Copyright 2022 by The Art Center, Highland Park, IL. The book author and artists retain sole copyright to their contributions to this book. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without prior permission in writing.
Catalog edited by Caren Helene Rudman
Catalog designed by Karen M. Gutfreund, www.KarenGutfreund.com, @karengutfreundart
April 29-June 11, 2022
“The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.”
Marcel ProustAt The Art Center Highland Park our mission is to celebrate and encourage artistic discovery and creative exploration, to provide a platform for our community to experience and participate in the arts.
With Fiber-Fashion-Feminism we wanted to highlight artists that are constantly creating breakthroughs in the milieu of fiber art. Through the diligence of our curator, Caren Helene Rudman, we were able to seek out and invite nine amazing artists, each with a unique and passionate vision, each who is teaching us to see fiber art with new eyes.
Thank you to all of our participating artists for sharing that rare universe each of you sees and for helping us ‘fly from star to star’.
James M. Lynch, Executive Director
Vision Statement: The Art Center’s vision is to be a cultural destination that inspires and ignites a passion for the arts; providing a forum for self-expression, dialogue, and community engagement.
Mission Statement: The Art Center, a not-for-profit organization, is the North Shore’s home for artistic discovery and creative exploration. Through innovative programs, exhibitions, and classes designed for all levels and ages, The Art Center provides a welcoming space for our diverse communities to experience and participate in the arts.
In the nineteen seventies, artists such as Judy Chicago coined the phrase Feminist Art to encompass “women in the arts,” especially those working with fiber. Breaking with the traditional association of women in textiles and crafts that had been considered “less than," they became leaders of a movement in art; they ushered in a generational shift that exposed the misuse and misrepresentation of women throughout art history.
The Art Center Highland Park (TAC) exhibits Fiber-Fashion-Feminism from April 29-June 11, 2022. The theme, though wide in scope, narrows the intersection of fiber arts, the world of fashion, and the sociopolitical terms of feminism. The group of nine artists selected for the exhibition represent an important and groundbreaking movement, challenging perceptions and pushing the art form itself, looking beyond the mere use of material, while understanding its historical context. The common theme throughout much of the work addresses perceptions of perfection of the female body, and how clothing reflects self, identity, and culture.
Each artist in their own language re-examines fiber as an art form, from using traditional clothing in Nirmal Raja’s work using saris and MartyO’s wedding dress installation, which raise questions about cultural references and norms. Ginny Sykes’ large fabric panels of portraits of women draped in fabric speak to the historical lack of women’s representation, especially in art monuments. Nneka Kai’s use of hair, in the site specific installation, reference the notion of identity in connection to body and self. Fashion designer, Katrin Schnabl’s layers of fabric echo her fashion line while her fashion speaks to her fine art, leaving the viewer to look closely at the role clothing plays, both as viewer and “viewee.” Conversely, Maria Pinto separates her roles as fashion designer and artist, yet the work influences each other with an overlapping emphasis on energy and creative process. Yana Schnitzler’s, Tales of a Phoenix: The Letting Go Project, is an ongoing performance where Yana quilts a patchwork of stories shared by women, while Jennifer Markowitz’s embroidered dresses trace her own physical and emotional journey, mapping a history based on the boundaries of her body in space. Laura Morrison’s prolific use of fiber references both feminism and nature as her piece, Don’t Touch, acted as the catalyst piece inspiring the overall theme.
Together, the nine artists explore what re-defines the term feminism in today’s world, exemplifying how form, material, and theme coincide to push the boundaries of traditional fiber art. Their work provides a new broad look at contemporary feminist art, illustrating the intersection of the three terms, Fiber-Fashion-Feminism.
