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Usually, the I.M. Pei-designed Everson Museum of Art’s gray brutalist structure would match the cloudy, gloomy aesthetic of a rainy Sunday in Syracuse. But there’s something different about it now: a 56-foot-wide tapestry of colorful squares hanging over the front-facing wall of the museum. Rachel Hayes’ colorful “Flurry” is one of her latest pieces of artwork and meant to turn heads as it hangs outside of the museum, she said.

“(I was) thinking about how you can make really huge things that have a presence but not give you a looming feeling,” Hayes said. “I guess I was after something like that, that had more of a weightlessness.”

The “AbStranded: Fiber and Abstraction in Contemporary Art” exhibit is on view until Jan. 2, 2022, and features work by 10 artists. Some pieces, like Polly Apfelbaum’s “For the Love of Morris Louis,” take up a whole room — floor and walls included — while others, like Samantha Bittman’s geometrically woven canvases, are smaller and more confined. Steffi Chappell, the assistant curator at the Everson, said creating the space to showcase fiber arts is essential right now.

“Fiber arts are often marginalized within the history of modern art, dismissed as just a hobby or pastime or relegated to decorative arts,” Chappell said. “But now, more than ever, as scholars work on expanding the art historical narrative, fiber artists are taking on a newfound relevance and popularity.”

“For the Love of Morris Louis,” which Apfelbaum created for the Everson in 2015, has a room of its own in this exhibit. But she also made a newer piece in 2020 for this show: 10 strips of multicolored, multimaterial weavings that hang vertically down from the wall. Whereas her 2015 piece is refined and geometric, Apfelbaum’s recent weavings look more handmade, using eclectic materials like pompoms and beads that she said all came to her “serendipitously or naturally” during its creation.

Apfelbaum created the artwork when she was in the early stages of learning to weave at the start of 2020. She mostly used materials and scraps from other artists and studios and fabrics from the thrift stores she frequented as a child.

“I also liked that there was a domestic quality and familiar quality to the work and to the materials, and that I could use it conceptually and formally in different ways,” Apfelbaum said.

Influenced by a range of art — from Bauhaus weavings to crazy quilts to ‘60s macrame — Apfelbaum said she was aiming to merge “high and low” culture without judgment. She accomplished this by using both cheap and expensive looking fabrics, pompoms and beads in the same long strips, all sewn and weaved together.

Planning for “AbStranded” started in 2018, Chappell said, and Everson originally scheduled to open the exhibit in April 2020. Once the pandemic began, the museum originally postponed the exhibit indefinitely.

Hayes said that she started creating the smaller rectangles that make up “Flurry” in January 2020 and just kept working through the pandemic, despite not knowing when the exhibit would open.

During that time, Hayes sewed the smaller rectangles of the piece, finally attaching them all once she had the official green light from the museum. She said the piece kept her from having “idle hands” during quarantine.

“If you’re physically making things, I guess it just keeps things moving forward,” Hayes said. “That’s when it moves into ‘art for art’s sake,’ then you’re just doing it for yourself because you want to see it done, not because there’s a deadline, you’re working towards something that’s more abstract.”

Throughout the pandemic, Hayes deliberately picked each square of fabric and cut them to 56 inches to reflect the dimensions of the Everson wall it would be hung upon.

“It was just a flurry to make and these last couple years have been a flurry. A lot of little things coming together to make one big thing,” she said.

She also had to be conscious of the history and design of the building’s architecture when creating this piece, Hayes said, because she wanted to respect the museum as artwork in its own right.

“Some people would probably think it’s blasphemy or degrading, but I just didn’t want (“Flurry”) to feel like a joke,” Hayes said. “I wanted it to be serious but also sincere and (a) kindhearted response to the building.”

“Flurry” by Rachel Hayes gives motion and color to the front of the Everson museum with respect to its original architecture.
Sydney Pollack | Assistant Culture Editor

“Flurry” communicates a lot about the nature of fiber arts that the exhibit is meant to highlight: the importance of color, craftsmanship, practicality and tactility over time were in the front of Hayes’ mind when she was creating the work. Everything from the colors she chose to the nylon fabric — the same fabric used in flags — was planned so she could count on it surviving and maintaining its form over time in the elements.

There were colors she excluded in this piece that she had used in past outdoor works because she knew they would fade or shred while the piece was hanging through rough weather, Hayes said. Instead, she chose colors like yellow and green, magenta and two shades of blue that she knew would stand out against the gray skies of Syracuse’s winters.

“It would be sad to put something up there and not have it react with nature, because then it may as well be a billboard,” Hayes said. “But now, because air can go behind it and lift up those flutters and it’s doing something, it’s living, it’s of the environment.”

This exhibit isn’t just about fiber and textile. Its focus is abstraction within fabric art, and its influences and connotations can be directly traced to gender and the term “women’s work,” said Garth Johnson, curator of ceramics at the Everson. The curator added that fiber is undoubtedly “the most gendered of the craft disciplines,” and the art in the show explores that in new ways, through tradition, research and material.

There are 10 artists showing a diverse range of work in the exhibit. Some have small canvases, others like Anne Lindberg’s “Blood Lines” stretch across whole rooms
Sydney Pollack | Assistant Culture Editor

While the artists agree that gender isn’t the first thing they hope viewers will see in their work, Apfelbaum explained that it is so essential to her art in the larger history of textiles that it’s present in everything she makes.

“I’m very conscious of (gender) as a woman artist,” Apfelbaum said. “It’s another color, it’s something so ingrained, it’s another line, it’s in there. It’s so innate to me in the work that I do, it’s my sensibility, that I don’t think you could take that part out. It’s part of the work, part of my DNA.”

But Hayes wanted people to be careful about gendering the artwork in the show because she doesn’t want her work to be reduced to any one political or feminist statement. She added that the role women have in the history of fiber art is present in her work and can be seen in each square that her mother helped her hem. The artist also wants viewers to find equal meaning in the form, color and environment she uses.

Highlights from the exhibit besides Hayes’ and Apfelbaum’s works are Elana Herzog’s deconstructed rugs, Paolo Arao’s “queered” collages and “Blood Lines” by Anne Lindberg. Johnson noted Sarah Zapata’s “Standing on the Edge of Time,” saying it encapsulates the themes of the show through its use of Peruvian fabric and the meaning of that within her family and the larger culture of textile in Peru.

All these pieces resist the expected guidelines of what “fiber art” looks like. They aren’t straightforward quilts or tapestries, but they are thought provoking and convention-challenging in how they use traditional space and material, Johnson said. Apfelbaum said the dimensionality of the exhibit is refreshing after a year of looking at art through a 2D screen.

“It’s so nice that all this work is about a certain physicality, and we’ve all not had that contact and I think my work will … make a space and fill it with people, because I think it’s important for people to come and see the work and feel it,” Apfelbaum said.

Published on October 7, 2021 at 12:30 am

Contact Sydney: sypollac@syr.edu