Exhibitions: Spring, 2017

SPRING EXHIBITIONS FEATURING WORK BY LENORE TAWNEY

Between Land and Sea: Artists of the Coenties Slip
Menil Collection, Houston TX – April 14 – August 6, 2017
Exhibition featuring examples of the early work of Chryssa, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman.

Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY – April 15 – August 13, 2017
Drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection, this exhibition features nearly 100 works by over 50 artists created between the end of World War II and the start of the Feminist movement.
From the New York Times review:
In the 1950s, Ms. Tawney lived in Lower Manhattan, where she counted Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana and Agnes Martin (who is also in the MoMA show) as neighbors. Living in an old shipping loft, she made the most radical work of any of them: towering open-warp fiber pieces that stretched from floor to ceiling and across the loft’s wide space.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/arts/design/moma-women-artists-and-postwar-abstraction.html?_r=0

Pen to Paper – Artists’ Handwritten Letters from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL – April 18 – June 25, 2017
Organized by the Archives of American Art, this exhibition explores letter writing as an artistic act. Tawney’s letters can be seen here:
https://www.aaa.si.edu/exhibitions/art-of-handwriting?page=3

Liminal Focus
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York, NY – April 26 – June 30, 2017
This group exhibition brings together artists of the last fifty years whose work denies singular categorization. Featuring Carla Accardi, Lee Bontecou, Terri Friedman, Jessica Rankin, Jessi Reaves and Robert Bittenbender, Mariah Robertson, Lenore Tawney, and Claudia Wieser.

Thread Lines
Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY – April 29 – August 6, 2017
Work by sixteen artists who engage in sewing, knitting, and weaving to create a wide-range of works that activate the expressive and conceptual potential of line and illuminate affinities between the mediums of textile and drawing.

Beyond Craft
Tate Modern, London, UK – permanent collection display opening May 13, 2017
Work by Olga de Amaral, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney along with archival material related to two historic 1969 exhibitions—Wall Hangings at MoMA and Perspectief in Textiel at the Stedelijk Museum—which included work by these artists.

Exhibitions: Spring, 2015

Lenore Tawney is currently featured in Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present, ICA Boston, organized by Jenelle Porter at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. This important international exhibition includes work by thirty-three artists and examines the development of abstraction and dimensionality in fiber art from the mid-twentieth century through to the present.

Art in America notes that Tawney’s Dark River (1961), the earliest piece in the show, represents “the emergence of fiber as an experimental medium encompassing sculptural sensibilities.”

Currently touring nationally, the exhibition opens next on May 8, 2015 at the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (May 8-August 2, 2015). A comprehensive catalogue accompanies the show.

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The Museum of Arts and Design in New York has opened Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Midcentury and Today (April 28-September 27, 2015), highlighting the important contributions of women to modernism in postwar visual culture. Pathmakers focuses on a core cadre of women, including Lenore Tawney. Two of Tawney’s groundbreaking Woven Forms (first shown in the Museum of Contemporary Crafts’ eponymous 1963 exhibition) and a drawing are on view.

Following its presentation in New York, the exhibition will travel to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. A special issue of the Journal of Modern Craft will be published in conjunction with Pathmakers.