Contributing artists include: Nneka Kai, Jennifer Markowitz, Laura Morrison, Marty Ornish, Maria Pinto, Nirmal Raja, Katrin Schnabl, Yana Schnitzler, Ginny Sykes
Caren Helene Rudman, Curator
Biography:
@nneka_kai
Nneka Kai is an interdisciplinary artist from Atlanta, GA, whose practice is rooted in the exploration of personal and archival narratives through the material of hair. She received her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a research assistant at the Textile Resource Center. There she explored the history and conservation aspects of textiles within the Fiber & Material Studies collection. Not seeing herself represented in the objects, she decided to research the peripherals of textiles, in hopes of uncovering Black women’s material sensibilities throughout the diaspora. She also received her BFA from Georgia State University, where a study project sparked her curiosity for hair.
Currently, Nneka’s studio practice explores these findings through performances and fiber works, emphasizing methods of abstraction and opacity. She has performed her works in Chicago, Atlanta, and North Carolina. In 2021, Nneka exhibited in the Hair Stories Exhibition at The Newport Art Museum in Rhode Island. She is currently a substitute teacher in Atlanta, while also co-curating an exhibition in the Textiles Department at The Art Institute of Chicago for Fall 2025.
Artist Statement:
What is the free Black feminine form?
That question is the root of my studio practice. What is freedom to the Black woman and how is it manifested? My visual expression of this theme comes through in the fluidity of material and immaterial explorations. Playing with themes of identity, visibility, and history, I try to understand the Black woman, learning and unlearning aspects of self. In my practice, the technique of coiling learned during my undergraduate years, helped me to connect to my ancestral history through a process of erecting forms from a single strand. Expanded through performance and assemblage, I seek the conceptual meaning of both objects and bodies within their material pairings. From braiding to twisting to crimping, these forms of self-expression, speak to resilience, intimacy, and the narratives of Black women that are often contained within the peripherals. Pulling inspiration from personal anecdotes, historical archives, I create abstracted forms that speak to blackness as an ethos for existing in and out of time. I grew up between my mother's legs, listening to the comb, the television, and her voice. Every two weeks, she taught me how to last. My practice is about lasting, about survival.
Biography:
Jennifer Markowitz is a textile artist in Raleigh, NC. Her most recent solo show, Fleshmap: My Unraveling Geographies, was shown at ArtspaceNC in 2022. Her work has also been shown at The Nasher Museum, Frank Gallery, CAM Raleigh, Dayton Society of Artists, St. Louis Art Guild, Block Gallery, VAE, The National Humanities Center, Weems Art Gallery and VAE. She is a two- time recipient of the United Arts Career Development Grant and was the 2020 Emerging Artist Resident at ArtspaceNC. She was also a Brightwork Fellow at Anchorlight where her first solo exhibition, Fleshmap: My Bipolar Embroidered Geographies, showed in November 2019.
Before turning to textiles, Jennifer spent 25 years directing environmental theatre throughout the US, Scotland, Ireland, Israel and England, where she received an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick. She has taught Psychogeography, Performance Theory, Site-Based theatre and Postdramatic Theatre in the UK at the universities of Warwick, Birmingham, Manchester, Portsmouth and Plymouth. In the US, she has taught at Theatre classes at DePaul University, Columbia College Chicago and University of Notre Dame and Embroidery classes at Artspace and Meredith College.
Artist Statement:
In each of us, there is a hidden landscape that contains parts of ourselves we chose to abandon before they killed us. This show contains images of bipolar disorder, but is not only about mental illness. In 2006, I bought a large, blue suitcase to take back to England with me where I had started grad school a year earlier. I used the suitcase to move the rest of my belongings from the US. Since then, it has accompanied me back and forth several times between England, Mexico, Iceland, Lebanon and Chicago. In 2016, I packed it once more and moved to Raleigh. By then, it was barely a suitcase.
In my first phase of this series Fleshmap: My Embroidered Bipolar Geographies, 2019, I used thread to circumnavigate the geography of memory. In 16 different panels, I mapped a life frequently interrupted by Bipolar Disorder. In Fleshmap: My Unraveling Geographies, I revisited the previous maps, trying to reshape them from personal narratives into visceral objects of memory. I also continued with this system by filling in time gaps between the years of 1985 and 2010 and then, finally, mapping 2016-2018 in Raleigh.
