African textiles at Brunei Gallery till 14 Dec

From a collection of thousands of textiles, 150 have been chosen. This blog pos contains a lot of pictures, but certainly not all the pieces in the show. I hope it gives a flavour of the riches on display. Click on the photos to read the labels.

The exhibition examines the links between west and north African textile traditions through a selection of important and rare examples of textile art, shown for the first time.

 "The indigo room" -

 Wonderful hats -

 Fante flags -

 Woven figures -

Floating wefts

Further details on the Karun Collection can be found by visiting http://www.karuncollection.com; follow on Instagram @karuncollection. More of the African Textiles Collection can be seen in the book ‘African Textiles’ published by Prestel, 2015.

Anni Albers, weaver and artist

What held my eye at the Anni Albers show at Tate Modern (till 27 January) were the drawings, many reflecting Precolumbian motifs encountered on trips to Mexico as early as 1935-6, after she and her husband had moved from Germany and were working at Black Mountain College.

 She started printmaking in 1963 -

Sometimes the embossing was on metal -

 "Taking a line for a walk"? (Klee was one of her teachers at the Bauhaus) -

This 1970 colour study looks like a random collection of half-triangles ...

 ... but when you look closely you there are larger areas, of grey when combined with orange, of red when combined with grey -

That realisation got me looking for how space emerged in her patterning.

This became a design for Knoll in the mid-70s -

What's the basic unit here - is there one?

 The drawings of knots, preparatory work for a wonderful rug, are gorgeous -

The room centred on her book On Weaving (1965) had several splendid Precolumbian textiles, dating to approximately 500-1100. Such lovely faded colours, the same as those in a Coptic textile, date 800 perhaps, also displayed -

In the final room were samples of different yarns, and some samples woven with them;  beautiful work by Louise Anderson -

 A chance to experience the "haptic and tactile" qualities of the cloth, and very popular -

The big poster outside the museum has a short and striking summary of the exhibition:

An artist who changed weaving
A weaver who changed art

If textile exhibitions in art museums are of interest, this 2015 article on the Tate website deserves your attention:

Why this fascination now? Is it, as Richard Tuttle once stated, because ‘weaving has a certain cast of the future’?

Upcoming textile exhibitions

The latest issue of Art Quarterly (winter 2017) has an article about upcoming textile exhibitions round the UK.

Norwegian weaver Hannah Ryggen is at Modern Art Oxford till Feb 18. Living in a village, she was self taught: "Weaving belonged to a tradition which came from the culture of farms" (via). Her 1930s works are very political; she's speaking out about her experience: "the works have a very immediate message, but they're done with this incredibly slow, careful medium [tapestry]."

Hannah Ryggen: jul Kvale, 1956 (via)

If you went to Entangled Threads and Making exhibition in Margate, you would have seen her anti-fascist tapestry 6 October 1942 there, and Ann Cathrin November Hoibo's response, two woven panels. 

(This art-magazine review of the Entangled exhibition, also by Hettie Judah, puts the show into more than one context:

"[Christine] Löhr’s [fragile structures] occupy a sphere of making that ‘Entangled’ embraces quite unequivocally: craft is presented here – as per Bauhaus philosophy – on equal footing with art: specifically those practices that are awake to the possibilities of hand production (and which, of late, have drawn heartily on craft traditions including tapestry, embroidery and ceramics). This, today, is a more politically audacious move than the decision to dedicate the show entirely to female artists. But, given that it opened a week after women all over the world took up their needles and knitted pink pussy hats as an act of protest, you can’t fault the timing.")

Anni Albers ("long overshadowed by her husband Josef") gets a mention in the article, partly as a segue, via the Bauhaus, to the work of Harriet Wallace-Jones and Emma Sewell - they collaborate as Wallace Sewell, "painting with yarns" and designing fabrics, and have a show at the Fashion & Textile Museum, London, to 21 January. If you've travelled on the Bakerloo Line recently, you'll have sat on their moquette, showing the London Eye and Big Ben.

Wallace Sewell's designs are woven in Lancashire (via)

Dovecot Gallery, Edinburgh, is showing "Daughters of Penelope" till 20 January, celebrates the work of artists and makers working with the gallery. Dovecot Studios wove Paolozzi's The Whitworth Tapestry (1967; part of the Paolozzi exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery earlier this year) and Chris Ofili's The Caged Bird's Song (2017), recently shown at the National Gallery.

The Whitworth Tapestry, by Eduardo Paolozzi (via)

"The quality of human time is embedded in tapestry" (via)

The Edinburgh show includes Finnish weaver Aino Kajaniemi "whose tapestries appear loose and even fragile through the use of yarns as fine as fishing line alongside bulkier linen textures. Many of these portray women and children in rural and domestic settings" - and also American artist Erin M Riley, who uses tapestry "to explore charged issues in the fast-moving online world." Both artists also featured in Tapestry: Here & Now at the Holborne Museum, Bath, which unfortunately has been and gone.

"Alice Kettle: Threads" is at the Winchester Discovery Centre till 14 January, and she is collaborating with groups of refugees, till autumn 2018, on the "Thread Bearing Witness" project, which will be exhibited at the Whitworth, Manchester, from Sept 2018 till February 2019.

"Sea" is 8 metres wide and was designed in response to harrowing 

stories of migration across the Mediterranean (via)

So far the focus of the Art Quarterly article has been on weaving (is that the form of textile that most nearly approaches art?) ... but now we come to embroidery, in the form of May Morris, daughter of William, who put her in charge of Morris & Co embroidery department in 1885 when she was just 23. "She was recognised as a leader in the field of embroidery during her lifetime" - but her reputation has been neglected because "the fragility of the embroidery itself has played a role in keeping May's work out of permanent museum displays." See her work at the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, till 28 January. (Interestingly, this exhibition needed crowdfunding to make it happen.)

Worked by May Morris around 1900, displayed in Edinburgh (via)

Watch out, also, for Tate Modern's exhibition of Anni Albers' work, 11 October 2018 to 27 January 2019. Her choice of textile as a medium "was forced somewhat by the Bauhaus school's bar on women studying in departments such as painting and glass." As she later observed, "when a work was on paper it was considered art, but when it was made with threads, it was considered craft." (Plus ca change?)

Design for a rug, 1927, by Anni Albers (via)

Finally, are textiles coming closer to finding a place in the art world? As Hettie Judah says in the Art Quarterly article, "Within the art world there has been a marked resurgence of interest in the idea of an artist as a direct maker of objects. A central theme of this year's Venice Biennale [was] the relevance of textiles and hand-making in a digital age." 

But it seems to me that handmade=craft, in the eyes of the status-conscious art world, and that the "making" parts of art are less prestigious, eg carried out by artists' assistants and technicians. I think we shouldn't let ourselves be sucked into this bit of territorial defensiveness (or in-fighting), but just get on with doing what we need to do in terms of our "art making" - and being thoughtful and/or clear-sighted and/or open-minded about it all.