The Fabric Workshop and Museum will soon launch the East Coast debut of ‘You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry.’
The group exhibition organized by Mexico-based curator Su Wu is coming to the City of Brotherly Love from Dallas Contemporary with work from 25 artists. The new exhibition examines how contemporary practitioners are “expanding tapestry beyond its traditional boundaries, challenging conventions of material, image.”
Taking its title from a letter by Franz Kafka, the exhibition will display innovative weaving techniques and unconventional materials (think barbed wire, pine needles, and the loom itself) with creative input from artists like Melissa Cody, Goshka Macuga, Analia Saban, Jovencio de la Paz, Sarah Rosalena, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, and Kira Dominguez Hultgren.
“We proceeded from the simple questions: What is a tapestry? What does it do?” says Wu. “In this digitally mediated moment, tapestries offer a way of considering material significance, whether it matters what our images are made of, and the relationship between surfaces and the structures that support them.”
The Fabric Workshop and Museum’s presentation in Philly will expand the original exhibition with newly commissioned works by local artists Qualeasha Wood and David Hartt, alongside residency works from the museum’s permanent collection. As a release describes, Wood’s tapestry will transform the digital interface into woven form to explore Black femmehood and online identity, while Hartt’s work will reconsider landscape through the lenses of colonial history and environmental change.
The Fabric Museum also currently has showcases on display by Ed Ruscha and Mika Tajima, both created during FWM residencies.
“As an institution that encourages artists to experiment with and challenge material boundaries, The Fabric Workshop and Museum is proud to bring this dynamic and genre-breaking exhibition to the East Coast,” adds Kelly Shindler, FWM’s Executive and Artistic Director.
“Su Wu has compiled an impressive roster of artists whose experimental works—many made within the last ten years—interrogate the enduring relationship between material and image to fascinating and surprising ends. We’re excited to deepen connections to our history and location by adding works from our own collection as well as new and recent works by Qualeasha Wood and David Hartt, two Philadelphia artists. All together, visitors will encounter large-scale works that trace tapestry’s ties to storytelling and cultural history, including themes of trade, migration, and myth.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of programming as well, including artist talks, a curator talk, master classes led by exhibiting artists, and weaving workshops.
To learn more information on ‘You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry’ at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (1214 Arch St.,) visit fabricworkshopandmuseum.org
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