I located that place that holds the pieces of me I have recently abandoned in order to live. This place I’ve mapped contains some brutal memories from which I’ve tried to excavate myself. It also contains much of what I loved in ways too dangerous to control: the power of mania, men who loved a version of me that was not always me, directing theatre, the use of my body in ways that were electrifying but always unsustainable. I’ve spent the past four years cutting pieces from me. Eventually, they drifted to that place and landed like ash. I am the skeleton of a suitcase searching for a new use.
UK/Iceland/Mexico, 2007-2010, (2021), Hand-embroidery on repurposed and stiffened silk dress, from the Fleshmap Series
Episode, Chicago, 2012-2013, (2021)
Bra made from needle lace. Flowers built around wires and hand embroidery (all made by hand), from the Fleshmap Series
New York September 1998-February 1999, (2019)
Hand embroidery on deconstructed and stiffened nylon slip, from the Fleshmap Series
Biography:
@lauramorrisonart
lauramorrisonart.com Concord, NH
Laura Morrison combines traditional fiber art techniques such as felting, embroidery, weaving crochet and knitting to create mixed media sculptures, assemblages, installations and wall works. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, Morrison learned how to sew from her mother, an accomplished seamstress who created beautiful clothes for her two daughters. "Sewing with my mother and playing with the materials in the sewing room was a large part of my childhood and filled with special memories." Morrison attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she studied graphic design. After graduation, Morrison worked as a designer in the Chicago. During that time, she became fascinated with the needle arts and worked on embroidery projects during her train commute into the city.
Her move to New Hampshire was the catalyst that changed her life. It was then that she decided to concentrate her creative energy more fully on her art. “Moving to New Hampshire opened my eyes to the beauty of nature with its wild spaces. Here, I can truly breathe deeply and be the artist and person I want to be. Nature is my muse.” She began with creating collages and assemblages, often incorporating fiber into the work. Over time, fiber has become the main focus of her process driven work. She has exhibited her work in galleries throughout the New England and installed two public art commissions for The NH State Council on the Arts Percent for Art Program. Morrison is the Gallery Director for Twiggs Gallery in Boscawen, NH. She volunteers her time serving as the Past President (2020-2022) for the National Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) and the Gallery Coordinator for Red River Theatre’s Community Gallery in Concord, NH.
Artist Statement:
Selections from three different series plus a collaborative piece were chosen for Fiber-Fashion-Feminism. Although the aesthetic nature of these series may differ, the connective thread is my intense love of fiber. I am a process-driven artist that deeply enjoys working with small projects in my lap. I work on individual components that I combine into more complex works over time. Whether it is knitting, crochet, weaving, felting, embroidery or sewing, it is all done by hand. The subject matter of individual pieces may vary, but underneath it all lies a steady tribute to feminine power, strength and connection.
The Nature Regeneration Series is my primary work about feminine power and the persistence of life. Frightening environmental changes are happening all around us, but I believe Nature is fierce and will reproduce and regenerate to heal the ailing planet…with or without us. The Wonderment Series begins with a question to tackle whatever might be puzzling or troubling me at the moment. It could be Prejudice, Feminism, Global Warming, Suburban Sprawl, Motherhood, or Plastic Surgery. I wonder, ”How do I really feel about the subject?” While I work, the art often answers my questions and clarifies my feelings. 100 Years and Waiting examines the process involved in attempting to pass equal rights legislation and how long that wait continues. A victorian bodice was deconstructed to create a backdrop for feminist quotes from the past and present by Lucrecia Mott and Michelle Obama calling for change, highlighting how long women have been fighting for equal rights under the law. This piece is in response to a piece constructed by Gail Smuda with a 1920s flapper dress using quotes addressing the ongoing fight to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Gail and I collaborate together as the Loosely Knit Alliance collective.
