You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry offers an expansive engagement with the age-old medium, highlighting how contemporary practitioners challenge its material, ideological, and narrative conventions. The exhibition takes its title from a letter written by Franz Kafka, in which he imagines his father’s presence woven across a map of the world. Exhibition curator Su Wu proposes that a tapestry is a medium in which image and substrate are inextricable. The tapestries on view move beyond the rigid categorizations that have often guided the presentation of textiles in institutional settings. Boundaries between art and craft, perception and tactility, and tradition and improvisation are tested to the point of literal unraveling.
The works by twenty-five international artists presented here explore questions of authenticity, the tension between duration and technological efficiency, and the challenge of depicting vastness and omniscience in physical form. They reflect the circulation of people, materials, plants, and trade colors (both native and non). Identities emerge as temporary and contentious, even unverifiable. In our screen-mediated present, the exhibition offers tapestry as uniquely situated to reconsider what our images are made of, both in terms of their material and temporal significance and the relationship between surface and structure.
In addition to the twenty-four works organized by Wu, The Fabric Workshop and Museum’s presentation includes works from its collection by Ed Ruscha and Mika Tajima. It also features Philadelphia-based artists, with a recent tapestry by David Hartt and a new large-scale commission by Qualeasha Wood, created for the exhibition as part of the artist’s FWM residency.
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, Alicja Kowalska, Tomasz Kowalski, Candice Lin, Goshka Macuga, Christy Matson, Mai-Thu Perret, Sarah Rosalena, Ed Ruscha, Analia Saban, Kiki Smith, Mika Tajima, Qualeasha Wood, and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang.
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