Des Moines Register | Des Moines Art Center Stretches Fiber into New Territory by Michael Morain

Des Moines Art Center Stretches Fiber into New Territory

by Michael Morain

Unless you're reading this naked, you should probably thank some fiber artists. They've worked for millennia to figure out clever new ways to grow, gather, clean, spin, dye, weave, knit, stitch, design and market the clothes you're wearing right now.

But just for a moment, consider those threads on their own terms, freed from their day jobs as shirts and skirts and pants.

Think of them instead as art supplies that can be twisted or pulled or piled into sculptures. They can be delicate, like lace. They can be bulky and rough, like macrame on steroids. They can stretch like a mutant spider's web down a three-story stairwell, as one installation does in the Des Moines Art Center's new show, "Fiber: Sculpture, 1960-Present."

"The artists knew they needed to scale up to be taken seriously," the show's curator, Jenelle Porter, told a group last week before the opening. "They couldn't make a weaving and put it on the wall. They needed to make something that was so big that we really had to talk about it in terms of sculpture."

Porter developed the 50-piece traveling exhibition a few years ago for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where she works, and discovered a bustling corner of the art world that she'd never explored. That's because fiber artists enjoyed only a brief turn in the art-world spotlight, during the 1960s and early '70s, before they were pushed again to the back of the closet — or the "craft ghetto," as Porter called it.

There are double standards, of course. Weaving, crochet, needlepoint and other fiber techniques traditionally have been considered women's work. And since a lot of that output is functional, fiber art hasn't gotten the same respect as fine art, which emphasizes conceptual ideas.

But when Porter stumbled across the work of Sheila Hicks, whose colored ropes now cascade like a waterfall from the Art Center's ceiling, she wanted to push the conversation forward.

"We don't just have to talk about, well, how did they make it? And is this the finest example of its making?" she said. "We should talk about sculpture and volume and mass and color and form."

So let's do that. Let's talk about the mass of braided rope that Francoise Grossen arranged like a humongous centipede on the floor. Or the gossamer, jellyfishy piece that Kay Sekimachi wove from soft nylon fishing line (shortly after DuPont introduced the product, in 1959).

Let's talk about the shaggy purple, suspiciously vulviform sculpture by Magdalena Abakanowicz, who says it has nothing to do with female anatomy.

Or how about the walk-through net tunnel that Ernesto Neto fringed with seed pods and jingle bells?

The blue-and-green web in the three-story stairwell is the handiwork of Sheila Pepe, just around the corner from an enclosed crocheted cave by Faith Wilding. Therein, a single light bulb illuminates yarn stalactites on the ceiling and ropy webs that cling to the walls.

The exhibition represents 32 artists in all, from both Americas, Europe and Japan, and the curator traveled to some of their homes to retrieve works from their attics and basements. Many of the pieces had spent decades in storage, even in trash bags, until Porter pulled them out.

"Moments like that are very special to me. I love nothing more than digging around in someone's stuff," she said. "Some of these works are getting pulled out for the first time in years and years and years."

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