*detail
100 Years and Waiting, (created in collaboration with Gail Smuda), (2020) Vintage bodice, lace, linen, embroidery floss, printed text, 29 x 52 inches
Biography:
An internationally recognized artist, having won numerous Best of Show awards, Southern California-based artist MartyO has been creating wearable art, assemblages and sculptures from salvaged textiles and found objects. From a background in social work and law practice, in her mid-fifties she changed careers to become an artist. MartyO adheres to zero-waste principles as she transforms discarded, tattered and stained quilts and linens into distinctive art. Often the provenance of the vintage damaged textiles has been lost, yet new narratives emerge. Honoring the handwork of women, her art is emotional as she addresses controversial and universal issues.
Artist Statement:
Using needle and thread defiantly, creating art using ruined and vintage textiles found at thrift stores, estate sales, and gifted to her, MartyO seeks to effect social change. The fiber art movement subverts traditional “women’s work” into the artistic expression of women’s historically inequitable place in our patriarchal society. Hard-earned women’s rights are unraveling; thus, it is imperative for artists to speak out. In this exhibition, her work provides commentary on how women are objectified, manipulated, shamed, and made invisible and opens channels of empowerment.
Wedding Gowns, (2021), Installation, variable
Biography:
Maria studied fashion, photography, painting, and sculpture at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where all of her artistic practices informed each other and culminated in a BFA. During the past 30 years of her career in fashion, she returned to her other artistic pursuits; in 2010 she began working with ink on paper as well as beginning a committed painting practice in a separate studio. While fashion design requires strict control and foreboding deliberation, she feels a strange sense of having little to no control when painting or drawing. A constant theme in all of Maria's work is the marriage between human emotion and nature.
Artist statement:
I studied at the School of the Art Institute, where my focus was both fashion and painting. Today, I still keep these two creative practices. I'm approaching 31 years of working in fashion I love that this work can truly empower women, and that has always been my mission. That said, it's a very disciplined practice due to the reality of fulfilling women's needs and honoring the diversity of women's bodies. My other practice in fine arts has been a space in which I can limitlessly express my emotions and state of mind. This work had been focused on the use of ink on paper or board; my painting practice was rekindled in 2010, and has been a consistent committed endeavor since. For my first body of work, I was quite obsessed with roots not just their beautiful image, but also the deeper psychological significance of rootedness.
At the height of the pandemic I discovered a book by Manuel Lima, The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge, at an intense moment when we were all quite isolated and our circles of friends and family were broken. There was another layer to this as well the heavy conversation of inclusion, exclusion, and equality. My work is now focused on the image of a circle with a range of manipulations and surfaces. The circle clearly represents many elements, including time, space, and mood. I continue to explore this imagery in largescale pieces as well as multiple-panel pieces. Inspired by Clyfford Still's break from the frame, my next body of work will eliminate the barrier between the viewer and the art.
Biography:
Nirmal Raja is an interdisciplinary artist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She has lived in India, South Korea and Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States thirty years ago. She holds a BA in English Literature from St. Francis College in Hyderabad, India; a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She has participated in solo and group shows in the Midwest, nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of several awards including “Graduate of The Decade” from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual artists. She collaborates with other artists and strongly believes in investing energy into her immediate community while also considering the global. She curates exhibitions that bring people from different cultures and backgrounds together. She was a mentor at RedLine Milwaukee, a community arts incubator for six years and is now a mentor for the Milwaukee Artists Resource Network.
Artist Statement:
My work examines global movement, the cultural and material legacies of colonialism and its human consequences. Born in India, I lived in South Korea and Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States in 1991. I experience the local through this global lens, constantly responding to what is going on around me and within me.
Notions of memory, loss, and wonder are consistent experiences for an immigrant. I transform these felt experiences, giving form while framing them within the mundane and political landscape. I link current geopolitical strife and the refugee crises to the colonial past, using poetic and immersive strategies. Most often, this involves a reversal of orientalist and culturally rooted material forms by juxtaposing the beautiful with the unsettling vernacular language of women and migration.
