Textile art
11 articles
Textile art is an art form that involves the design and creation of artistic and decorative pieces using various fibers and materials. It’s a broad genre of art that uses natural or synthetic fibers to produce functional, creative, or decorative objects. It cuts across practically all cultures and represents one of the oldest art forms and human expertise.
Techniques for creating textile art vary greatly and may include looping, pleating, felting, knitting, crocheting, and weaving, all of which result in a wide array of materials like wool, silk, rayon, etc.
This form of art has, for many years, served many purposes, ranging from practical, for instance, clothes, to decorative, as in rugs and tapestries. A burgeoning list of iconic artists has taken a liking to textile art, including Alighiero Boetti, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar.
“It would be nice to be two people – one all aware and real, the other all dreamy and unconscious – who go hand in hand, without ever mingling,” – Alighiero Boetti. Childhood Alighiero Boetti was a prominent Italian Conceptual artist and Arte Povera movement member. As he grew up in Turin, Italy, where he [...]
Alighiero Boetti’s Arazzi – Tapestry made in Pashtunistan Read
Otti Berger is a respected name in the corridors of art history. The esteemed textile artist and weaver studied and later taught at the Bauhaus when it was still at the height of popularity in Germany. Born in present-day Croatia, Berger was one of the few female students and educators at the Bauhaus, managing to [...]
What made Otti Berger’s Bauhaus textile work so influential? Read
Leading UK contemporary artist Yinka Shonibare is an Honored Member of the Order of the British Empire, which is why the moniker MBE has become integral to his title. As one of the most revered and well-recognized contemporary artists in the world today, the name Yinka is synonymous with historical allusions. What is Shonibare known [...]
Yinka Shonibare’s The End of Empire Read
Anni Albers was a well known German textile artist and prominent printmaker. She is perhaps one of the most well-known print artists of the 20th century. Albers dared to go where no textile designer had gone before, which in part helped to launch her designs into popularity. Born in Berlin, Albers became a student of [...]
Why was Anni Albers a leading textile artist? Read
For his Sharjah Biennial 13 project, artist and composer Joe Namy’s has researched the influence of opera on music in the Arab world. Starting in Egypt with the founding of the Khedivial Opera House in 1869, he has found traces of the art form in Lebanon, Palestine, Kuwait, and more recently, the United Arab Emirates. [...]
Joe Namy’s colorful & oversized curtain partially covers museum Read
3 min 50 sec Every time there is war in a region, the locals look for ways to ease their frustration in an effort to remain hopeful. Afghanistan has been at war for a long time and while most people are aware of the United States invasion in 2001, the Soviet Union occupied the region [...]
The war rugs of Afghanistan Read
South Korean artist Do Ho Suh created an installation based on his New York home. It serves to highlight the permeable margins that are said to disconnect private and public in addition to the normalized concepts of global identity, space and place, diasporic movement, memory, and displacement. Do Ho Su’s biography is the inspiration of [...]
Do Ho Suh – Almost home? An entire apartment recreated in museum Read
Born in 1933 in Biella, Italy, Michelangelo Pistoletto’s was among the first interpreters of the radical renewal of artistic language, both socially and aesthetically, in the early 1960s. He was also one of the protagonists of Arte Povera. Pistoletto began to gain recognition in the mid-1950s, particularly after creating his first Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings) [...]
Michelangelo Pistoletto’s nude Venus inspects a rag of clothes (sfw) Read
Collective Subconscious is a large-scale interactive installation created by Beijing-based artist Yin Xiuzhen. She has spent the last twenty-five years creating and displaying works that reflect her surrounding environment and her relationship with it. Her works are usually personal and environmentally engaging and typically site-specific. Collective Subconscious, which is composed of a bisected minivan connected [...]
Yin Xiuzhen & her 14 meter minibus Collective Unconscious Read
Is there a better reflection of a culture than the creatives living in it? From painters to photographers to poets, the voice of our moment is often told most aptly and timelessly through what they create. The same goes for Erin M. Riley. She has taken a look at both her own and the collective [...]
Erin M. Riley interview – Nothing is off limits (NSFW) Read
The Mappa tapestries are some of the most important works by Alighiero Boetti. Upon his first arrival in Afghanistan in 1971, Boetti began a continuous collaboration with local weavers to produce embroidered tapestries, using himself only as the referential artist but considering the works a creation of a combined effort. Boetti used simple and mostly [...]
Alighiero Boetti’s beautiful Maps of the World Read
