CHICAGO — What to put on this morning? Are the bedsheets clear? Paper or fabric for wiping up the mess within the kitchen? We principally take such textiles without any consideration nowadays, coming, as they do, cheaply and from far-off, bereft of that means, unrevealing of the labor and supplies that went into their making.
It was not all the time so. For a lot of human historical past, immense time, talent, and significance have been a part of the very fiber of clothes worn, tapestries hung, bundles wrapped, blankets dozed below. In my very own life, glimpses of this gravitas stay once I sit within the chair draped with a throw my nana crocheted just a few years earlier than her loss of life, or when my husband and I sleep beneath the quilt pieced collectively for us as a marriage present 20 years in the past.
4 exhibitions at present up in Chicago every take a novel strategy to the chances of working with textiles at the moment. The funniest is by Kiah Celeste, whose spandex work, on view in a two-person present at Doc, confront the horny ridiculousness of athleisurewear with sculptural stress and materials playfulness. As an alternative of canvas, Celeste neatly stretches monochromatic sports activities material between poplar frames, then pulls and pushes it with discovered stuff. A hefty slab of Corian juts out the underside and entrance of a giant maroon quantity; stacked buckets lure and distend a yardage of child blue; skinny plastic wire tied to a protracted piece of bowed metal yanks a slim strip of forest inexperienced out to a young level.
Set up view of Artifact Unidentified: Kiah Celeste, Gordon Corridor at Doc gallery (picture courtesy Doc, Chicago)
Extra monstrous is Chicagoan Jacqueline Surdell’s solo present at Secrist|Seaside. The gallery is a type of huge, hard-to-fill areas, however Surdell’s muscular, monumental, unafraid weavings greater than maintain their very own. At 21 ft in size, “Suddenly, she was hell-bent and ravenous (after Giotto)” is monumental in each dimension and reference. As in her smaller works, Surdell knots and loops and even glues thick, coloured nylon wire upon itself and on steel armatures, generally interlacing strips of material printed with the photographs of Previous Grasp work. It really works and it doesn’t, being alternately clumsy and gorgeous, however it’s unfailingly thrilling.
Current landscapes by Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson, framed and held on the partitions of Andrew Rafacz Gallery, seem wild and otherworldly although they’re completely of this earth. Acid yellow mountains burst out of magenta terrain, lime inexperienced and neon orange flora pulse alongside vibrating electrical blue lagoons. These are visions collected by the artist on annual journeys to her native Iceland, laboriously dyed onto unwoven silk threads in her Cleveland studio, then masterfully woven into shimmering tapestries that transmit the precarity and drama of the nation’s extraordinary pure surroundings, from glacial lakes to the Northern Lights.
Foreground: Jacqueline Surdell, “My kaleidoscopic view” (2025)
These three gallery exhibits are a must-see for modern fiber artwork cognoscenti. On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival, on view on the Artwork Institute, needs to be visited by anybody who has ever touched a bit of material, grieved, or had a religious second, which is to say everybody. Drawn primarily from the museum’s important holdings, it presents an astonishingly numerous array of greater than 100 objects, from a Malian talismanic tunic to an enormous silk scroll depicting the loss of life of the Buddha, to a tondo woven of Velcro and velvet fuzz by Angela Hennessy in 2014. It’s maybe unsurprising that every one 4 of the co-curators of this profoundly shifting and deeply unique present — Isaac Facio, Nneka Kai, L Vinebaum, and Anne Wilson — are themselves fiber artists.
On Loss and Absence begins with loss of life and by no means actually leaves it behind. Historic Egyptian mummy coverings are right here, as is a Seventeenth-century engraving depicting one of many holy shrouds of Jesus and one other, by Goya, of a shawled girl strolling amongst swaddled warfare casualties. Two historic cotton masks, painted with supernatural beings, would have emulated heads when stuffed and sewn atop rounded bundles containing the deceased, a apply of the Paracas folks, who lived 2,000 years in the past alongside the south coast of contemporary Peru. Piles of elaborately patterned and appliquéd skirts, together with a superb wrap edged in black and white checkerboard, might need been accrued by a noblewoman of the Kuba Kingdom, in central Africa, to suggest her excessive standing and line her coffin.
Left: Hastiin Tła (Diné), “Rainbow People Have Arrived (Nááts’íílid Bee Yikáh)” (1925); proper: Dorothy Burge’s 10-foot-tall quilted portraits of Michelle Clopton and LaTanya Jenifor-Sublett (2025)
That was for the useless, to easy the journey into the afterlife, however different gadgets existed expressly for the residing, to assist with bereavement. “Mourning,” an summary composition of somber rectangular materials, pierced by a painful spike of embroidery, was constructed in 1989 by Michael Olszewski close to the top of his father’s life. A photographic quilt densely and sweetly stitched by artist Carina Yepez, collectively together with her aunt and mom, commemorates the long-gone women depicted on it, together with her grandmother, all of whom have been a part of a stitching group in Mexico within the Thirties. However nothing fairly says grief like an precise piece of the deceased’s physique, therefore the pattern amongst Victorians for jewellery and needlework common from the hair of misplaced family members. Of the dozen examples of hairwork on show, my private fave is a gold locket from about 1800, with a white braid wreathing an auburn snippet and two loss of life dates engraved on the rear.
