You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestries

At once a celebration of the genre and a categorical collapse, You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry offers extended engagement with the age-old medium while magnifying how contemporary practitioners are challenging its material, ideological, and narrative conventions. Across works by twenty-four artists, the exhibition suggests tapestry as an active inflection point for unresolved inquiries into the human condition. These works explore notions of authenticity, durational efforts in the face of technological efficiency, and depictions of vastness and omniscience in physical form. The tapestries here move beyond the rigid ethnographic categorizations that have often guided the presentation of textile in institutional settings. Instead, they reflect circulations of people, materials, plants, and trade colors, both native and not. Here, identities are temporary and contentious, or even unverifiable.  

Taking its title from a letter written by Franz Kafka, in which he imagines his father’s presence woven across a map of the world, You Stretched Diagonally Across It depends, like the pieces that compel it, on exceeding fixed latitudes. Boundaries between art and craft, perception and tactility, and tradition and improvisation are tested to the point of unraveling. A tapestry, as posited by guest curator Su Wu, is an object in which the image and its substrate are inextricable. In our screen-mediated contemporary present, the exhibition offers tapestry as uniquely situated to reconsider material and temporal significance—whether it matters what our images are made of—and the relationship between surfaces and the structures that comprise them.

Exhibiting artists: Caroline Achaintre, Yto Barrada, Diedrick Brackens, Melissa Cody, Jovencio de la Paz, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Josh Faught, Christina Forrer, Sanaa Gateja, David Hartt, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, Sanam Khatibi, Tomasz Kowalski, Alicja Kowalska, Candice Lin, Goshka Macuga, Mai-Thu Perret, Sarah Rosalena, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, Kiki Smith, Mika Tajima, Qualeasha Wood, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.