Tapestries, an exhibit of woven textiles by contemporary artists, is groundbreaking in part because of how the project came to be.

When contemporary realist painter John Nava applied for the commission to fulfill the Communion of Saints cycle for the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels in Los Angeles his first idea was to sandblast the iconography into the walls. Then the phone rang. Father Richard Vosko, the design consultant heading the art program for the new cathedral, explained to Nava that acoustical engineers had found the church would echo without sound-absorbing material on the walls. “We’re going to make tapestries instead,” Vosko told him.

So Nava got to work. He and longtime friend and collaborator, artist Donald Farnsworth of Magnolia Editions in Oakland, California, began using Photoshop to create compositions with fabric textures and experiment with how Nava’s images might look when woven. After a successful presentation to the cathedral art committee, their next step was to find a mill.

A small mill in Belgium with state of the art electronic jacquard machinery got interested in their project—not because of its appeal for contemporary artists, Nava says, but because of the plan to put the textiles into a major new American church. Hence, the newest of old media got jumpstarted to re-tell the oldest of stories—and thus was born an innovative use for contemporary weaving.

The Magnolia Editions Tapestry Project applies Nava and Farnsworth’s innovations to produce tapestry editions digitalized from paintings and even small-scale media such as works on paper into woven cotton jacquards measuring up to 15 feet high. “By accident, we resuscitated tapestry,” Nava says.

Nava says each new artist to come to the tapestry medium pushes the previously explored limits of its fabrication. “The particular vision of the artist is a spur to new technical solutions,” Nava says.

Bruce Conner’s black-and-white Blindman’s Bluff is based on a small-scale collage of 6 11/16th” x 6 1/ 16th” transformed by digital instructions into a 101” x 90” tapestry. Pop iconography animates Mel Ramos’s Martini Miss, who sits propped inside a drinking glass. In a nod to the medieval master, Hieronymous Bosch, allegory drives the political content of William Wiley’s No Fault Insurance. This work reflects on Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant whom New York City police shot and killed in 2000. Hung Liu’s Golden Glyphs limns figures from ancient Buddhist cave murals found in the Gobi Desert alongside19th and 20th century photographs of Chinese laborers and courtesans. George Miyasaki’s Terra Incognita translates the geometric abstraction of his collograph prints into a landscape of woven texture.

The height of the textile medium is considered by many to be the cycle of 15th-century Unicorn tapestries of the Musee de Cluny in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When conservators at the Met took the Unicorn tapestries into their wet lab for conservation several years ago, they removed them from their linen backings and found the colors as bright on the underside as one might expect from fiber never exposed to sunlight. These works were hand woven from lengths of thread called the weft, which were passed around the straight, long harp-like threads of the warp. The weft’s delicate horizontals laced through vertical warp to form tapestries that were a painstaking labor of exquisite workmanship and mysterious meaning. Perhaps a backdrop to an important marriage, or a parable of the sufferings of Christ, as the hunted unicorn shed drops of blood, the power of these tapestries remains undiminished. An expert medieval weaver needed an hour to complete an inch of tapestry or a week to finish an eight-inch patch. The weavers were young men, who wove only by daylight.

Fast-forward to the 21st century where the patterning is accomplished by a new electronic technology that, using pixels, creates an intricate matrix where the fibers of warp and weft meet to color contemporary visions of art.

Ellen Berkovitch is a writer, art historian and a Ph.D. student in depth psychology.

Squeak Carnwath
Bruce Connor
Chuck Close
Guy Diehl
Martha Mayer Erlebacher
Don Farnsworth
Don and Era Farnsworth
April Gornik
D.J. Hall
Doug Hall
Robert Kushner
Hung Liu
Alan Magee
George Miyasaki
Ed Moses
John Nava
Mel Ramos
William Wiley