REWOVEN: Innovative Fiber Art, is an international collaboration between the Taiwanese American Arts Council, New York; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; Queensborough Community College Art Gallery, CUNY; and the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College.
In this exhibition, twenty-four artists express creativity and a commitment to environmental issues in a convergence of painted, woven, assembled, and installed artworks. While some pieces incorporate traditional craft, most artists use contemporary strategies to transform natural, industrial, and waste materials into works of wit, whimsy, protest, and beauty that address the endangered Earth. Each piece displays ingenuity in redefining the practice of fiber art. In pursuit of a radical agenda, these compelling voices reexamine innovation, social justice, and art history in a distinctly Taiwanese context.
The exhibition has been thematically divided into three venues: at QCC Art Gallery/CUNY, 15 artists from Taiwan and 9 from New York focus on humanitarian, environmental and social issues; while at Godwin-Ternbach Museum, 10 artists from Taiwan choose feminism and Nature as subjects. At El Museo de Los Sures, social justice is the common theme.
One of the curators, Fangling Tseng writes, “Since ancient times, fibers and textiles have been an indispensable part of human life. Using such plain and simple materials as bark, wool, rattan, hemp, and cotton, simple warp and weft patterns can give rise to variations as boundless as music.” Dr. Amy Winter writes: “The stories therein are derived from everyday individual, private experience; some are active and realistic, while others are romantically unworldly; some are steeped in fantasy, while others are deeply contradictory, but all have their own enchanting rhythms.”
New York artists for Rewoven were selected by curator Luchia Meihua Lee; according to her these works naturally display extreme creativity in intuiting and formulating laws to redefine and reshape “fiber art” ideas, practice, and content. They prosecute a provocative and profound reweaving. This exhibit celebrates concept and relentlessly questions and confronts the requisites of “Fiber Art.” While weaving itself indicates an element of reversion and repetition, this “fiber art” has been ready to absorb the practical implication of the new critical regime with no delay. This art ineluctably updates our conception of the contemporary world.
A fully illustrated, exhibition catalogue with essays by the curators will be available for sale during the exhibition.