“The truest thing in my life was my work. I wanted my life to be as true.”
Lenore Tawney
When Lenore Tawney arrived at Coenties Slip in her black-and-tan convertible, she wasn’t searching for herself on the shores of Manhattan’s southern ports—she was seeking independence as a fully fledged artist. Leonora Agnes Gallagher was born in 1907 in Lorain, Ohio, a city west of Cleveland on Lake Eerie. All her life—from the Midwest to the East Coast—Tawney loved living near a body of water.
Following her graduation from high school, she worked for two years in a factory sewing men’s suits, something that she later reflected on with some irony given her eventual pursuit of fiber art. She moved to Chicago in 1927, joining her older brother, who worked as a sportswriter. Tawney first waited tables, but soon began the detail-oriented work of proofing court opinions for a publishing company.
In 1941 she married George Busey Tawney, who passed away from an illness a year and a half after the couple’s wedding. Devastated, Lenore allowed herself to be cocooned in the home of her in-laws, a prominent and wealthy family of psychologists in Urbana, Illinois. Casting about for her next steps, Tawney perused her father-in-law’s library, where she first encountered books on Eastern philosophy and Buddhism—concepts that captivated her mind and woven forms for years to come.
Tawney returned to Chicago in 1946, and soon enrolled in an interdisciplinary program at the Institute of Design (today the Illinois Institute of Technology), an offshoot of the German Bauhaus. She studied under Alexander Archipenko, a sculptor, as well as Marli Ehrman, a textile designer. After spending a summer in Archipenko’s studio in Woodstock, New York, her path forward became clearer. “It seems that I had to devote my whole self to sculpture, I couldn’t do it halfway, so I gave it up,” she recalled. She destroyed her sculptures and got a secondhand loom, learning from a friend how to use it. At 47, she attended a workshop with tapestry weaver Martta Taipale at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
Though she had found stability in her home in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, her community of friends, and inclusion in “Good Design” exhibitions jointly held at MoMA and the Merchandise Mart, Tawney once again craved change. “I left Chicago to seek a barer life,” Tawney later observed. “The truest thing in my life was my work. I wanted my life to be as true.” She first settled into 27 Coenties Slip in 1957, before moving a block closer to the seaport at 27 South Street.
She had brought along her cat, her threads, and her tools—in particular her reed, an object she devised to shift the position of her vertical threads on the loom, allowing her to create convergences and diversions in a single piece. In the expanse of her South Street loft, which had been a space used by craftsmen to work on boat sails, her forms grew. Dark River, which she created in 1962, is nearly 14 feet tall. She felt inspired by her proximity to the East River, and the generative sensation of her work “just flowing like a river.”
Distinct among the circle of post-WWII weavers who focused on industrial designs, Tawney was determined to create non-functional artworks. Tawney’s signature was her “floating threads” that drift and dance right and left across a suspended warp, stretched like the strings of a violin. Sometimes her woven forms were so open they dissolved into space, while simultaneously framing up their surroundings through fibrous windows. Other times, dense interlocking threads create shapes, circles within squares or crosses, to convey Tawney’s own inner symbolism.
Like her contemporaries Sheila Hicks and Claire Zeisler, Tawney contended with the perceived division between fine art and crafts, but she also had a steady series of exhibitions. In 1960 she received a commission from the Interchurch Center, near Barnard College’s campus, to create a tapestry for the sanctuary space. Nativity in Nature, an impressionistic scene of overlapping threads, is still on view there today. Tawney’s solo show on Staten Island in 1961 was a breakthrough, showing 40 weavings she had created since 1955. A selection of her open works dominated the Museum of Contemporary Craft’s Woven Forms exhibition in 1963, and her seven-foot Little River was a highlight in Wall Hangings at MoMA in 1969. “I’m not just patiently doing it,” she clarified of these successes. “It’s done with devotion.”
Tawney made her last weaving in 1976, thereafter investing more time in her practice creating collages and postcards-as-assemblages. She also made taut line drawings that bear a relationship with her Cloud Series, tall installations of hanging threads like streams of rain.
Rachael Schwabe, Assistant Educator, Interpretation, Research, and Digital Learning, 2025
