Lenore Tawney: A Retrospective
Textile artist Lenore Tawney's weavings range from intimately fragile to powerfully majestic. Her Cloud series of freely hanging linen and canvas filaments evoke cosmic waterfalls. In the 1950s and '60s this Ohio-born artist, who studied in Chicago with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, helped revolutionize fiber art with her open-warp weavings, gauze-weave experiments and "fiber sculpture." Her later collages, with motifs of flags, postcards, feathers or shells, are hybrid fusions of found object and invented artifact. Her secret-laden box constructions preserving miniature items bear comparison with those of Joseph Cornell. In this catalogue of a traveling exhibition, Mangan, an independent curator, teams with other craft and textile specialists to decipher the visual poetry of a weaver whose sources of inspiration range from Amerindian baskets to Taoist symbols.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.