I choose materials and processes intuitively, drawing from objects and imagery that have dual cultural and personal significance. I acknowledge these materials are migratory receptacles and transform them into inter-culturally resonant artwork. Clothing, specifically the sari, enters my work as a cultural marker. Fiber is used literally as material but also as a metaphorical allusion to the fabric of our lives.
Biography:
@katrinschnablprojects
katrinschnabl.com Chicago, IL
Katrin Schnabl is a designer, artist, and educator. Trained in dance, Schnabl moved to New York from her native Germany, where she honed her skills creating costumes for dancers. She shifted towards fashion after graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Relocating to Chicago, she has made a huge impact as Chair of the Department of Fashion Design at The School of the Art Institute. Her garments move sensuously on the body, alongside her spatial 3-D kinetic portal paintings and scrolls, allowing her to intersect dance and movement with fashion and installations. Her “interactive membranes,” emphasize the dualities between the viewer and wearer, inner and outer.
Artist Statement:
Portal Series, 2020 is a series of rectangular metal frames, resembling doorframes, and scrolls swathed in a surface of sheer solidcolored fabrics, curvilinearly stitched together, forming a dimensional unit. The pieces are large, ranging in height from about four to 10 feet. The fabrics are mesh polyamides and leftover pieces accumulated from Schnabl’s career as a fashion designer, and the colors range from vibrant blues and electric greens to deep browns and reds. Currently, there are nine pieces comprising Portal, including Conception I, Conception II, Chant I, Chant II, Life and Death I, Life & Death II, Bodies between Bodies I, Portal 1.2 scroll, and Portal 2.3 scroll.
“If I was a painter, this is how I would paint,” Schnabl explains. The dimensionality of the works give them a body, allowing her method of painting to extend beyond the canvas, making the pieces something in between a painting and an installation. The desire to give the works depth comes perhaps from her years of pattern-cutting and design expertise and working with the human form. “I was in dressing my feelings in a way,” she adds. By imbuing the works with the body of a metal frame, Portal offers the viewer several surfaces to contemplate and encourages a dynamic relationship as one ambles around the works.
Biography:
@yanaschnitzler
humankinetics.org
Astoria, NY
Yana Schnitzler is an interdisciplinary artist working in fiber and performance. For more than twenty-five years, Schnitzler has been exploring themes of sensitivity and connection through a lens of feminism, often expressed in durational performances using the movement of the human body in fabric. Her work has been presented at numerous museums, galleries and performance art festivals as well as corporate events throughout the US and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; One World Trade Center, NYC, Urban Garden Room/Bank of America, NYC, Hamburg Art Week, Germany; Concorso d’Eleganza, Lake Como, Italy and Opéra Plage, Nice, France, among others. She has been commissioned by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, Onishi Gallery, NYC, Musikfest, Bethlehem, PA, and BMW Munich, Germany, and was awarded funding support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, German General Consulate New York and Friends of Hudson River Park, as well as corporate support from Citibank and Jana Water.
Artist Statement:
Tales of a Phoenix: The Letting Go Project harnesses the power of ritual to bring women from across the globe together in a unified release of old patterns that no longer serve their personal growth. Over the past year and a half, women contributed pieces of fabric inscribed with their intentions of what they wish to let go of. An ongoing project, I stitch these testimonies together into a room-filling skirt, representing the global collective feminine voice. With pieces from over 40 different countries and states, the work creates a tapestry of personal stories from all walks of life and cultures, offering a glimpse of where women stand with the struggles they face. The project will culminate in a ritual dance performance, where I wear the skirt radiating with these women’s collective energy, and conclude with the public destruction of the skirt in a powerful symbol of release and letting go.
Tales of a Phoenix: The Letting Go Project is made possible, in part, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Further support was provided by Chashama, Williamsburg Art & Historical Center and The Feminist Art Project.
Biography:
@ginnysykesartist
Ginny Sykes is an interdisciplinary artist utilizing performance, video, sculpture, painting, installation, ceramics and more. Her personal and political approach to art incorporates a Jungian and feminist perspective, working with symbol and myth to critique patriarchal codes that have occupied and over-determined artistic content through much of history. Resisting prescriptive and institutional classifications of a universalized female experience, Sykes instead asserts and affirms the complexity of identities women negotiate. She employs a poetic, layered, and visceral aesthetic across the genres of her practice to suggest the transforming and healing potential of art, and to invite new cultural, emotional, and psychological understandings.
Recent selected exhibitions include Legler and Woodson Regional Libraries in Chicago, IL; Oliva Gallery, Chicago, IL; Art Performing Festivals Ed. IV and V, Naples, Italy and Forte Marghera, Venice, Italy; Dryphoto Arte Contemporanea, Prato, Italy; Castel dell’Ovo, Naples, Italy, Water Tower Art Festival, Sofia, Bulgaria; LACE, Los Angeles, CA; Loyola University Art Museum, Chicago, IL; top Schillerpalais, Berlin, Germany; Saltillo Contemporary, Saltillo, Mexico; Pinacoteca Communale de Arte Contemporanea, Gaeta, Italy; and Can Gelabert Casal de Cultura, Mallorca, Spain.
Sykes taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lill Street Art Center and the Evanston Art Center, and was a teaching artist for twenty five years, including After School Matters and the Illinois Arts Council. She has presented her work at the Jungian Institute International Conference and at the College Art Association Conference. She has served on the board of Woman Made Gallery, was a board member and core artist with the Chicago Public Art Group, and currently is on the advisory council for the Sam Fox School of Art at Washington University. Sykes’s more than 40 public artworks include On the Wings of Water at O’Hare International Airport, and Rora at Erie Terraces on the Chicago River, which received an Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects. She is the recipient of individual artist grants from the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, a Chicago Percent for Art commission, Ragdale residencies, and the Artegiro Residency in Conzano, Italy.
Sykes holds an MA in Women Studies and Gender Studies from Loyola University, Chicago, IL, where she received a Community and Global Stewards Fellowship, and has a BFA from Washington University, St Louis, Missouri. She studied painting and art history for three years at Studio Cecil Graves in Florence, Italy. She divides her working life between Chicago, Illinois and Naples, Italy.
Artist Statement:
100 Women: Collaborations Beyond the Veil presents large scale photographic banners of contemporary women to address the historical lack of visibility of women in public space. Unlike singular bronze or stone statues that valorize men as heroic, via war or conquest, this chorus of women suggests another kind of monument that is non-hierarchical, fluid and transparent, interdependent and connected. Originally conceived to mark the 100th anniversary of the United States’ 19th Amendment, the banners are a gesture to offset the present gap and encourage future representation of real women, rather than as abstract attributes such as chastity or virtue, or muses for others. Each woman stands with a hand to the heart and one on the abdomen, to acknowledge and honor these seats of wisdom long disavowed by patriarchy.
100 Women: Collaborations Beyond the Veil elevates a diverse group of women as a corrective, healing gesture and creates a contemporary visual archive of women on the subject of liberty. Each woman metaphorically stands for the multitudes of women being affected by new restrictive voting laws, laws that disregard women’s bodily autonomy, and laws that particularly and disproportionately impact poor women and women of color who already experience unequal treatment across cultural, economic, and political sectors.
The right to self-determination has always been a contested right for women. 100 Women: Collaborations Beyond the Veil alludes to what we miss when women are denied rightful representation in the form of public monuments and reconnects people with the truth of women’s leadership in history, by offering meaningful, contemporary examples of the impact that each woman has in the world, especially when in solidarity with other women.
The exhibition “Fiber—Fashion—Feminism” was made possible through the generosity of:
