CALL FOR EXHIBITIONS: Textile Society of America’s 15th Biennial Symposium

CALL FOR EXHIBITIONS

Savannah, Georgia, October 19th – 23rd, 2016

Textile Society of America’s 15th Biennial Symposium

Organized in collaboration with Savannah College of Art and Design.

Timeline

Submission process opens: May 1, 2015

Abstract Submission Deadline October 1st, 2015

Notification of Acceptance to Presenters and 1st round exhibition proposals (via email): December 15, 2015

Deadline for presenters to submit need-based fee-waiver applications: January 7, 2016

Deadline for 2nd round exhibition proposals: February 12, 2016

Notification of Acceptance of 2nd round exhibition proposals: March 15, 2016

Deadline to Confirm Participation: March 15th, 2016

Registration Opens: May 16th, 2016

Deadline for Presenters to Register: June 15th, 2016

Apply here: https://textilesociety.submittable.com/submit/35107

Organizers (artists / curators) are encouraged to submit proposals for group exhibitions that focus on the theme, Crosscurrents: Land, Labor and the Port as outlined in the Call for Papers. Proposals may be for exhibitions of contemporary work, ethnographic, and/or historical textiles or a combination. Contemporary textile art is widely defined to include 2D, 3D, site-specific installation, video, and performance-based work. Indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces are available.

Eligibility is the same as for other submission categories. The exhibition organizers must be TSA members at the time of submission and proposals will be blind juried by a panel of peers. If accepted, it is understood that the organizer(s) will register and participate in the 2016 Symposium. Organizers are also encouraged to coordinate a panel discussion of exhibiting artists, academic papers, or a roundtable. Where appropriate, these sessions may be held in the space of the exhibition.

Submissions will be handled in two parts. First the organizer(s) submit a project description with images. Submissions that are selected will be sent details of the potential exhibition space including architectural plans. In the second phase, organizers will work to formalize the project through drawings/layout and expanded project proposal. The exhibition spaces vary in size and type of facilities available (i.e. height of ceilings, natural light, installation assistance, museum quality lighting and environmental controls).

To ensure safe handling of materials and quality of display, all formalized (2nd stage) project proposals must be approved by the exhibition committee in conjunction with the staff at the exhibiting location. The exhibition coordinator will act as a facilitator between organizer(s) and exhibition venues. Each venue will work with the exhibition organizer(s) to work out the details of a site specific contract and the insurance of artworks while on site (TSA will not provide shipping, insurance for art works, or artist fees).

TSA will provide a listing & map of all participating exhibitions and venues and will publicize the exhibitions.

Shipping of work will be at the expense of the artist and or organizers(s). Organizers proposing site- specific work and those requiring special handling are expected to be on-site for installation. Proposals requiring engineer documents must be handled by the submitting body and approved by the exhibition location. We encourage exhibition organizers to apply for outside funding to support installation, shipping, and artist participation. TSA offers financial assistance to Symposium attendees through a competitive fee-waiver application (details online). If additional opportunities for exhibition-related funds become available we will let exhibition organizers know.

http://textilesocietyofamerica.org/symposia-2016/

Academic Program Co-Chairs:

Jessica Smith, Professor of Fibers, Savannah College of Art and Design (jrsmith@scad.edu)

Susan Falls, Professor of Anthropology, Savannah College of Art and Design (sfalls@scad.edu)

Sheila Hicks, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Always temporary. Always contemporary. September 11, 2015 - December 27, 2015.

Sheila Hicks, Voyage of Serpentina, 1985. Linen, silk, wool, and synthetic fibers, 19 pieces, approximately 34 x 54 inches each. Courtesy Saint Louis Art Museum.

Paris-based American artist Sheila Hicks has been creating hand-woven, abstract fiber-based installations and sculptures for nearly sixty years. From large-scale commissions to gallery exhibitions, her multifaceted practice traverses the spheres of commercial production and fine art and simultaneously references indigenous traditions from around the world. The artist plays with and builds on classical textile techniques—weaving, crocheting, dyeing, spinning—to develop her own experimental and idiosyncratic style, incorporating natural fibers, synthetic blends, and even everyday office supplies. Hicks’s tactile objects and installations of riotous color and breathtaking form expand fiber’s kinship to both painting and sculpture.

Featuring works from the 1960s to the present, this exhibition brings together major works from private collections and the Saint Louis Art Museum with recent examples of the artist’s ongoing series of small-scale portable weavings, or minimes. The works on view exemplify a number of formal leitmotifs that Hicks has returned to over the years. Modular arrangements recur throughout her practice, as in The Evolving Tapestry: Blue (1967–68), a collection of twenty-five woven units of fringed linen and silk and Voyage of Serpentina (1985), comprising nineteen stuffed and knotted silk tubes and brightly colored skeins of fiber. Her ongoing interest in the relationship between painting, sculpture, and textile media is explored in works like Masonry Panel (1981) and Forêt de Lin Wall Hanging (c. 1968, reconstructed 1983), a large-scale diptych of undyed, wet-spun linen tassels that cascades off the wall in a reinterpretation of bas-relief. Other works demonstrate Hicks’s playful adaptation of quotidian materials and interest in industrial design. The minime Ringlets (1993), for instance, is made of intertwined multicolored rubber bands and paper clips and also serves as a study for larger objects. Still other works incorporate elements of the natural world, including feathers and porcupine quills. Together, these works map a cross-section of Hicks’s practice over the last fifty years and exemplify her masterful and ongoing articulation of color, materiality, space, and scale.

Sheila Hicks (b. 1934, Hastings, Nebraska) lives and works in Paris. Recent solo exhibitions include Foray into Chromatic Zones at the Hayward Gallery, London (2015), and L'État du Ciel at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014). The major survey Sheila Hicks: 50 Years debuted at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 2010 and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina in 2011. Hicks’s work has been widely exhibited in major group exhibitions including Threadlines, The Drawing Center, New York (2014); The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); and Fiber: Sculpture 1969–Present at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa) (2014–15).Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; the Museums of Modern Art, Tokyo and Kyoto; and many others. Hicks is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal (2010), Officier des Arts et des Lettres, France (1996), and an Honorary Doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Sheila Hicks is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Kelly Shindler, Associate Curator.

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with Innovations in Textiles 10, a regional collaborative event celebrating fiber art.

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
3750 Washington Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63108
(314) 535-4660
info@camstl.org
http://camstl.org/exhibitions/main-gallery/sheila-hicks/

Art Department Chair, Jo Stealey featured in Material Revival, at Edwardsville Arts Center.

September 11 to October 16, 2015
Opening Reception:  Friday, September 18, 6-8 pm

Artist talk on Sunday, October 4 between 3 and 5 pm.
The talk is part of Fiber East Self Guided Tour
which will also visit galleries in Alton, IL.

Artists:
Erin Cork Woolfolk
Sarah Gillespie
Jo Stealey
Laura Strand
Erin Vigneau Dimick
Pat Vivod - curator

Material Revival renews and celebrates a collaboration, begun 4 years ago for Innovations 9, between friends and colleagues who share a student/teacher/mentor relationship and who strive for a collective conversation that will take them out of their comfort zones to expand how they work conceptually, materially and how they think about their work. Erin Cork Woolfolk, Jo Stealey, Laura Strand, Erin Vigneau Dimick, and curator Pat Vivod are joined this year by new member Sarah Gillespie in the challenge to create inspired new bodies of work by integrating the shared materials from each other’s studios into their own work.


Material Revival is part of Innovations in Textiles 10.

Hours:
Wednesday – Friday, 10 AM – 4PM
Saturday, 11 AM – 3 PM
Sunday – Tuesday, Closed

6165 Center Grove Road
Edwardsville, IL 62025
*On the Campus of Edwardsville High School

Telephone: (618) 655-0337
Email: office@edwardsvilleartscenter.com

Join the MU Fiber Arts Club!

Please consider joining and MU Fiber Arts Club!

Our first meeting will be September 3rd at 5pm in the fibers studio.

There will be pizza and lots of fiber fun!

Welcome to the Fiber Arts Club!  We look forward to your involvement in the club.  Meetings are held in the MU Fiber Studio located on the second floor of Bingham Commons on the first Thursday of each month at 5 p.m.

