Lissa Hunter at the Jane Sauer Gallery
Gallery Talk: Thursday, July 9, 5:30 - 7:30 pm,
July 10 - August 11, 2009
Jane Sauer Gallery, 652 Canyon Road

Lissa Hunter’s work speaks of poetry, the natural world and our connections to both. She tells stories with her constructions, containing baskets, drawings, text, and occasionally other objects made by the artist. Lissa says of her work “Sharing our experiences is a necessary gift we offer to one another, if only to bear witness to our having lived“. Hunter’s work gives voice and images that show us beauty where we cannot always see it ourselves.

The book Lissa Hunter: Histories Real and Imagined by Abby Johnston, Upala Press, will be available at the opening.

http://www.jsauergallery.com

Sue Walker
founder and former director of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop
June 7th, 2009, 3pm at the Wheelwright Museum Library

Sue Walker will discuss the work of 6 weavers who were pioneering figures in the development of tapestry in Australia, each in different ways having been very influential figures. She will show examples of personal work from their studios and discuss connections and contrasts with commissioned tapestries that they wove at the Victorian Tapestry Workshop.

Sue Walker served as founding director of the Victorian Tapestry Workshop (VTW) in Melbourne, Australia, from 1976 to 2004. Through Sue’s inspired leadership, the art of tapestry achieved a vital presence in Australia’s cultural life. With remarkably speedy success, the VTW became the major provider of public art in the country and an important force in the international world of tapestry.

As Director of the Workshop for 28 years she was responsible for negotiating and managing the production of more than 350 tapestry projects including many monumental commissions such as Arthur Boyd’s Reception Hall Tapestry for Australia’s Parliament House, the Federation Tapestry at Melbourne Museum, and numerous tapestries now hanging overseas. In addition to initiating opportunities for more than 300 artists from Australia and overseas to work in tapestry she has curated and toured many traveling exhibitions to major centers throughout the world including New York, London, Paris, Germany, Denmark, Turkey, Japan, New Zealand, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. In 1988 with her colleague Kate Derum, she convened an International Tapestry Symposium in Melbourne that attracted 220 delegates from 23 countries and resulted in the establishment of a worldwide tapestry network. She has edited and published several full-color catalogues and books, and been a key-note speaker at numerous Study Days and Conferences in world centers including Kyoto, Chicago, Beijing, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London. In 2006 she presented the Eighth Annual Lecture for The Gloria F Ross Tapestry Study Centre in America and was subsequently invited to join the Board as a Trustee of the Centre. Sue’s recent publication, Artists’ Tapestries from Australia 1976 to 2005, documents the history of the VTW, including its patrons and sponsors, artists and weavers. Sue has received numerous awards for her contributions to Australia’s artistic heritage and has a doctoral degree in progress at the University of Melbourne.

Join Us for a TAA Think Tank!
April 26, 2009, 3-5pm

We are at a crossroads…

* Who are we?
* Where do we want to go as a group?
* What are your wildest dreams for the TAA?
* Do to a drop in membership we need to reassess and redefine and re-energize our direction and mission for the future.

You are cordially invited to come with your ideas and something yummy for tea to: Polly Barton’s house, 205 Vitrina Court, Santa Fe

 Directions: Go up Bishop’s Lodge Road to Encantado Drive. Go left on Enacantado Drive. Very soon, go left on Vitrina Court. We are the house on the right at the  bottom of the hill.

We look forward to a spirited conversation!
RSVP pollyb@cybermesa.com

Ferne Jacobs: An Inner Relationship to the Container
Saturday, April 25, 2009, 3:00 pm
Wheelwright Museum Library, Museum Hill
Free to TAA members, $5 non-members

Ferne Jacobs is included in the exhibition Intertwined: Contemporary Baskets from the Sara and David Lieberman Collection at the New Mexico Museum of Art, April 24 - September 6, 2009.

