One of the first artists I ever covered for PRINT was the extraordinary quilting artist Bisa Butler. Widely beloved and heralded for her immersive quilted portraits, Butler has been one of the modern-day fiber artists bringing long-overdue appreciation to the medium. “Quilts are tombs of history,” Butler told me. “Printed fabrics give you a date and time. If I’m using oranges and blues and dayglow flowers made of polyester, you know that fabric is from the 70s because they’re not making fabric like that anymore. So by me using my grandmother’s fabrics that she wore in the 60s and the late 50s, you recognize the time; when was this made, how did this person live that they had access to lace or velvet or dayglow flowers.”
Barbican Art Gallery, London
Many have come before Butler, as author PL Henderson unpacked in her 2021 book Unravelling Women’s Art: Creators, Rebels, & Innovators in Textile Arts, which I was also sure to cover. My fascination with fiber and textile artists started with the one and only Louise Bourgeois when I went to an exhibition of hers at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm nearly a decade ago when I was studying abroad in college. I was mesmerized by her quilted sculptures, compelled by her reclamation of an art practice typically sidelined and undervalued for its association with domesticity and women.
The latest installment of appreciation bestowed to textile arts has come in the form of an exhibition at the Barbican in London entitled Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. The show sheds light upon artists from the 1960s to the present who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles, using the medium as a lens by which to ask questions about power: who holds it, and how can it be challenged and reclaimed?
Unravel comprises over 100 artworks from 50 international artists, ranging from small hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations. Drawn to the tactile processes of stitching, weaving, braiding, beading, and knotting, these artists have embraced fiber and thread to tell stories that challenge power structures, transgress boundaries, and reimagine the world around them.
The exhibition presents six themes that transverse time and geography: ‘Subversive Stitch,’ ‘Fabric of Everyday Life,’ ‘Borderlands,’ ‘Bearing Witness,’ ‘Wound and Repair,’ and ‘Ancestral Threads.’ Together, these ideas investigate the role of textiles in artistic practices that challenge dominant narratives and push up against regimes of power. Unravel reflects how textiles are an especially resonant medium to address ideas of gender and sexuality, the movement and displacement of people, and histories of extraction and violence, as well as understanding the world through connecting with ancestral practices and communing with nature.
The exhibition will conclude at the Barbican on May 26th but will next travel to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it will be on view from September 14 to January 2025.