Seven Ways of Looking at Woven Histories

Textiles are everywhere in our lives, all the time. It’s not surprising, then, that they’ve been the focus of so many extraordinary artists, who have often created them in tandem with painting, sculpture, or art in other mediums. The exhibition Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Art connects weaving, textile design, and clothing with the development of major ideas of abstract art, from the beginning of the 20th century to today. Here, seven thematic entry points to help you follow the thread...

Anni Albers. Design for Wall Hanging. 1927. Gouache and ink on paper

Envisioning a New World

In the early 20th century, in the aftermath of World War I, artists across Europe worked to remake a better world. At the Bauhaus academy in Germany, the school’s weaving workshop, run by Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers, was an important experimental laboratory, and both artists readily applied the geometric abstraction that characterized the avant-garde painting and drawing of their peers to the designs of textiles. The first gallery of Woven Histories includes major works by both of these women, and provides a rare opportunity to see them juxtaposed with the complex gridded drawings that were used to design them, such as this one from 1927.

Line Involvements

Like Anni Albers, the next generation of weavers, including the artist Olga de Amaral, revered the ancient textiles of Central and South America. Amaral attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in the mid-1950s, and established a weaving studio upon her return home to Bogotá, Colombia. There she produced unique wall hangings, like this one, inspired by both local indigenous craft traditions and modernist abstraction. Like her contemporaries, including Sheila Hicks, Amaral encouraged the transformation of decorative wall hangings into fiber art forms, approaching filament and thread as other artists made use of the drawn line.

Olga de Amaral. Cintas entrelazadas (Interlaced ribbons). c. 1969. Wool and cotton

Grids, Nets, and Knots

Ed Rossbach. Constructed Color Wall Hanging. 1965. Synthetic raffia

The grid, a major compositional tool for modern painting, is built into the very structure of weaving: the interlacing warp and weft threads, one over and one under. For many postwar fiber artists, however, the grid was not simply a structural element, but was integral to a textile’s form, design, and meaning. It was also one to be challenged, as with Ed Rossbach’s knotted net of colored synthetic raffia. Obviously handmade, and impossible to replicate with a machine, his highly colored Constructed Color Wall Hanging expands organically across the wall, its crossed threads refusing to form the 90-degree angles of an expected grid.

Lisa Oppenheim. Leisure Work III. 2013. Gelatin silver print (photogram)

Labor

Exploitative labor practices in low-wage economies currently fuel a trillion-dollar textile industry. This is not a new trend, however: the production of lace, once a highly valued luxury item, is also underpinned by a similar history, dependent on wealth disparities and the textile industry’s unrelenting quest for profit. Although lace was traditionally made by women, the production of the material was vastly different for aristocratic practitioners, who produced lace as a leisure pursuit, and laborers such as nuns and domestic craftswomen, who received little compensation for their skill in producing the material. As mass-production of lace began to replace the need for women laborers, the quality and prestige of the material was lost. Lisa Oppenheim’s detailed photogram of collaged fragments of vintage lace plays into the subsequent emergence of a market for vintage handcrafted lace, which encouraged the assembly of rare fragments into large-scale composites such as this one.

“Life Wear” and Self-Fashioning

Andrea Zittel is part of a cohort of contemporary women artists, coming of maturity during the 1980s and onward, who explored the politics of “lifewear” through feminist-informed lenses. Embracing the countercultural prioritization of attire as a form of self-representation after the liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s, these artists fused dress, textile, and art-making, creating garments that embody their disaffection with mainstream culture and mass production. In 2002, Zittel created her series A-Z Fiber Form Uniforms in response to the waste and environmental harms brought about by global textile industries and fast fashion. Hand-felted from wool fiber, Zittel’s designs favor simple sleeveless dresses and tops. Zittel’s individualized garments offer a stylish alternative to unsustainable production, as she disrupts the imbalanced output of the factory-produced knitted fabrics that have outpaced handwoven textiles since the mid-20th century.

Andrea Zittel. ‘White Felted Dress #3’ from A-Z Fiber Form Uniforms. 2002. Wool

Shan Goshorn. Color of Conflicting Values. 2013. Paper printed with ink, acrylic, and gold foil

Basketry Cultures

Many cultures have long venerated the ancient textile art of basketry as a foundational, pre-loom technology across human history. In North America and Australia, new generations of Indigenous artists have revived basketry practices as part of a collective impulse to preserve cultural legacy. Shan Goshorn is credited as one of the few artists of the 21st century to learn Eastern Band Cherokee single- and double-weave techniques. Rejecting traditional materials such as rivercane, Goshorn created the splints from which she wove her baskets from paper, on which she’d printed a range of texts and images. Viewing basketry as a “nonthreatening vehicle to educate audiences,” Goshorn created baskets that probe and subvert the stereotyping of Native American culture for mainstream consumption and entertainment.

Community and the Politics of Representation

Tapestries, rugs, and wall hangings may serve as touchstones of kinship for individuals who have experienced—or are threatened with—dislocation, displacement, and loss of roots. Igshaan Adams’s textiles engage his ethnic and vernacular heritage as a Muslim-identifying South African. His work Vroeglig by die Voordeur (Early Light at the Front Door) is modeled after a found piece of inexpensive linoleum that the artist sourced in his home township of Bonteheuwel, which was racially segregated in Apartheid-era South Africa. In creating this work, Adams repaired the damaged sections—gaps in the flooring’s pattern—with strands of inexpensive gold beads. The resulting wall hanging invokes the Islamic tradition of ornamental rug making with a contemporary and local specificity.

Igshaan Adams. Vroeglig by die Voordeur (Early Light at the Front Door). 2020. Cotton twine, wood, plastic, and stone beads, wire, turmeric, tea, and fabric dye

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Art is on view at MoMA through September 13, 2025.