For 35 years Ferne Jacobs has employed a wrapping technique used in ancient basket-making to create fiberworks suffused with mystery and beauty. “My commitment grows out of a fascination that thread can be made solid, that by using only my hands and the thread, a form can be made that will physically stand on its own.” Her sculptures range from large-scale to small and are structurally intricate. They are labor-intensive, taking from two to seven months to complete. All are created out of waxed linen for stability. Early pieces have an austere simplicity and symmetry reminiscent of ancient ceremonial artifacts. But Jacobs’ artistic path has been one of continuing evolution in which she pushes the expectations of fiber as a medium. Her wall-hangings and free-standing forms have grown increasingly fluid and organically complex. They explode with bright color, lively intersecting shapes and surface openings that reveal interior space. Recent works are even more animated and rhythmic with mixed color filaments selectively woven in to delineate the sensuous contours. Jacobs’ pieces seem imbued with so much exuberant life force that they appear less like objects and more like individual beings or presences. “I see myself as a link in bringing an ancient way of being into my own time, and helping nurture it into the future,” she says.

Photography by Susan Einstein

The Cofradía de la Conquistadora at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi
Sunday, February 15, 2009, 3:00 pm
213 Cathedral Place, Santa Fe, NM
RSVP for this special presentation, (505) 473-7898
Free to TAA members

The Cofradía de la Conquistadora will speak to members will of the Textile Arts Alliance Members only at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi.

The Cofradía de la Conquistadora is dedicated to the devotion and care of the image of la Conquistadora, Our Lady of Peace, which is housed in the Chapel of la Conquistadora in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. Come meet the officers of the Cofradia to learn the history of the care of the image, her wardrobe, ceremonies, novenas and other devotions. Join us at the Cathedral in the Chapel to the left of the altar.

Free to TAA members–but all members must be in good standing at the time with dues for the current year paid as no money may change hands at the Cathedral.

Please RSVP due to limited space to: (505) 473-7898.

Polly Barton: New Work

December 7, 2008, 3 pm, Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, NM

Polly Barton has been weaving on her Japanese kimono looms for the last 27 years, and is known nationally for her work in the ikat technique and for her unique silk woven paintings. In conjunction with her show Threads: Drawn, Dyed, Woven at the William Siegal Gallery (thru Dec. 31st) she will speak about her studio process and illustrate the various ikat techniques which were used in producing this new body of work.

Polly Barton was born in New York City. She studied Art History at Barnard College and has lived and traveled in Paris, Florence, and Rome. In 1981 she moved to Kameoka Japan to study with master weaver, Tomohiko Inoue, living in the religious heart of the Oomoto Foundation. She returned to New York in 1982, married, and continued to weave on her Japanese tsumugi silk kimono looms.

In 1989, she and her husband bought land in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. Their family moved to this remote area in 1992, where they lived for 15 years. They are now based in Santa Fe.

A nationally recognized artist, she shows her woven silk ikat paintings on both coasts, and is collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and by important private collectors. Her work has been published in numerous magazines including Hali Magazine, FiberArts, Surface Design Journal and American Craft. She is a member of the Textile Society of America, Friends of Fiber Arts International, the Surface Design Association and the Textile Arts Alliance of Santa Fe.

Lauren Camp - Structure and Content: Bringing Depth to Fiber Art
Sunday, October 5, 2008, 3:00 pm
Wheelwright Museum Library, Museum Hill
Free to TAA members, $5 non-members

Lauren Camp is the daughter of a genteel woman from the Midwest and a Jewish emigré from Baghdad. In a house where art was neither taboo nor respected, Lauren became an artist. She holds degrees in human development, oral interpretation of literature, and advertising and public relations – all important skills for getting through life. But she learned about art on her own.

Following a brief stint of nonprofit work and freelance writing, Lauren devoted herself fully to visual art and poetry. In the past 13 years, Lauren’s innovative, award-winning pieces have been in major publications and exhibited at performance spaces, on movie sets, and in cultural centers and museums in the U.S. and Europe. Images of her work and the companion poetry have been featured in numerous publications, including the Santa Fean, Jazziz and World Watch, and the poetry journals Brilliant Corners and Impetus.

