If the Drawing Center seems a strange place for a sweeping show about textile art, consider the concept of the line. The distance between two points is, as the artist Sheila Hicks says, from her Paris studio, “the mother thinker of all form-making, whether it be two- or three-dimensional. It is the direct conductor from brain to materialization.” Rendered in fiber, that line is just pulled a little tighter, and the tension is on full display in “Thread Lines,” opening Sept. 19.
The exhibition traces the influence of the modern titans of textile art — from Louise Bourgeois’s embroidery of a spiderweb to Hicks’s hugely influential small woven improvisations incorporating plant fibers — on work by younger artists, including appliquéd felt pieces by William J. O’Brien and reworked Ikea rugs by Sam Moyer. “There is a similarity between the deliberate and imperfect stitch as in the drawn line, in the connection to the hand, and in the presence,” says the show’s curator, Joanna Romanow. “Many of younger artists are picking up where their predecessors left off. They’re picking up the threadline.”
But if drawing is about gesture, working in fiber is often an act of “brute force,” as Hicks puts it, willing into existence both the image and the structure that supports it. Showcasing the physicality and repetition of weaving, the artist Anne Wilson will slowly walk a spool of yarn among four columns in the Drawing Center’s main gallery throughout the course of the exhibition. “It’s a performative piece about the tension you create as you move from one place to another, in real time,” Romanow says. The work is a fitting tribute to the museum’s 1866 building, originally built, as Wilson discovered when researching the piece, as a factory for the Positive Motion Loom Company. “If you have fiber, you are drawing in space. There’s no front and back, and you’ve got to get your brain around that,” Hicks says. “It’s movement that has texture. How many things do you know that are like that?”
“Thread Lines” is on view Sept. 19 – Dec. 14 at the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St.,drawingcenter.org.
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