Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe

Monica Sjöö

in ‘Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement in the UK 1970 - 1990’, Tate Britain, London

Maria Bartuszová

Museum der Moderne, Salzburg

Sheila Hicks

in ‘To Weave the Sky: Textile Abstractions from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection’, El Espacio 23, Miami

Sheila Hicks

Parvis de L’Institut de France, Paris

Carol Rhodes

Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht

Sheila Hicks

Awarded the 2023 U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts

Nicola L.: Life and Art Book Launch

New York, Paris & London

Ian Kiaer

in ‘UNBUILD: a site of possibility’, Drawing Room, London

Carol Rhodes

Haus am Waldsee, Berlin

Ana Mendieta

Silhueta em Fogo, SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil

Erika Verzutti & Anderson Borba

Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil

Alessandro Raho

in ‘In The Offing’, Turner Contemporary, Margate

Veronica Ryan

2023 School Prints programme at The Hepworth Wakefield

Ljiljana Blaževska

Palazzo Carrozzini, Lecce

A series of four exhibitions at the John Michael Kohler Arts Centre, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, explores Lenore Tawney’s life and impact, offering a personal and historical view into her entire body of work.

‘In Poetry and Silence: The Work and Studio of Lenore Tawney’ (6 October 2019 – 7 March 2020) anchors the series with an evocation of Tawney’s studio underscoring the relationship of the artist’s space to her creative practice. This exhibition reunites over 120 key works – weavings, drawings, collages and assemblages—with art and artefacts from Tawney’s highly personalised studio environment, revealing her processes and inspirations, and dissolving boundaries between the material surroundings she constructed for herself and the work she produced.

‘Ephemeral and Eternal: The Archives of Lenore Tawney’ (15 September 2019 – 16 February 2020) explores correspondence, journals, artist books, photographs, audio interviews, and ephemera drawn from manuscript collections at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. Tawney’s papers do not merely reflect her artistic legacy; they reveal her complex – and at times contradictory – identities as an artist, friend, woman, reader, wife, thinker, collector, weaver, sculptor, traveler, and seeker. More than a repository of materials documenting her life, Tawney’s archive is also a landscape she cultivated as a daily log of inspiration for her art.

‘Even Thread Has a Speech’ (1 September 2019 – 2 February 2020) is a group exhibition exploring Tawney’s lasting impact on eight contemporary fiber artists with new, site-specific installations commissioned by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center as well as two- and three-dimensional works. From crocheted installations to macramé sculptures, video, assemblage, and performance, the works echo Tawney’s visual language of abstraction and the desire to communicate without sending specific messages. Artists in the exhibition include Indira Allegra, Julia Bland, Jesse Harrod, Judith Leemann, Anne Lindberg, Michael Milano, and Sheila Pepe.

‘Cloud Labyrinth (18 August 2019 – 19 January 2020) fills an entire gallery with a work originally created for the Lausanne International Tapestry Biennale in 1983. This monumental piece exemplifies the evolution of Tawney’s practice while maintaining an unmistakable connection to weaving. Accompanying the installation will be an ongoing screening of the film Cloud Dance (1979) in which dancer and choreographer Andy De Groat improvises movement in response to Tawney’s Four-Armed Cloud at the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton.