"When we see a painting, we don't generally ask ourselves, "Is this art?" A work on canvas is almost always inherently seen as such, but what about mediums like ceramics, photography, or fiber that also often serve functional or decorative purposes and historically have not been considered " high art?" Why are some textiles considered art while others are not, and what system are we using to determine this "value?" What makes a tapestry a tapestry, and a rug a rug?"
"Thread Count, a large-scale group exhibition curated by Charlotte Grüßing at The Hole, aims to illuminate the beguiling nature of textiles-something of a dark horse in the contemporary art world. The show is organized as an ode to the work of trailblazing artist Anni Albers, a modernist weaver who studied at the Bauhaus in Germany and later taught alongside her husband, Josef Albers, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina."
""Fiber practices may be having a cultural moment, yet they remain widely misunderstood," the gallery says. " Thread Count invites a slower kind of looking: attention to surface, texture, knots, dyes and the physical logic of how things are built." The show serves as a reminder, despite the rise of textiles in modern and contemporary art, "of how inadequate such quality measurements are for describing the complexity of textile work.""
Perception of textiles as art is complicated by their historical functional and decorative roles and by longstanding hierarchies that exclude fiber from "high art." Thread Count, a large-scale exhibition curated by Charlotte Grüßing at The Hole, spotlights textile practices and honors Anni Albers's modernist weaving legacy from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College. The show gathers more than two dozen artists who manipulate fabric, thread, rope, dyes, and found objects through weaving, embroidery, and structural techniques. The exhibition urges slower looking at surface, texture, knots, dyes, and construction while questioning simplistic quality metrics when assessing textile complexity.
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