Washington, DC—In recent decades, textiles have assumed an increasingly substantial place in the globalized art world. Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction proposes that abstraction, modernism’s primary visual language, has been entwined with textile’s materials, technologies, and issues since its inception. Highlighting the transformative roles played by women and other marginalized creators, this exhibition explores the shifting relationship between abstract art, fashion, design, and craft over the past 100 years. Comprising some 160 works in diverse mediums, Woven Histories is on view from March 17 through July 28, 2024, in the East Building of the National Gallery of Art.

"This exhibition fundamentally reshapes narratives of modern art by exploring the relationship between abstraction and textiles," said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. "The conversations created by artists working across mediums, generations, and continents reinforce the centrality of cloth and fiber in the history of modern art."

Woven Histories delves into dynamic moments when social and political issues have activated textile production and artmaking with heightened focus and urgency. In the aftermath of World War I, avant-garde women artists inspired by utopian social visions created designs for textiles and apparel that played a key role in shaping the modern era. The Black, gay, and feminist liberation movements of the 1960s and the 1970s counterculture placed increasing significance on dress as a marker of identity and resistance. Their legacies were taken up in the following decades by a cohort of young women artists whose feminist-inspired practices fuse dress, textile, and artmaking as forms of self-fashioning. Others draw on their Indigenous cultural heritages in works that seek to build community and center marginalized histories. And as globalization and the digital revolution transform everyday life, creators worldwide critique the harms caused by the outsourcing of mass-produced textiles and apparel to low-wage economies and the resulting environmental devastation.

Exhibition Organization and Support

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation has provided major support for the exhibition.

Additional funding is also provided by the Director’s Circle of the National Gallery of Art.

Exhibition Curator
This exhibition is curated by Lynne Cooke, senior curator in the department of modern and contemporary art, National Gallery of Art.

Exhibition Tour
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 17, 2023–January 21, 2024
National Gallery of Art, Washington, March 17–July 28, 2024
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, November 8, 2024–March 2, 2025
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 20–September 13, 2025

About the Exhibition
Organized loosely chronologically and thematically in seven sections, Woven Histories includes painting, photography, apparel, textiles, drawing, basketry, and sculpture, among other forms.

Interwar Years: Utopian Social Visions
The exhibition begins during World War I with the cross-disciplinary work of women artists who turned to textiles and textile technologies to realize their utopian social visions. Featured in this section are such trailblazers as Paris-based Sonia Delaunay, who considered her textile design and couture an integral part of her innovative fine art practice. Foregrounding concepts of luminosity, vibrancy, dynamism, and speed, emblematic of the modern age, her simultaneist style spanned multiple art forms. Also included are Dadaists Hannah Höch and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, both of whom created artworks informed by skill sets they acquired as professional craftswomen. In Moscow, in the wake of the Soviet Revolution, Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova repurposed their constructivist abstraction into designs for mass-produced textiles for furnishings and apparel. In Germany, Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl—who led the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus, an influential school uniting handicraft, fine art, and functional design—considered a constructivist vocabulary inherent in the structure and design of woven cloth. These transnational textile designers challenged the dismissal of textile as minor, "women’s work," or domestic labor, and envisioned their practices as instrumental in effecting social change.

Post–World War II: Line Involvements
In the United States, Anni Albers stewarded the legacy of the Bauhaus weaving workshop through teaching, writing, and her textile-based work. At Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the late 1940s, she explored the formal constituents of weaving—threads, interlaces, and knots—in delicate drawings and weavings featuring linear and calligraphic forms. The next generation of artists, including Sheila Hicks, Lenore Tawney, and Olga de Amaral, shared Albers's commitment to formal experimentation and handicraft, as well as her reverence for the open weaves of pre-Columbian textiles. Approaching filament and thread much as other artists use line, they reinterpreted a popular fiber art form: the wall hanging. In parallel, artists committed to process-driven modes of making, such as Eva Hesse and Gego, adopted everyday materials—such as string, cord, wire, and rope—to expand the traditional vocabulary of sculptural forms.