We discuss new fiber projects. As well, we attend conferences to help further our knowledge regarding the art of fibers. Weaving, felting, paper making, and dying fabrics are all medias that we work with in this organization.

http://mizzou.orgsync.com/org/fiberartsclub47268

Mary Sandbothe

President of the Fibers Club

New full-time Fibers faculty member, C. Pazia Mannella, has work in Extreme Fibers: Textile Icons and the New Edge, August 20 through November 1, 2015 at The Muskegon Museum of Art.

C. Pazia Mannella, Force, detail

Extreme Fibers: Textile Icons and the New Edge examines the state of fibers and textiles in the fine art world today. The exhibition has been developed by the Muskegon Museum of Art in coordination with Guest Curator Geary Jones of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The artworks on display reveal the diversity of the fine art textile and fiber movement, and its transformation into a multi-media and discipline-spanning phenomenon. Participating artists come from around the world, including an invited slate of 27 artists that are visionaries in the field: Luis Acosta, Kyoung Ae Cho, Kate Anderson, Ewa Bartosz-Mazus, Lia Cook, Thomas Cronenberg, Nancy Crow, Patricia Hickman, Jan Hopkins, Wolfgang Horn, Ferne Jacobs, David Johnson, Gerhardt Knodel, Gyöngy Laky, Maximo Laura, Tom Lundberg, Libby Mijanovich, Laura Foster Nicholson, Krystyna Sadej, Arturo Alonzo Sandoval, Chizu Sekiguchi, Sherri Smith, Ixchel Suarez, Yoshiko Wada, Dawn Walden, Carole Weller, and Bhakti Ziek.

A slate of artists selected from juried submissions received from countries around the world will join these masters. Narrowing from a field of over 300 entries, jurors Ferne Jacobs and Namita Gupta Wiggers selected 79 works from 51 artists for inclusion. These juried pieces join those by our invited artists for a showing of over 120 fiber and textile based artworks. One artist from the juried portion of the show will be selected by Ferne Jacobs and Namita Gupta Wiggers for the California Fibers Beyond the Boundaries Award. This award is sponsored by California Fibers and is given annually to a fiber artist for artistic innovation in subject matter, materials and/or technique in a national or international fiber exhibition. The winner will be announced at a later date

Viewers will find tapestries, quilts, weavings, sculpture, basketry, and a host of other forms on display, from functional works to fully abstracted shapes. This is a remarkable opportunity for West Michigan to see truly contemporary, international artwork by artists that defined and continue to transform a major art movement

One artist from the juried portion of the show will be selected by Ferne Jacobs and Namita Gupta Wiggers for the California Fibers Beyond the Boundaries Award. This award is sponsored by California Fibers and is given annually to a fiber artist for artistic innovation in subject matter, materials and/or technique in a national or international fiber exhibition. The winner will be announced at a later date.

Extreme Fibers will open at the Dennos Museum in Traverse City, Michigan, December 6, 2015 and run through March of 2016.

Underwritten by Bayer CropScience. Program support provided by the Michigan Council for the Arts with the National Endowment for the Arts.

http://www.muskegonartmuseum.org/exhibitions/

Speaking With Threads, Jane Sauer, Curator, August 28-October 25, 2015, Craft Alliance Center of Art + Design.

Mark Newport, Batman 712

Speaking With Threads
Jane Sauer, Curator
August 28-October 25, 2015

Opening Reception:
Friday, August 28, 6-8pm
Speaking With Threads
"Life on the Grid" by Mary Bero

Featured Artists:
Mary Bero, Sonya Clark, Kathy Halper, Cindy Hickok, Mark Newport, Carol Shinn, and Benji Whalen

Innovations in Textiles 10
Gallery Hop
Friday, October 2, 5:00-8:00 pm

Curator’s Talk in the Gallery
Saturday, October 3, 2:00 pm

Workshop
Finding the Magic in Disappearing Fabrics with Cindy Hickok
Friday, October 2, 10:00 am-4:00 pm

Poetry Reading
Stitching Verses in the gallery
Thursday, October 15, 6:30 pm
Presented by the St. Louis Poetry Center

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with Innovations in Textiles 10, a regional collaborative event celebrating fiber art.

