Occupying the first floor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, “Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women” immerses visitors in the colorful, textural and, perhaps unexpectedly, sculptural world of fiber art. As an everyday material—from our clothes to our furniture—fiber may not seem like the likeliest star of an intriguing art exhibition located across the street from the White House. However, as the Renwick’s Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft Mary Savig notes, fiber “is widely expressive.” As such a familiar material, fiber holds a unique power to connect and comfort and disarm. By exploring fiber’s versatility and artistry through thirty-three works by women artists, Savig hopes that visitors will leave with a deep appreciation for fiber and its potential as an artistic material. After all, as Savig puts it, fiber is “sublime when created by truly subversive artists and when seen from their world view.”

        The exhibition does not disappoint. Entering the first room, visitors encounter Claire Zeisler’s Coil Series III—A Celebration (1978), a dramatic, gravity-defying work of hemp and wool strands that seem to stand on their own, creating an unsettling white form surrounded by cascading red curls. (Hint: the strands are painstakingly wound around metal wires, a process that took nearly 600 hours.) This work sets the stage of the show: fiber threads are not thin, two-dimensional items but dynamic, multi-purpose materials that can be used on their own or with other mediums to create diverse, dimensional forms.

        Featuring works from the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), the exhibition examines the versatility of yarn, threads, and cloth. Spanning several decades, continents, and cultures, the show features women artists who have worked with fiber as part of generational traditions of weavers and makers, as well as those introduced to this medium through careers in design, fashion, and art. As artists and designers, these women have embraced the long-standing medium of fiber and pioneered new forms, techniques, and practices. Many, like Lenore Tawney and Claire Zeisler, intentionally challenged established hierarchies that marginalized fiber art as “women’s work,” exploring how fiber could be powerful and expressive, much more than something that simply adorned a body or beautified a home.

        One of the ways the exhibition challenges this notion of “decoration” is through the innovative and expressive use of color, architecture, and light throughout the galleries. The Renwick, constructed in 1859 as the first purpose-built art museum in the United States, features many of the hallmarks of an ornate nineteenth-century public space including an elaborate facade and high-style Second Empire ornamentation inside and out. As such, the gallery is a far cry from today’s typical exhibition experience of plain white walls, the sometimes favored or sometimes dreaded ‘White Box’ so often used to display art. Instead, the exhibition plays with the existing intricacies and irregularities of this historic space to highlight the dynamic and complex surfaces of the works featured within.

Designed to use the original floor plan to best advantage, the exhibition starts in a smaller gallery off the main entrance with work featuring pops of reds before shifting into a moodier, more intimate second room. Of planning the exhibition for this building, Savig said: “Many of these pieces are large works of art and they were made to take up space and provide moments of drama. We wanted to create different feelings and experiences, using the exhibition and lighting design to amplify what these artists were doing through their work.”

        One of the most dramatic works on display is Lenore Tawney’s haunting 1984 sculpture, Box of Falling Stars, part of her Clouds series exploring the shape of light. Framed by two majestic, fluted columns, a canvas is suspended mid-air with loose, tendril-like fiber threads descending freely towards the ground. These “vertical weavings,” or “weavings without weaving” as described by Tawney, appear to float within this intimate space, challenging both the rigid architecture of the building and the traditional form of weaving. Indeed, many of the works in this show occupy a contradictory position as both strong and fragile, resilient and flexible, heavy and weightless.

        Towards the end of the exhibition, a pair of works pick up this theme of weight and gravity. Situated within a five-sided nook is Nagare VII (1970) by artist Kay Sekimachi, made of woven nylon monofilament (or fishing line). Nagare means “flow” or “river” in Japanese, and Sekimachi takes inspiration from calligraphy, origami, and lacework. Suspended from the ceiling and dowsed in blue and white light, this ethereal, almost transparent work appears as if underwater rather than as a complex series of carefully woven and structured fibers. Across the hall is Neda Al-Hilali’s 1975 sculpture, Medusa, made of knotted sisal, jute, linen thread, wool, and gold wire. In contrast to Sekimachi’s sleek work, Medusa appears heavy and earthy, with braids, knots, and frayed edges tumbling towards the floor. Yet like Nagare VII, Medusa challenges expectations by hovering just above the hard marble.

        Like the architecture, the exhibition itself is infused with dramatic lighting that highlights and complicates the works—challenging viewers to think about their multi-dimensionality and materiality. One of my favorites was Maria Emilia Castagliola’s A Matter of Trust (1994). Castagliola collected sealed paper envelopes from friends and relatives that contained written accounts of their deepest secrets inside. She then set these envelopes within sheets of fiberglass in the style of a quilt. The exhibition panel notes that her process prevents “the secrets from being revealed without the total destruction of the work.” Mounted off the wall and lit from above, the opaque paper of the envelopes suspended in the fiberglass creates as second work—a stunning shadow quilt where these secrets no longer exist.