Grids, Nets, and Knots
In modernist art theory, the grid is painting’s preeminent formal device and abstraction its primary visual language. Once vital to experimental abstraction, the grid was considered a dead end, both as a trope and a formal device, by the 1970s. Painters such as Alan Shields, Harmony Hammond, and Valerie Jaudon, who sought an art form grounded in the everyday, turned for inspiration to ornamentation, pattern, and textiles, in which the grid is key to fabric’s making and meaning. For other artists, such as Ed Rossbach and Yayoi Kusama, knotted nets or webs found in vernacular cultures and the natural world offered an organic alternative to the grid. In the 1990s, the rise of digital technologies revitalized geometric abstraction in new terms; electronic hardware and algorithmic data have inspired ravishing textile-based works by Marilou Schultz and Analia Saban, among others.

Basketry Cultures
Although foundational to cultures throughout history, basketry's relationship to modernist art histories was peripheral until the 1960s, when influential American textile artist, writer, and teacher Ed Rossbach championed the art form. Enormously varied, basketry’s lineages and techniques have long been venerated in non-Western cultures—for example in Japan, where bamboo arts are essential to the ritual of the tea ceremony. Toward the end of the 20th century, a radical generation that included Nagakura Ken'ichi and Tanabe Yōta began to experiment with new basketry forms and interlace techniques. Sharing a similar deep regard for artisanal skills and vernacular traditions, American artists Ruth Asawa and Martin Puryear transformed modernist sculpture by adopting age-old handicraft techniques: knotting, netting, and looping. Today, artists across the world, such as Yvonne Koolmatrie (Ngarrindjeri), Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee), and Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee Nation), draw on their ancestral heritages, including Indigenous interlace practices, to probe questions of cultural legacy and identity.

"Life Wear" and Self-Fashioning
Following the transformative feminist, civil rights, and gay liberation movements of the 1960s, and the countercultural and punk movements of the 1970s, dress became an important signifier of personal identity. As the market share of manufactured textiles shifted from household use (carpets, upholstery, and wall coverings) to cloth for apparel, factory production of knitted fabric outpaced woven fabric—a first since the Industrial Revolution. Simultaneously, the dominance of cotton in textile production was challenged by the rise of synthetic textiles, such as acrylics, nylons, and polyesters. In recent decades, seismic shifts across the fashion industry culminated in Fast Fashion, sped-up clothing production and marketing cycles involving great waste, which has become the norm today. With their aesthetics framed by feminist visions, Rosemarie Trockel, Andrea Zittel, Paulina Ołowska, and Ellen Lesperance explore the politics of "life wear": clothing as a means of fashioning both a self and a worldview. For inspiration, they look outside their academic art training to the cross-disciplinary practices of women artists from the interwar years, including Anni Albers, Sonia Delaunay, Liubov Popova, and others.

Labor
Today, the design of cloth and clothing cannot be separated from the conditions of its production. Low-wage economies and exploitative labor practices currently fuel a trillion-dollar textile industry premised on racial, ethnic, and gendered wage disparities. Unregulated textile production is a major contributor to environmental degradation worldwide. As sectors of the globalized fashion world seek more responsible modes of production and distribution, artists working across a range of mediums—particularly time-based technologies—call out the textile industry's heedless quest for profit as well as consumer complicity. Artists such as Sascha Reichstein and Lisa Oppenheim foreground oppressive labor conditions stemming back to the early 20th century. By contrast, Senga Nengudi exposes the polarizing discourse dividing labor issues into formulaic binaries: local versus global production, free versus exploitative work, tradition versus innovation. In The Threader (2007), she highlights the practiced, economic, precise choreography of a long-term factory employee, Ameer Baig, as he braids silken ropes for upholstery trimmings.