Hair seems all through On Loss and Absence. And the way not, being probably the most textile-like part of the human physique, to not point out probably the most painlessly harvested? It decorates a big, closely patterned wrapper historically worn throughout Asante funeral ceremonies, illustrated because the nkotimsefuopua motif, a geometrical swirl based mostly on hairstyles worn by royal attendants. It fills the wool plaits that hold from a Bamiléké hat, to be worn by a masked dancer throughout secret therapeutic ceremonies. And it’s the central materials of “Lasting ‘Til Sunday,” a generous performance installation by curator Nneka Kai, reprising a weekly childhood ritual when her mother would take time to cornrow her and her siblings’ hair. Braiding is caring.
On Loss and Absence features a case stuffed with Victorian mourning jewellery, together with this gold locket. Made round 1800, it options two kinds of human hair.
Repairing is caring, too. It may take the simple type of darning, as in a pair of spectacular mending samplers performed by Northern European schoolgirls within the early 1800s, or it may be superior textile conservation, of the sort carried out on a luxurious Taoist excessive priest’s gown. Paul Schulze, a German design professor who died in 1928, as soon as took a little bit of 14th-century Italian silk brocade and imagined the remainder of the material by way of trompe-l’oeil watercolor and ink drawing. Show instances brim with such fragments, some ensuing from the passage of time and environmental decay, others from the deliberate chopping up of historic textiles to make them simpler to promote, distribute, and catalogue. There’s even a pretend, supposed to idiot collectors keen on remnants of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258 CE). All have been meticulously stabilized, but they radiate loss — lack of precise materials, positive, however much more so, of technical information and cultural integrity. A snippet of an Edo-era kimono bears an embroidered character indecipherable due to its separation from the remainder of the garment. A trio of beautiful lace edgings characterize handicraft supplanted by machined variations.
However loss generally reveals. Deterioration exposes processes utilized by the Nazca folks to create a pair of charming garment borders that includes pampas cats. Different historic Andean strategies and iconography have been revitalized by Noqanchis, a weaving collective shaped in Peru in 2021 by Alipio Melo, María José Murillo, and Danitza Willka. Their interpretations powerfully show the continued existence of a tradition. In addition they permit for artists’ names to be put to works of weaving artwork in a approach that museums have did not do for thus lengthy. These and different acts of survival fill the ultimate gallery. Kai’s mother-daughter cornrowing is right here, resisting the systemic oppression of Black folks, by way of their hair as by way of the justice system, a tortuous historical past instantly acknowledged by Dorothy Burge’s 10-foot-tall quilted portraits of two ladies wrongfully imprisoned by the Chicago police. A quartet of Diné blankets — an ultramodern one from 1925 by the famed Hastiin Tła and a set of basic miniatures made final yr by Barbara Teller Ornelas — insists that, in opposition to their continued dispossession and disenfranchisement, Native People are nonetheless right here. Final of all is the gown that ought to present all guests pause: an indigo and crimson jellaya made in Ramallah within the Nineteenth century, richly cross-stitched in tatreez, a Palestinian embroidery type nonetheless practiced at the moment, whilst its folks endure genocide.
Colectivo Noqanchis collaboratively created “Sí tenemos ojos/ÑAWIYOQMI KANCHIS (We Have Eyes)” (2024), based mostly on the khipu, an historic Andean record-keeping system constituted of knotted cords.
A pair of darning samplers made by Northern European schoolgirls within the early 1800s.
On the wall hold elaborate skirts from Nineteenth-century Kuba. Partially seen within the foreground is an Historic Egyptian faience bead shroud with a scarab beetle.
Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson, “Glacial Landscape #21” and “Glacial Landscape #23” (each 2025), silk and dyes, on view at Andrew Rafacz Gallery
The video “Lasting ‘Til Sunday” exhibits curator Nneka Kai having her hair braided by her mom. To the left hangs an early Twentieth-century adinkra funeral wrapper of the Asante folks. (courtesy Artwork Institute of Chicago)
A gown embellished with tatreez, the standard Palestinian embroidery type, from Nineteenth-century Ramallah.
Artifact Unidentified: Kiah Celeste, Gordon Corridor continues at Doc (1709 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) by way of November 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
Jacqueline Surdell: The Conversion: Rings, Rupture, and the Forest Archive continues at Secrist|Seaside (1801 W Hubbard Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) by way of November 15. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson: Glacial Landscapes continues at Andrew Rafacz (1749 West Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) by way of November 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
On Loss and Absence: Textiles of Mourning and Survival continues on the Artwork Institute of Chicago (111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) by way of March 15. The exhibition was curated by Isaac Facio, Nneka Kai, L Vinebaum, and Anne Wilson. Melinda Watt served as senior museum advisor.
