“Craft” – though it would be better to use the plural, as there are many crafts, just as there are many arts; but the singular already reveals its place in the discourse of contemporary art – is having a good moment: international exhibitions such as the current Venice Biennale testify to a renewed interested in media for a long time considered marginal if not outright excluded from the “fine arts” so codified in the language of 18th-century Western philosophy, and still marked today by the Kantian division between the “free arts” and the “applied arts.” Although this is not entirely a recent phenomenon—it’s been gaining momentum, especially thanks to feminist artistic practices and their re-evaluation in the last decade or so—in recent times, we are witnessing a joyous explosion of the most heterogeneous materials, practices, and techniques that openly embrace the artisanal, the traditional and the culturally diverse, often blending the hand-made with the mechanically and digitally re-produced.
In this context, the exhibition TerraTextl, curated by Yohanna M Roa for White Box in New York City, marks a further point of focus with particular attention to textiles, fibers, and ceramics through the work of fifteen artists characterized by corresponding personal histories of migration, hyphenated identity, and cultural hybridity. As the curatorial statement reveals, in many ways, we are closer to the early Twentieth-century avant-garde than we may think: a time marked by experimentation, when artists broke many barriers among genres and categories and freely brought art, design, craft and various forms of making into dialogue with one another.
The key of the exhibition is contained in the title: “Terra,” as in “earth,” which also stands for “clay,” the material of which ceramics (from the Greek Kéramos – clay, earth) is made; and “Textl,” a clever neologism combining “textile” and “text” (which not incidentally contain the same root, from the Latin textum -i or textus -us, declinations of texĕre, “to weave”; also aggregate, structure), which brings into the dyad a third term, “word,” understood alternatively as concept, narration, and object. Roa’s overarching goal is to continue the curatorial program, inaugurated since the opening of WhiteBox’s new space in the Lower East Side a couple of years ago, to showcase primarily (but not exclusively) women artists’ work and to draw from a diverse pool of artists to reflect, on the one hand, the rich fabric of New York City as a place of excitement and constant flux, and on the other hand, the global tendency to explore other makers, cultural producers, and artistic traditions that are expanding ossified notions of center and periphery.
Under Roa’s expert orchestration, the works in the exhibition reveal that textiles and ceramics are more than just beautiful materials, let alone limited to the decorative or functional role to which they are traditionally associated: they become tools to communicate social issues, from global trade dynamics to the re-evaluation of colonial legacies. Both are ancient forms of human creation, common to most, if not all, cultures. Both are characterized by a certain fragility and organic quality of their constituent elements. However, these are often wittily overturned by many of the artists in the show, who seem to take a particular delight in defying expectations by intentionally “misusing” or short-circuiting particular materials, meanings, and forms.
We see that strategy at play, for example, in one of the first works we encounter when entering the gallery, Michael Pribich’s Blood Hands (2020), an arresting sculptural piece where the prime material is cotton knit gloves used in construction. The first impression, though, is not of gloves at all: the material is so reframed in a partly suspended semi-circle to resemble an ancient native American or indigenous Mesoamerican headpiece, as if made of feathers (the position on the wall may help with that association), conferring an uncanny dignity and even regality to an otherwise humble object. This was not the artist’s declared message, who intended to draw attention to the essential workers who were both vital and vulnerable during the Covid-19 pandemic, thus symbolizing labor’s eternal cycle. However, rather than hindering the actual meaning of the work, I find that this interpretation brings it forth as if it were implicit or latent in the artist’s intentions. Then again, the artist’s intention only gets so far in the life of a work, which almost always takes more interesting connotations when left to the viewer’s interpretation. In this sense, we could say that the more an artwork departs from the intended meaning, the more successful it is.
The question and the possibility of giving body to images that are immaterial through the use and manipulation of humble materials is a constant of the works in the exhibition—where the “immaterial” refers especially to the social aspect of human consciousness and the “material” to the mode of production that transforms the actual stuff of which the works are made. A case in point is offered by Elie Porter Trubert and her journal-based series Walking Within, composed over several decades starting in the early 1970s, as a child, and tracing the arc of her youth and adulthood experiences into our days. Over the years, her artistic journey evolved from gathering natural materials to what she now calls “walking within,” connecting her with the natural world and her internal landscape. What is presented here (and further documented online through a series of podcasts) is a small part of a large “feminist archive”; Porter Trubert made small ceramic vessels in Albuquerque, placing fragments of her journal pages inside the clay containers before firing them together in the kiln. The fusion of paper with ceramics disintegrates the written words while preserving them in a new, transformed multisensory archive that can be touched and held in one’s hand.