Community and the Politics of Identity
Works by certain artists prioritize questions of collective belonging and kinship. Conceived as performative, the garments made by Liz Collins and Gary Graham (GRIZ), Ann Hamilton, and Jeffrey Gibson are intended for both ritual and display. They celebrate the resilience of precarious, often contested, and underrepresented communities. As issues surrounding race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sovereignty continue to fuel national and geopolitical debates, textiles may articulate heritage and legacy. Among notable examples are Harmony Hammond's Floorpieces (1973), conceived during the social upheavals of the late 1960s. Based on traditional rug-making techniques and enhanced by bright acrylic, they challenge painting's enduring preeminence. In her installation Hinges (2023), Ulrike Müller builds on Hammond's trailblazing queering of masculinist forms of abstraction. And in their tapestries and wall hangings, Diedrick Brackens, Igshaan Adams, and Teresa Lanceta variously mine genealogies of African American quilting, kente cloth, Islamic rug-making, and Berber (Amazigh) weaving. As these works attest, textiles may serve as touchstones of belonging and collective identity for individuals threatened with displacement, loss of roots, and dislocation.

Exhibition Publication

Copublished by the National Gallery of Art and University of Chicago Press, this 292-page volume offers a fresh and authoritative look at textiles—particularly weaving—as a major force in the evolution of modernist abstraction, and a seminal means of complicating canonical art histories. Richly illustrated, the book features more than 50 creators whose cross-disciplinary, intergenerational practices contest divisions and hierarchies that formerly divided the fine arts from the applied arts, design, and handicraft, while probing urgent issues of our times.

Essays by distinguished art historians Elissa Auther, Lynne Cooke, Darby English, Briony Fer, Michelle Kuo, and Bibiana K. Obler contribute new scholarship to this complex, layered subject. Also included are reflections on artworks by their peers written by Jeffrey Gibson, Ann Hamilton, Harmony Hammond, Ellen Lesperance, Carole Frances Lung, Ulrike Müller, and Lisa Oppenheim. Their texts, like their works, are critical to the exhibition's narratives.

The book is available for purchase at National Gallery shops located in the West Building and East Building, and at shop.nga.gov (online); 800.697.9350 (phone); or [email protected] (email).

Related Activities

Films
Film Knots and Threads
March 17, March 23, April 14, 2:00 p.m.
East Building Auditorium
A selection of work by contemporary artists and filmmakers who use metaphors and patterns of the handwoven and handmade to conjure associations between cultures, eras, and histories.

Talks
A Conversation with Harmony Hammond and Ulrike Müller
March 22, 12:00 p.m.
East Building Auditorium
Conversation with exhibition artists Harmony Hammond and Ulrike Müller, moderated by exhibition curator Lynne Cooke. A signing of the exhibition catalog follows in the East Building Concourse Shop.

Gallery Talk
May 24, 1:00 p.m.
East Building Concourse
Art historian Bibiana K. Obler discusses how textiles intersect with and influence modern artists and movements.

Performance
In Your Factory Are the Doors Locked?
March 24–25, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
East Building Concourse
On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City burned, killing 146 workers. To commemorate this anniversary, textile superhero Frau Fiber continues her work towards sewing 146 shirtwaist blouses.

First Saturdays
May 4, July 6, 10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.
East Building

National Gallery Nights
Art Prom
May 9, 6:00–9:00 p.m.
East Building
Lottery for registration opens April 29 and closes May 2 at 12:00 p.m.

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Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 17, 2023–January 21, 2024
National Gallery, Washington, March 17–July 28, 2024
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, October 25, 2024–March 2, 2025
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 20–September 13, 2025

Want to appreciate more art and design in your daily life? Just look down. The apparel we wear reflects not only our personal tastes and values but also a profound relationship to modern art. Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction reveals the myriad ways textiles intersect with and influence world-renowned modern artists and movements.

Woven Histories delves into dynamic moments when social and political issues have activated textile production and artmaking with heightened focus and urgency. Traced chronologically with 160 works made in a range of techniques—from oil painting to weaving, basketry, netting, knotting, and knitting—the exhibition explores the overlap between abstract art, fashion, design, and craft.

This exhibition is curated by Lynne Cooke, senior curator in the department of special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation has provided major support for the exhibition.

Additional funding is also provided by the Director’s Circle of the National Gallery of Art.