Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe is an in-depth portrait of the pioneering American artist who died at the age of 100 in 2007. Organized in collaboration with the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Museum of Arts and Design and the Yale Center for British Art, the project will consist of a series of four separately curated exhibitions shown simultaneously across the organization’s galleries. Lenore Tawney is best known for her monumental sculptural weavings that helped to define the genre of fiber art in the late 50s and early 1960s. Her technical innovations in off-loom weaving have been influential to generations of artists and her experiments across disciplines anticipated contemporary multi-media approaches by several decades. Tawney produced collages, sculptural assemblages, drawings, postcards and works in fashion throughout her long life, all of which will be represented in the exhibition, as will a film she made with dancer/choreographer Andy DeGroat in the late 70s. Mirror of the Universe will engage Tawney’s multi-dimensional practice through diverse specialized lenses, and at the same time highlight the poetic and spiritual undercurrent that runs through her entire body of work.
Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe
“The terrific range of project proposals we receive each year speaks to the mobile and porous disciplinary boundaries of contemporary art practice, and to the rich and inventive ways writers approach art today. They are alert to the urgent need to expand the conventions of art history and criticism with ideas from other discourses, such as black studies, transnational and diaspora studies, gender and women’s studies, and LGBT studies. The work of lesser known and overlooked artists and art communities continues to be mined, with writers articulating new ways to counter the striking imbalances of race, class and gender that continue to affect the arts and the culture industry.”