Textile Tactics: Material, Method, and Concept in Artists’ Publications

The visual language of textiles is universal and multivarious, expressed through weaving, knitting, quilting, embroidery, and basketry. The works in this exhibit exemplify the different motives that artists have in using textiles as a focal point or as a point of departure in their creative practice. These objects were made to be experienced intimately—like the experience of wearing clothing—by an individual reader. In some works, the slowness of making is present. The artist invites you to take time to experience different textures and handmade details. In other works, artists embrace the textile tradition of community-based collaboration in which you are invited to take part in making new works yourself. Other themes explored are the modernization and mechanization of textile production, the roots of computing in the invention of the Jacquard loom in the early 1800s, and the repetition and abstraction found in modernist textiles, painting, and sculpture.