“The Fabric of Jazz,” her series of jazz portraits, toured museums in ten U.S. cities between 2004 and 2007. Her newest body of work is a multimedia installation featuring sound, sculpture and fiber art. This series, “Flinch: A Study of Your Self,” will be on exhibit at the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque, NM during March 2009. Other exhibit highlights include the Fiber Art Biennial in Chieri, Italy; the NAACP Annual Meeting; and a human rights survey exhibit entitled “Roots of Racism – Ignorance and Fear.”

She has held residency positions at Working Classroom in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the New Brunswick (New Jersey) Public Schools, working with students from disadvantaged communities. Lauren has also mentored adults in creativity and self-expression. She is the recipient of a two-month “Sea Change” Residency by the Gaea Foundation of Washington, D.C., an organization that celebrates arts and activism. She received a substantial grant from the Surface Design Association to complete work on “Flinch.”

Candace Kling
Sunday, September 7, 2008, 3:00 pm
Wheelwright Museum Library, Museum Hill
Free to TAA members, $5 non-members
www.textileartsalliance.com

Over the past 25 years, Candace Kling has traveled to museums across the country and taken many beautiful slides of the wonders therein: ribbonwork on dresses, shoes, hats, purses, lingerie and more, from 1750 to the present.

In this slide lecture you will follow her on her journey through museum costume collections, vintage sewing books, 19th century periodicals, to present day fashion magazines, and learn of her fascination with the various techniques used to manipulate ribbon and fabric. Quilling, ruching, gauging, goffering and gathering, cockades, rosettes and more will be illustrated. Candace brings boards and boxes full of samples to this lecture.

Candace’s artwork will be used to illustrate the creative possibilities for the contemporary application of these historical techniques. Candace will share with us the artistic process involved in the creation of her exquisitely detailed textile sculptures: helmets and headdresses as well as diminutive candy boxes and monumental waterfalls.

Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally over the past 25 years, and is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Art and Design, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Oakland Museum of California, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Candace is the author of The Artful Ribbon.

Laurie Waters
Sunday, June 29, 2008, 3:00 pm Wheelwright Museum Library, Museum Hill
Free to TAA members, $5 non-members
www.textileartsalliance.com

Handmade Lace: A Collector’s Experience.

LAURIE WATERS started collecting lace as a teenager growing up in Minneapolis. Laurie was greatly influenced the the 1974 St. Paul Minnesota Museum of Art exhibition Lace, Fans and Photographs, which helped bring focus to her own collecting efforts. As a volunteer, she cataloged the MMA collection, and later also the extensive collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Bishop Whipple collection of Native American lace. She helped start the Minnesota Lace Society for local lacemaking amateurs, and also traveled to various lace centers in Europe. In 1980 she was the first and only American ever invited to study at the Atelier National du Point d’Alencon in France, where she made a 1″ square piece of needlelace which took 40 hours to complete.

“My fascination with intricate bobbin and needle lace techniques is endless. The complexity of this work makes me think that these women would have been the computer technicians of our own age. This kind of work is little known in the US, where settlers were more likely to include a small crochet hook in their belonging rather than the elaborate equipment needed for bobbinlace. With the exhibition Handmade Lace: from Fine Art to Folk Art, I hope to recapture the excitement over this art that I first felt in seeing the MMA exhibition. I also want to emphasize that there is a tremendous range to the art, from very fine commercial pieces to everyday items that anyone can attempt.”

Handmade Lace: from Fine Art to Folk Art opens July 5th, 2008 at the Mesa Public Library, upstairs gallery, 2400 Central Avenue, Los Alamos, NM. The exhibition dates are July 5 - August 2, 2008. For more information please call 505-662-8240.