The 20th century textile artists you should know

14 July 2020

Twelve titans of thread

14 July 2020

We chart the work of 12 twentieth-century textile titans whose influence on weaving, sculpture and design continues to make an impact. Some are still working today.

The Flag is Bleeding #2 (American Collection #6), Faith Ringgold, 1997. Image: Private collection Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London 2018 Faith Ringgold/Artists Rights Society

Faith Ringgold (b. 1930)

The pioneering artist tells stories through her quilts, canvases and other mixed media works – personal stories about African-American identity and history, and searing, heart-stopping critiques of racial politics in the United States. Born in Harlem in 1930, she was creative from an early age, encouraged by her fashion designer mother, and went on to build a career at a time when it was prohibitively difficult for a Black artist to find gallery representation. In the early 1960s, after completing her master’s degree, she made her first political paintings, The American People Series. In the 1970s, she began to make tankas (inspired by a Tibetan art form), soft sculptures and masks. African influences had long seeped into her work but she didn’t travel to the continent until the late 1970s, when she visited Nigeria and Ghana. She made her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem, in 1980, in collaboration with her mother, going on to develop her distinctive style of painting through the medium of quilt. Now aged 90, she continues to be a powerhouse in the world of contemporary art and craft, with an exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in 2019 (astonishingly, her first European show), and her role as professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught art from 1987 until 2002.

Nylon rug, 1959, Anni Albers. Image: Courtesy of the Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Gift of Laurel and Jim Vlock, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Artists’ Rights Society, New York

Anni Albers (1899-1994)

Before Anni Albers, weaving was a craft, then it became an art. Despite her iconic status, Berlin-born Anni initially took up weaving reluctantly, forced into textiles, rather than glass or painting, by the Bauhaus’ uncharacteristically backward gender restrictions. Blossoming all the same, she quickly took over the weaving workshop from her mentor Gunta Stölz. Soon National Socialism compelled her and her painter husband, Josef Albers, to flee to the US where both took up teaching roles at the infamous Black Mountain College. Her geometric weaves combined her interest in the mathematical intricacies of pre-Columbian textiles with an intuitive approach to pattern and colour theory, that went on to define Modernism. She was the first textile designer to have a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, she wrote seminal works on design and weaving, and she also mastered printmaking until her death in 1994. Albers continues to influence makers today.

Installation view of Phenomenal Nature, Mrinalini Mukherjee, at The Met Breuer, 2019. All images courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015)

With a career spanning four decades from the 1970s to 2000s, Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee created huge organic and anthropomorphic forms inspired by plants, blossoms, the body and seated and standing deities, unlike any other artist in her generation. Using hemp and jute ropes hand-dyed in murky natural greens, blues and purples, her laborious process involved knotting to create three-dimensional structures and folds – almost entirely without preparatory sketches – that were often taller than the human body. Myth, folklore and sexuality recur through her textile sculptures, as does a sense of decay. Despite exhibiting all over the world, Mukherjee was not nearly as famous as she should have been during her lifetime, but a posthumous retrospective at The Met Breuer in 2019 has since propelled her to rightful international recognition.

Study for Enid Marx’s London Underground moquette fabric, 1937, pencil and gouache on paper. Photo © Estate of Enid Marx

Enid Marx (1902-1998)

With idiosyncratic abstract shapes and nature-inspired motifs, British textile designer, printmaker and illustrator Enid Marx defined the look of midcentury pattern. A peer of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden, Marx comfortably strode between designing industrial fabrics, book jackets, even Elizabeth II’s coronation stamps, and between the 1930s and 1960s, four of her moquette designs for London Transport sat beneath the bums of millions of Londoners. Her style borrowed much from folk and popular art, often block printing with natural dyes. During the war years she developed upholstery fabric for the Utility Furniture Scheme, combining clever weave designers and cunning repeats to save resources, while she later worked on covers and illustrations for Curwen Press and Penguin, as well as posters for London Zoo, children books and even Staffordshire dogs.

Abakan Red, Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1969. Image: Tate/Magdalena Abakanowicz Foundation

Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017)

Dubbed by Christie’s as the ‘godmother of installation art’, Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz is perhaps best known for her Abakans, vast and roughly woven sisal forms that hang imposingly in three dimensions, recalling bodily appendages and female genitalia. Growing up in Communist Poland, Abakanowicz used weaving to side-step the scrutiny faced by painters, especially those deviating from state-sanctioned Socialist Realism, while also meaning her works could travel to exhibitions flat and, therefore, cheaply. Later Abakanowicz moved away from weaving discarded rope fibres to repurposing used burlap, stretching it into warped human shapes she called Alterations. Often playing with the fragility and strength of the human body, loss and dominance, her later works shrug off the textiles that made her famous in favour of bronze, stone, wood and clay.

Untitled, c 2002, by Rosie Lee Tompkins. Image: Eli Leon bequest/photographed by Ben Blackwell for BAMPFA

Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006)

Effie Mae Howard, who went by the pseudonym Rosie Lee Tompkins to guard her privacy, made abstract works from strips of materials of diverse origins (from velvet to fake fur), inspired by religious ideas – she described her process as meditative. Born in rural Arkansas, she learned quilting from her mother, but worked as a nurse for most of her life in Richmond, California, before resuming quilting after experiencing mental health problems in the late 1970s. In 1985, she met Eli Leon, a collector of African-American quilts, who included her in a touring exhibition Who'd A Thought It: Improvisation in African-American Quiltmaking, which first opened in San Francisco. In 1997, her work appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, held several months before the museum’s landmark exhibition of work by the women of Gee's Bend.

