The artist’s former sail-making loft on the East River in downtown Manhattan inspired this magisterial work. Part of a collection exhibition called The Artist of Coenties Slip, currently on view at MoMA, it looks at a brief period when a group of artists lived and worked on Coenties Slip, far downtown by the waterfront in Manhattan.
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Lenore Tawney’s Dark River by Prudence Peiffer
Article Excerpt:
Lenore Tawney was the oldest and one of the least known among the artists who ended up at the Slip in the 1950s and 1960s, a group that also included Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Ann Wilson, and Jack Youngerman. Still, as Youngerman realized, Tawney was probably “the most outlier,” in terms of the radical work she created there: huge woven forms that departed from traditional square shapes to become sculptural, made of linen, cotton, and salvaged feathers, metal, and wood that she climbed up on the ceiling beams of her old sailmaking loft to hang and see in full. Tawney arrived in New York from Chicago in 1957 with her loom and her cat Pansy and her big Daimler car, seeking “a barer life, closer to reality, without all the things that clutter and fill our lives.” Unlike her neighbors, she was financially well off, and quietly helped her slipmates: paying for Indiana’s electric bill and purchasing many of Martin’s earliest works, often saving them from destruction.
