Fiber at Memorial Art Gallery

Every three years the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh pulls together an international show meant to wow us all with the creativity of artists working with textiles. The 2010 exhibit included 81 people from 14 countries and after debuting in Pittsburgh, the show is now on a 3-stop national tour. One of those venues is our very own Memorial Art Gallery where the work may be viewed until July 3.

I visited the gallery this week and I will admit to only the few of you who read this blog: I have more questions than insight. So I’m going to put my questions out there and I invite anybody to challenge, share, illuminate, educate….whatever your take on this, I’m happy to pass along.

First, it feels like a HUGE SHOW. But none of the pieces is especially monumental in scale and in fact, many are tiny. So why does the show seem to inhale space?

Of the 81 included artists, I noted only two or three male names; all others are female. What does this say about the medium? Does tradition refuse to die? Is there something in the female DNA that pushes us to historic ritual (dying, spinning, weaving, needlework) or is this learned?

The overarching response to the work is WHAT TEDIUM! HOW MUCH PATIENCE IS REQUIRED TO DO THIS AND IS THE MAKER BLIND YET? But is this response appropriate/necessary/even a consideration to good/great art? Where is the line between technical virtuosity and artistic expression? And if you’re aware of the debate when you look at a piece, has the piece automatically failed as a work of art?

Jack Lenore Larson was trained in textile art (at Cranbrook I think?) and went on to develop and run one of the most successful commercial high-end designer textile firms in the world. (He also has a great garden that I’d love to visit someday.) Is he an artist or a brilliant businessman? Which box would he check?

International art star Cristo “wraps” buildings, bridges – Central Park and an island! - with fabric. Does this make him a “fiber artist?” Why not? Magdalena Abakanowicz (Polish I think?) exploded onto the international art world with her fiber “corpses”. I saw one of her shows last year at Davidson College in North Carolina and it was haunting. One of her works is at Storm King Art Park (in a glass Sleeping Beauty dome.) How does she fit into the world of textile art? Or has she jumped out of any material classification?

By naming the exhibit “Fiberarts,” have we already limited the artistic value?

Smalltown, U.S.A.

Never underestimate small towns. With the slightest nudge, they reveal fascinating history, quirky characters and nearly always the good heartedness we all hope to claim as our heritage. Mt. Morris, New York, is one of those small towns.

Mt. Morris hunkers down in the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate New York, near Letchworth State Park (site of the “Grand Canyon of the East"), in Livingston County.

The Mt. Morris Dam (nearly 1000 ft. across and 250 feet high) was built here in the 1950s preventing the Genesee River from flooding downstream and leading to the town’s motto: “The Best Town by a dam site!” (That right there is good enough reason to love this small town.) Mt. Morris also brags that Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance, was a homegrown boy and that the largest epileptic colony in the country was once here. Now it’s a prison - a sad poetry in this coincidence.

Drive through the town center and up Murray Hill and you come into a campus of towering trees and quietly imposing two and three story red brick buildings each with a multi-paned glass sunroom on its top floor. Originally the estate of James Murray who owned local glass works and mills in the 1800s, the estate was given to New York and turned into a tuberculosis sanitarium in 1930.

Tuberculosis was proclaimed “vanquished” by the spectrum of antibiotics available by the 1970s. Tuberculosis centers everywhere were shut down and within a few years, the campus on Murray Hill was turned over to Livingston County. Now it houses county social services of all kinds and headquarters for the Genesee Valley Council on the Arts.

The arts council is in what once was physician housing which may explain the three kitchens in the relatively small building. Along with office space and gift shop, the Council runs the New Deal Gallery named for the 230 easel paintings discovered throughout the sanitarium facility. These paintings are works by Upstate New York artists, all purchased under the auspices of the WPA New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s and installed throughout the hospital at the request of the insightful director who convinced the WPA Board that original art would make patients feel better.

The artistic merit of these works is uneven; most pieces would never be included in any museum collection although I love Petra Mearns' painting. It reminds me of works by Frieda Kahlo who was painting similar images at the same time a half-continent removed from Upstate. (Petra Mearns invented the Scotch Cooler, proof that creative expression is seldom channeled in only one direction.)

But there is more to learn from this collection. Even mediocre art often adds huge dimension to our mythology, artistic expression is worthwhile even when the maker sees no or little reward and sometimes someone comes along with the power/money/authority who understands the human requirement for visual healing. The rest of us can only be thankful.

(These paintings all need restoration work. Even a small donation can help. Send to “Adopt Art”, c/o the Genesee Valley Council on the Arts, Bldg. 4, Murray Hill Drive, Mt. Morris, NY 14510. And a big thanks to Kathryn Hollinger, Arts Director, who lights up the walls with her enthusiasm.)