Basket Weave Variation, c. 1900, Mary Lee Bendolph, a quilter based at Gee’s Bend, featured in We Will Walk, an exhibition at Turner Contemporary (2020). Image: Mary Lee Bendolph/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio

The quilters of Gee’s Bend

The isolated hamlet of Gee's Bend in Alabama is home to about 700 people, who are the descendents of people who were once enslaved on a cotton plantation in the area. Since the mid-ninteenth century, the women in the community have been producing vibrant, abstract patchwork quilts, mostly made from recycled fabric, influenced both by Native American and African aesthetic traditions. While they were originally primarily for practical use they are now recognised as unique contributions to the history of American art and culture, and works by artists such as Arlonzia Pettway, Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph were featured by New York’s Whitney Museum in a 2002 exhibition, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend. In 2003, a group of artists founded the Gee's Bend Collective. As well as representing the craftspeople, the group offers retreats for people to learn more about their work and its members travel around the country giving talks.

Cloud Labyrinth, 1983, Lenore Tawney. Courtesy: John Michael Kohler Art Centre/ Lenore G Tawney Foundation, New York

Lenore Tawney (1907-2007)

American artist Lenore Tawney was a fundamental figure in the development of what came to be known as fibre art, developing a gauze-like open-warp weaving technique that gives the impression of colourful line drawings floating in space. Many of her weavings entirely abandoned a conventional rectangular format, instead creating totems of yarn that were suspended in mid-air like ethereal webs and sometimes adorned with shells, beads and feathers. Considered a heretic by many in the craft orthodoxy and a touch folksy for the art world, Tawney nevertheless continued making unconventional and often spiritually inspired sculptures, including series of shields, masks and later in the 1970s, clouds – large-scale expanses of suspended threads that hinted at translucent forms.

Macro Gauze, Peter Collingwood, 1970, Oxford Ceramics Gallery

Peter Collingwood (1922-2008)

Peter Collingwood is the best-known British weaver of the 20th Century. His technical approach – where aesthetics were driven by process – is perhaps best summed up in his Macrogauze wall hangings, which create precise geometries by twisting and crossing threads on a homemade warp-dominant loom. Collingwood himself stumbled across weaving while training to be a doctor, and built a portable loom during his National service days in the Royal Army Medical Corps, weaving scarves in the back of a military ambulance. Ditching medicine, he set up his own studio in 1952, and went on to develop a truly innovative practice, pioneering a speed-weaving process he called ‘shaft switching’ and conjuring up ‘anglefells’, a technique that allowed him to weave the weft at an angle. Perhaps his most ambitious project was a 2x4.5m stainless steel yarn Macrogauze sculpture for the Performing Arts Centre, Kiryu, Japan, which weighed 100kg. Collingwood also wrote a series of influential books on weaving and taught internationally, receiving an OBE in 1974.

Saffron Sentinel, Sheila Hicks, 2017. Image: Courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery, London/Noam Preisman

Sheila Hicks (b.1934)

American artist Sheila Hicks effortlessly moves between the miniature – in her tiny ‘minimes’ made on a wooden loom – to the architectural in scale, piling colourful felted boulders up to the ceiling or draping a tangle of oversized tassels across an entire room. A master of colour and scale, Hicks studied at Yale University School of Art and Architecture under colour theorist Josef Albers and, encouraged by his wife Anni, travelled to explore the vernacular fabrics and techniques of Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia – experiences that have been formative to her techniques and led to a lifetime collaborating with local artists. Her work can often be found outside of conventional gallery spaces, lining huge sticks bound tightly with contrasting yarns along the edge of a street like a giant game of pick-up sticks of turning the palace of Versailles’ gardens into a canvas.

Snowscape, Monika Correa, 1986, show by Jhaveri Contemporary gallery at Frieze London, 2019

Monika Correa (b.1938)

Through her nature-inspired tapestries, Indian artist Monika Correa helped elevate weaving to an art form in the subcontinent, becoming one of India’s most well-known textile artists. Taking up weaving in the late 1960s and learning from Cranbrook Academy’s Marianna Strengell, many of her early works were dhurries (or floor carpets), which combined stripes and block colours with traditional techniques reimagined for the Modernist age. Her early weaves were sometimes pictorial, calling to mind trees, forests and waterfalls, before becoming more abstract in later years. The use of a weft made from hand-spun wool defined her signature style, giving it a grit and three-dimentionality that Correa has called the 'backbone to the weaving'. Recently she has worked on high profile commissions for international restaurants, and her works are in the collections of MoMa and The Met.

Itchiku Kubota (1917-2003)

A kimono obsessive and master dyer, Japanese textile artist Itchiku Kubota is best known for his expressive revival of a lost 16th Century tie-dying technique called tsujigahana. After seeing a fragment of fabric in the style at the Tokyo National Museum, Kubota dedicated his life to recreating the technique, finally managing something he deemed acceptable aged 60. His version of tsujigahana involves complex Shibori stitching and tying, then individually applying a range of different dyes that mix and interact with the binding to create a huge variety of shades and shapes. His major work, The Symphony of Light, is a series of 36 kimonos – he originally intended it to be 80 but passed away before its completion. Hung together they form a representation of the four seasons, with the three-dimensionality of the binding and mastery of colour creating textured and evocative landscapes.

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