According to the curator, Yohanna M Roa, language can be considered a conceptual object, not simply a mode of communication or a conveyor of meaning. Several pieces in the exhibition treat language as both an image and the constitutive fabric of a narrative, from the personal (as already seen in the work of Porter Trubert) to the mythical. In the former camp, we find the visually arresting text-based works of Anna McNeary (Timeline 1 and Timeline 2, 2023), two large-scale irregularly shaped fabric pieces made of silk and cotton where simple antonyms like “NOW/NEVER” and “SOONER/LATER” are printed throughout the surface in bold complementary colors or in black and white, in a repetitive pattern that evokes advertising billboards and the binary code of artificial oppositional choices, like obsessive thoughts spinning in one’s mind with no resolution. The two video pieces by Peter Burr, Architecture Machine 10 (2024) and Pattern Language (2024), relate to McNeary formally and conceptually by employing a system of self-generating images of infinite duration through a bright and simplified palette dominated by primary colors. As the accompanying text specifies, Burr applies architect Christopher Alexander’s theories of “pattern language” to create “a generative video game labyrinth, resulting in rhythmic animations of rippling, skipping, and strobing light. The environment pulses with procedural vitality, driven by cellular automata and crowd simulation algorithms, indeed a tangle of fibers in action.” Pushing the abstract qualities of language, the unassuming miniature three-dimensional piece by Jelena Micić, an artist living in Austria, evokes a non-verbal communication system through single-use tiny plastic straws woven together to form a colorful, mysterious codex. A secret language seems to inform Kathie Halfin’s intricately woven womb-like structure made of hand-dyed and hand-span paper and sisal rope, Despite The Gloom (2023). This and her other piece in the exhibition made of the same materials and process, Wisteria Spoke To Me (2023), superbly elegant in its psychedelic colors and delicate form, is the outcome of her study of shamanic practices and her connection with the dream world. Inspired by Donna Haraway and her concept of “tentacular thinking,” one can find in climbing plants, octopuses, and other living beings, Halfin conceives her work as a gateway to a new kind of sensory knowledge she discovered through her relationship with plants. In her view, the sensory experience needs to be rediscovered and promoted as an antidote to the omnipresence of virtual experiences.
Another sub-text in the exhibition, related to textiles and language, is the question of mixed identity and personal narrative that so many of the artists in the exhibition reveal in their biographical accounts and translate into their works. For instance, the installation by Cecile Chong, a New York-based artist of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, displays encaustic paintings in various shapes and dimensions combining traditional Chinese images derived from blue and white porcelain ware, with fabric pieces – medium and large-scale tapestries in which different shades of blue predominate. Deliciously vibrant and visually stimulating, works like Thangka (2020) and Dressing Up (2019), in particular, have the power to surprise with their playful assemblage of materials, mixing traditional Ecuadorean patterns with Chinese materials and motifs consisting of both natural fibers and artificial plastic-based decorative threads, and to make us reflect on the interconnection of cultures and the global dissemination of goods via ancient and new transportation modes, of which past and present Silk Routes are just one example. At times, the patterns look like book spines; a free association is created with textiles used as a code for cultures that did not possess writing in a proper sense: strings are substitutes for words, numbers, and so on.
Coming full circle by exiting the gallery, one encounters a small sculpture by Esperanza Cortés, an artist with roots in Colombia who grew up in New York City. Colibri (2024), the Spanish word for hummingbird, depicts the figure of a woman as a human bird in the upper part, while the lower part is made of several silver-color chains to which bells are hanging, producing a chime-like sound when touched or moved by air. The artist described the piece as being made with three different works combined, out of scrap materials she found in her studio when the pandemic hit, and she could not shop for new art supplies. Embroidery, threads, glass beads, bells—they all ended up in this piece. During the roundtable discussion with the artists, Roa told a folk tale from Colombia, in which the hummingbird symbolizes a new human race that is to come: it will be of every color, go everywhere, and bring peace to the world.
In the aftermath of a momentous presidential election in the US, amid mounting anxiety, chaos, and uncertainty, we need these stories more than ever. And we need them to be conveyed by the iridescence of sensuous materials transformed by expert hands into unexpected, inventive interpretations, combining different crafts and techniques that have the power to outlast their ephemerality through a transmission of knowledge as making. WM