The Changing World Of Fiber Art

HARTFORD — Newly acquired works by Lenore Tawney and Norma Minkowitz are among the highlights of “Traditions/Transitions: The Changing World of Fiber Art,” at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art until March 6.

Weaving, knotting, stitching and dyeing: the techniques of fiber art are ancient. Its preeminent practitioners have made breakthroughs as creative and innovative as painters, sculptors and architects. Then why has fiber art been defined more narrowly than other contemporary artistic expression?

New York-based Lenore Tawney (born 1907) is best known for releasing weaving from both its loom and from two-dimensionality to give it sculptural form. Yet it was the haunting “song” of a mechanical jacquard loom that inspired a series of meditative drawings created 40 years ago, among them “Blue Fountain” (1964).

The exhibition pairs this work on paper with the sculpture born of it, 33 years later, “Drawing in the Air #13” (1997). Made of hundreds of threads accented with beads in a Plexiglas “loom,” the sculpture “sings the song the artist heard in a textile factory as well as the complex structure created on it,” says Carol Dean Krute, curator of costume and textiles at Wadsworth Atheneum.

A Westport resident since 1965, Norma Minkowitz (born 1937) transforms the linear process of crochet into a medium for sculpture. Stiffened with wife and polyurethane, her works may take the form of a shadow box, such as “Permeance” (1990), or as figural sculpture, such as the sequential wall relief “Goodbye Goddess” (2003).

Either way, the airy, irregular interlacings convey a sense of exterior and interior while resembling the cross-hatchings of pen and ink drawings.

The museum is at 600 Main Street. Visit www.WadsworthAtheneum.org or call 860-278-2670 for information.