Skip to content
Entertainment
Link copied to clipboard

Fabric artist's lesser-known paper works

Recognized as one of the world's preeminent fiber artists, Lenore Tawney (1907-2007) also had a magical touch with paper. Her collages, assemblages, and postcards are being displayed side by side with her fiber-art pieces at the University of the Art's Ro

Recognized as one of the world's preeminent fiber artists, Lenore Tawney (1907-2007) also had a magical touch with paper. Her collages, assemblages, and postcards are being displayed side by side with her fiber-art pieces at the University of the Art's Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery in one half of the two-venue exhibition "Lenore Tawney: Wholly Unlooked For." It's a tandem effort with the Maryland Institute College of Art, which is showing Tawney's drawings, weavings, sculptures, and installations through March 17.

Tawney, born in Ohio, attended the Chicago Institute of Design, where she studied sculpture with Alexander Archipenko, drawing with László Moholy-Nagy, and weaving with Marli Ehrman. She could have become a modernist sculptor in the mold of her mentor Archipenko, but weaving became her preoccupation, and eventually, after moving to Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, her woven works evolved to become a kind of linear sculpture. (The painter Agnes Martin, who lived in the same building and was a friend, was influenced by Tawney's taut lines of linen, as was Tawney by Martin's minimal abstraction.)

Though the Rosenwald-Wolf presentation includes two monumentally scaled woven pieces, Tawney's much less familiar works in and on paper are the show's scene-stealers, along with a film of the artist, then in her 80s, taking a visitor through her studio. Who knew she was in the vanguard of the mail art movement in the 1960s, making and mailing her own postcards, or that she created vaguely Joseph Cornell-like boxes filled with collected objects, or would reassemble broken eggshells, paint them, and collage snippets of writing to them, as in the delicate pink and white Easter Breakfast (1982)?

These modest, personal pieces, many reflecting her travels to India, South America, and Mexico, illustrate Tawney's devotion to repetitive gestures as her woven works do, but also underscore her attraction to the hidden or obscured, a state the act of weaving so inexorably achieves.

UArts has two concurrent exhibitions that complement its Tawney show, in its 224 Gallery in Anderson Hall and in Hamilton Hall's President's Gallery. Both comprise the works of current fiber students and alumni, and MFA Book Art students and professors; all constructed their works using materials from Tawney's own collection of old books, manuscripts, linens, and silks donated by the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation.

Past is present

Shelley Spector's first exhibition at Bridgette Mayer Gallery is her most polished show to date. Spector's evocations of the everyday (a birdcage, a brick wall, a pincushion) rendered in mostly reclaimed materials, including vintage hand-me-downs from Spector's family, such as old upholstery, are witty, carefully made, and exude an old-fashioned charm.

Spector's installation Mariposa, which takes up the entire north gallery, is the second large-scale installation of hers I've seen - the first, Drek Groove Wallpaper (One), originally shown at the Esther Klein Art Gallery, is mounted on a wall downstairs - and it shows her at her most expansive, literally and figuratively. To make this piece, Spector unraveled an old family blanket and wrapped its red threads around wooden spools of all sizes that are displayed on shelves running the length of the walls. Lenore Tawney's woven meditations came to mind, but I think the eccentricity of this piece is more reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois' use of materials to stir memories.

Old City quintet

Abstract painting is alive and well in Old City. Larry Becker Contemporary Art has extended its current show of paintings by New Yorker Joseph Marioni and German artists Peter Tollens and Michael Toenges, and LG Tripp Gallery, a few doors up, has turned its two spacious rooms over to Philadelphia painters James Erikson and Timothy Gierschick.

Marioni, who has shown with Becker, is represented by four shimmering single-color paintings. Tollens' paintings of accumulations of brushstrokes in like-minded colors pulse like a close-up of a Van Gogh field, and Toenges' lush paintings of thickly applied pinks, blues, and greens summon a palette used by de Kooning in his Women period.

At LG Tripp, Erikson has taken inspiration from novelist Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet in large paintings of curved forms that bring African art to mind. Gierschick's colorful paintings have grown more complex since I saw them last. Now, rather than referencing mainly logos and graphic design, they seem to be drawing on folk art as well.