published a five page feature article by Janet Koplos (held in the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art) on Giordano entitled JoAnn Giordano: The Earthy and the Cosmic. [10]
Giordano's work is in the permanent collection of the Ohio Craft Museum, [11] the Lafayette Museum of Art, Indiana and the Century Center in South Bend, Indiana. [12] The Smithsonian Archives of American Art contains an archive file from the Women's Building with documentation of her work. [12]
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 1940's and 50's, 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 1970's Tawney focused increasingly on her spirituality, but continued to make work until her death.
American craft is craft work produced by independent studio artists working with traditional craft materials and processes. Examples include wood, glass, clay (ceramics), textiles, and metal (metalworking). Studio craft works tend to either serve or allude to a functional or utilitarian purpose, although they are just as often handled and exhibited in ways similar to visual art objects.
Toshiko Takaezu was an American ceramic artist, painter, sculptor, and educator whose oeuvre spanned a wide range of mediums, including ceramics, weavings, bronzes, and paintings. She is noted for her pioneering work in ceramics and has played an important role in the international revival of interest in the ceramic arts. Takaezu was known for her rounded, closed ceramic forms which broke from traditions of clay as a medium for functional objects. Instead she explored clay's potential for aesthetic expression, taking on Abstract Expressionist concepts in a manner that places her work in the realm of postwar abstractionism. She is of Japanese descent and from Pepeeko, Hawaii.
Leza Marie McVey (1907–1984) was an American ceramist and weaver. She is known for her large hand-built organic forms.
Mary Lee Hu is an American artist, goldsmith, and college level educator known for using textile techniques to create intricate woven wire jewelry.
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.
Sonya Clark is an American artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Clark is a fiber artist known for using a variety of materials including human hair and combs to address race, culture, class, and history. Her beaded headdress assemblages and braided wig series of the late 1990s, which received critical acclaim, evoked African traditions of personal adornment and moved these common forms into the realm of personal and political expression. Although African art and her Caribbean background are important influences, Clark also builds on practices of assemblage and accumulation used by artists such as Betye Saar and David Hammons.
Katherine Westphal was an American textile designer and fiber artist who helped to establish quilting as a fine art form.
Alice Kagawa Parrott was a Japanese American fiber artist and ceramicist. She spent most of her adult life in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she established a reputation as one of the country's most important weavers, and opened one of Santa Fe's first shops devoted weaving and crafts.
June Schwarcz was an American enamel artist who created tactile, expressive objects by applying technical mastery of her medium to vessel forms and plaques, which she considers non-functional sculpture.
Nancy Morrison Crow is an American art quilter and fiber artist. She is one of the leading figures in the development of the art quilting movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and is also known for her development of certain techniques to allow more spontaneity and expression.
Cynthia Schira is an American textile artist and former university professor. Her work is represented in the collections of many major public museums.
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.
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.
Hiroko Sato-Pijanowski is a Japanese jewelry designer, artist, author and educator. Sato-Pijanowski is credited with introducing Japanese materials and techniques to American metal working. She is based in Yokohama in Kantō, Japan.
Mary Ann Scherr was an American designer, metalsmith and educator. She was known for her jewellery design and industrial design, but she also worked as a graphic designer, illustrator, game designer, fashion and costume designer and silversmith.
Lillian Wolock Elliott (1930–1994) was an American fiber artist, and textile designer. She is known for her innovative basket craft.
Gerhardt Gunther Knodel, is an American contemporary textile artist, academic administrator, and educator. He was the head of the fiber arts department at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 1970 to 1997, and also served as the school director from 1997 to 2007. In 2016, he was named a fellow of the American Craft Council (ACC).
Dorian (Dohrn) Zachai was an American fiber artist. Her work was included in the 1963 exhibition Woven Forms at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York City. She is considered an important innovator in the field of fiber art.