Curatorial Statement
Jane Sauer

Speaking with Threads brings together the voices of 7 artists using linear elements of thread as a means of communication. Embroidery, a technique loosely connected to the technical practice of each artist in the exhibition, has been dated to the Warring States period (5th - 3rd century BC) in China. The process was originally used to tailor, patch, mend and reinforce cloth. This utilitarian approach led to the decorative possibilities of embellishing with stitches. The artists and craftspeople of the time developed new ways to turn, knot, loop, braid, and twist pliable linear threads to create decorative stitches.   Strangely, there have been no significant changes or advancements in the materials or techniques used in embroidery in the 2500 years since its invention. Rather, the changes that have taken place in the approach to stitchery or embroidery are seen in how it is used.

I selected these artists for their ability to use a simple and modest linear element to create a large statement. The artists I selected all have a distinguished and straightforward voice. I am fascinated by the end result from the accumulation of hundreds and perhaps thousands of small linear elements coming together, to make a powerful statement. Whether diminutive or large in scale, the pieces draw the viewer in to examine how each is constructed. Carol Shinn is a master with an ordinary sewing machine, using the threads as pencil strokes, building up layers of color, light, and shadow; an image emerges from a chaotic ground of tiny marks. Cindy Hickok also creates using the sewing machine, applying layer upon layer of strokes of thread until she has created a fabric of her own. Hickok’s wry sense of humor is what drives her narratives. Her art requires detective work to identify all the characters dancing across her backgrounds. Discovery is an important part of the impact of Hickok’s work.

Mark Newport is a master of many textile techniques. Knitting has been of prime interest to him in recent years. He uses stitches to create a strong graphic plane. Newport explores the supposed heroes of our culture, exposing their vulnerabilities as well as expressing their presumed power to protect. There is an uneasy dichotomy in the use of a female-oriented art form to create an ultra-masculine image. A level of anxiety is also created by the need for these super heroes to protect the innocent from the horrors of our society- the rapists, child molesters, robbers, and the bombs and hand guns which seem to be lurking behind every corner.

Mary Bero fearlessly breaks all the traditional rules of fiber art. She deftly combines embroidery, painting, and sculptural elements to create exuberant works of art. She is a virtuoso of color. Her images are loosely connected, as if part of a daydream or, at times a nightmare. The various elements in the picture plane come together through a succession of small marks, and build to a cohesive whole.

Kathy Walker questions the disappearing space between the public and the private. Her images are derived from material she finds on social media. She looks at the role technology plays in the lives of today’s adolescents, using a technique and material, embroidery, that is oppositional to the fast pace of the internet.

Benji Whalen’s heavily embroidered tattoos on stuffed arms clearly point to the cultural divide between generations and ethnic groups. He references current subcultures and lifestyles. His sculptures also raise the question of “what is art?” Does art have to be located on something that can be placed in a gallery or museum to be valid? Or can it be a part of your body? If art is a part of the owner, then is it personal and not public?  Can it be understood by the 60+ generation in this country?

Sonya Clark uses the symbols of race and identity to engage the viewer in a dialogue. She has an ongoing interest in the quality of black hair and its multi layered meaning. Hair in Clark’s repertoire is woven, stitched, twisted, and manipulated in unconventional ways, creating recognizable objects that become political statements upon closer examination.

It is my hope that this exhibit illuminates the overlap between art, craft, and popular culture.

http://www.craftalliance.org/exhibitions/delmar/speakingwiththreads15/speakingwiththreads.htm

Welcome Back Fibers!

Jo Stealey, Heirloom

C. Pazia Mannella, Force

The Fibers program is back in session for Fall 2015.

In addition to our new Blogger site we also are on Instagram.

https://instagram.com/mizzoufibers/

The hashtag we are using for the Fibers program is #fibersmu

Please follow us throughout the semester.

Professor Jo Stealey has moved from the Head of Fibers position to the Chair of the Art Department. For more information about Stealey please see: http://art.missouri.edu/full-time-faculty/jo-stealey

I am C. Pazia Mannella the new full-time faculty member in Fibers. For more information about me please see: http://art.missouri.edu/full-time-faculty/c-pazia-mannella