        Uplifting—metaphorically and literally—earthy fiber materials like wool, linen, and hemp that are tied and bound together is a key theme of the exhibition. As with Faedo’s work, items often perceived as fixed or weighted like quilts or wall coverings are instead instilled with lightness and movement. In Sheila Hick’s The Principal Wife Goes On (1969), large ponytails of linen, silk, wool, and synthetic fibers are draped and hung over a suspended beam. Displayed in the center of the main gallery, it is lit from multiple angles and casts shadows that change as the viewer moves around the piece. The work is meant to be rearranged each time it is displayed to respond to its unique environment.

         Another theme is the ability of fiber to transcend its very threads to imitate or replicate other forms of art. In The Family Embraces (1997), Carolyn Mazloomi explores the style and look of wood block prints through her use of reverse appliqué in quilting. With only black and white fabrics and threads, Mazloomi creates a bold piece where the thread imitates the grooves created from carving a wood block. The dynamic, monochromatic work with its threaded, woody texture is mounted to a bright orange wall that offers visual contrast. In display cases nearby, Joyce Scott’s beadwork in Necklace (1994) and Birth of Mammy #4 (2004) lends rigidity to fiber, producing hardened sculptures and jewelry that from a distance appear to made of solid plastic, glass, or metal. And in My Home in Fresno around the Year 1900 (1949), artist Marguerite Zorach embroiders a detailed scene that captures a memory of childhood. The stitches are so minute that the work looks like a photograph or painting; only very close inspection reveals each tiny loop of wool thread.

        Where “Subversive, Skilled, Sublime” truly stands out is in its intentional and systematic incorporation of the artists’ voices through quotations and storytelling, inextricably tying their lived experiences to each work. Every piece includes wall text with a quotation by the artist on their inspiration, practice, or life, in addition to a short biography. In some ways, this emphasis on the individual maker may make it more difficult to establish a single narrative (or thread) through the exhibition, but it grounds the works in a real world of lived experience, practice, and creativity.

        The curators of the exhibition have taken this narrative a step further by creating a complementary podcast called “Backstitch” available to stream for free online. Drawn from hours of audio recordings compiled by the Archives of American Art as part of their Oral History Program, this podcast features short ten- and twelve-minute clips of the artists speaking about their lives and art. Curator Mary Savig, who previously worked at the Archives, was eager to use this resource “to give the artists their own voice and let them tell us who they are.” Also available digitally are images of the works in the show, removed from their creative displays and architectural context within the Renwick but visible to audiences across the globe virtually.

        This exhibition builds on several recent textile-focused shows in Washington DC, many highlighting the ambiguity of fiber as art or craft relative to the canon of twentieth-century art history. Just last fall, this author covered “Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts” at The Textile Museum at George Washington University. Bringing together historic quilts (many made by now-unknown artists) and contemporary artworks inspired by the practice and materials of quilt-making, this show explored the often confusing and contradictory nature of textiles in the museum context. Removed from domestic environments and functional uses, traditional quilts often move into the realm of fine art.

        Many artists have explored the multiplicity of value systems around textiles, from art and beauty to form and function. Nearby, the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art recently closed “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” (on view from March 17 to July 28, 2024). Featuring approximately 160 works by over fifty artists from around the world, this show was a sweeping look at the many ways that twentieth-century artists embraced weaving as a form of artistic expression in addition to, or in contradiction of, its functional value or material meaning. A few pieces come to mind: Andrea Zittel’s White Felted Dress #3 (2002), a white dress with large holes that complicates its use as clothing; and Shan Goshorn’s Color of Conflicting Values (2013), a small basket woven from paper printed with twenty-dollar bills. Through an almost encyclopedic overview of modern textile art, this exhibition reflected how contemporary artists working with fiber took on large questions such as identity, politics, consumerism, and societal change.

        The Renwick’s show continues the conversations of these two previous exhibitions, encouraging visitors to consider the overlaps and blurred lines between fine art and everyday objects of beauty. Some works on display serve more traditional domestic uses, like quilts and wall coverings, while others were purpose-made as art to be displayed in this type of setting. In conversation with each other and in their own right, each piece is a work of art that transcends mere decoration. To firmly establish this point, the show closes with a room dedicated to the artistic process, peeling back the (metaphorical) curtain on the dramatically lit and creatively installed artworks in the galleries. This step into the artists’ studios highlights the materiality of the medium—indeed, its everyday-ness—but also explores the creativity and skill needed to transform simple threads into these complex works of art. Yarn samples, drawings, and maquettes show the steps and decisions that go into selecting fiber types and colors, creating complex designs, and plotting weaving patterns with mathematical precision. While the materials are readily recognizable, these primary sources—scraps and sketches—illustrate the complex and time-intensive process undertaken by these artists to create their truly sublime works of fiber art.

Emelia Lehmann is a DC-based writer and cultural heritage professional. When she is not looking at art, you can find her looking at buildings.