‘Technologies within Textiles’ at the Shepherd in Detroit
Library Street Collective is pleased to present “Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles,” a group exhibition curated by
Allison Glenn, Artistic Director of the Shepherd. “Warp and Weft” considers how artists experiment with new technologies,
interrogate materials, and embed innovative, inherited, familial, or ancestral epistemologies into their practices, to
foreground narrative and allegory.
From the invention of and subsequent improvements to the Jacquard loom, to the reframing of traditional weaving styles, and the incorporation of computers and other forms of machination, there is a long history of technologies located within, and born of, deep engagements with textiles. “Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles” brings together a wide spectrum of styles, histories, and approaches. Many artists in “Warp and Weft” have primarily textile-based practices, while others incorporate textiles and fabrics into largely experimental bodies of work. This range speaks to the materials’ expansiveness.
Relationships between humans and technology are explored through experimental projects. Working with machines
and technology, Kamau Amu Patton has created a series of “Static Field” paintings born of a dialogue between machines
and the artist, the tangible and intangible. To create these paintings, Patton points a camera into its output, generating
an image created by the feedback loop. The artist then records and digitizes the image, working with another person to
progressively spray and smooth the canvas for the printer’s plotter arm. The distorted, noisy image resembles microwaves
from the Cosmic Microwave Background, an echo of the Big Bang.
Alisha B. Wormsley and Kite’s iterative Cosmologyscape (2024 ongoing) is a public project that invites people to nourish
themselves through dreaming. Historically, the ability to dream provides an avenue to explore future possibilities and
process thoughts through the unconscious. During the run of “Warp and Weft,” visitors will be invited to take a rest in one
of the dream chambers, where they can upload their dreams to a dedicated website that will translate them into a system
of Lakota symbols and Black quilting patterns, generating a digital quilt square for each participant. The symbols of our
collective dreams will result in a digital quilt for Detroit, reflecting our collective visioning.
Trained by her aunt in the Guatemalan embroidery techniques of Comalapa, Angélica Serech began her career creating
güipiles, a traditional Mayan blouse worn by Indigenous women. Güipiles often have narrative embedded within their
abstract compositions, by way of cultural motifs using the visual vocabulary of Mayan principles. Breaking from convention, Serech began creating large-scale, hand dyed abstractions that are expansive interpretations of this heritage. The result is a series of knotted and woven tapestries that hold narrative within each thread.
With Dopamine Dream (2023), fourth-generation Navajo weaver Melissa Cody’s work expands upon the intertwined histories of Germantown Revival, a weaving style born from the dismantling and reconfiguring of woolen blankets given to Navajo people as they were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands by settlers. Imbuing her tight-weave textiles with pixelations evocative of 1980s video games like Nintendo and Pacman with symbolic Navajo motifs, such as spiders and Whirling Logs, Cody adds a further dimension to this inherited visual language.
The rips, fissures, and imperfections on the surface of Carole Harris’ textile-based assemblages mark the passing of
time. To create these complex abstractions, the artist layers strips of found fabric, interspersing soft, muted colors with
saturated ones.
Woven strips of coffee and tea-dyed muslin form Maren Hassinger’s Whole Cloth (2017), an almost six foot long assemblage of various brown and tan tones. Hassinger’s interest in seriality and repetition can be seen across media, including her wire rope, plastic bag, paper, and woven sculptures.
Gary Tyler’s narrative explorations include self-portraits of mediated images that circulated widely during the forty years he was wrongfully incarcerated at Angola, alongside photographs and sketches of scenes from the Angola Prison Drama Club, which he founded and led. Teaching himself how to sew during this time, as well as leading the drama club, created a space for personal and collective visioning through self-expression. Big Toe (2024) is a mixed media quilt depicting Terrence “Big Toe” Williams as Lucius in the 2012/2013 production of “The Life of Jesus Christ,” directed by Tyler.
Artists in “Warp and Weft” experiment with folding, wrapping, collapsing, layering, and otherwise manipulating textiles. The foundation of James Benjamin Franklin’s shaped paintings is thrifted fabrics, rugs, and quilts, upon which large swaths of vibrantly-colored acrylic paint, gel, and other mixed media are laid.
Drawing inspiration from the natural world, rippling lines cascade along Josefina Concha E.’s towering ten-foot Serie complementarios Naranjo I (Complementary series Orange I) (2023). Utilizing brightly colored thread and the zigzag stitch, Concha E. develops irregular weaves that allude to painting and sculptural forms.
Allie McGhee folds, twists, and contorts his painted canvases, creating low-relief sculptural forms inspired by the abstraction found in African symbolism. Informed by astronomy, cosmology, and music, McGhee’s expressionistic abstractions are also deeply embedded in research, including the nature of microscopic vision.
Born from his daily studio practice, Jason REVOK shapes weathered drop cloths– complete with the detritus of the atelier–onto painted canvas. The indexical quality of the folds in both McGhee and REVOK’s collapsed works creates a dialogue between the artists that is echoed in their distinct, yet similar, approaches.
Found materials are critical to Tyrell Winston’s Network series, created with salvaged nets taken from basketball courts across New York and Detroit.
Lisa Alberts creates her “Acute Onset” series from large sunprints she invites her children to create on fabric, which Alberts then cuts, sews, and ties into bulbous, irregular forms. The intertwined work is critical to Alberts’, who sees intrinsic connections between play and repetition, and the anxieties of motherhood and making.
Familial connections are also the crux of Esteban Ramón Pérez’s material choices. The leather and other fabrics found in his sewn and stretched compositions are often sourced from his father’s upholstery studio, which Pérez apprenticed in growing up. Evocative of the Chicano resquache ideology, at times the artist scars the surface of the discarded materials, incorporating marks and motifs that point to Mesoamerican histories, such as a portrait of an Olmec mask.
An interest in adornment and material histories anchors many artists’ practices. The Diné worldview of hózhó, which can be understood as living in balance and at one with the physical and spiritual, is manifest in Eric-Paul Riege’s continuation of Indigenous weaving, durational performances, and jewelry-making traditions inherited from his maternal ancestors. Riege’s yoo’4yay (2025) is a large-scale textile earring created for the Diné Ye’iitsoh deity, suspended from the central oculus. Loosely translated to “necklace (or beads) for fun/god”, yoo’4yay is a reflection on the advice the artist was given by one of his grandmothers.
Raphaël Barontini pays homage to historical figures and liberation movements through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in ceremony and ornamentation. In 2020, Barontini collaborated with Cowboys of Color National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, TX, inviting a group of Black cowboys to ride to the opening of his exhibition “Caribbean Fantastia,” at the Fort Worth Contemporary Arts. Each of the riders was given custom designed clothing to wear during the ride, including digitally printed scarves embellished with colorful fringe. Images on the scarves include those of Toussaint L’Overture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, and his army lieutenant Sanite Bélair, pointing to the connective histories of the Caribbean.
A collaboration between Nep Sidhu and Nicholas Galanin resulted in a series of SHE garments, representing the divine feminine, created in response to missing and murdered women in Alaska, Canada, and India. The collaboration is manifest through the combination of materials that reference both South Asian and First Nations epistemologies. SHE in Light Form (2015-2016), for example, includes abstracted images of a temple and tipi, and references to Chilkat weavers of the Pacific Northwest. The crest on the back of the gown represents the combination of a Sikh Khanda, a symbol of Sikhism, and Ti’naa, or copper shield in Tlingit that represents wealth through gifting.
“Warp and Weft” also makes connections to pedagogy and experimentation in Metro Detroit. In the 1930s Loja Saarinen,
textile designer and head of Cranbrook Academy’s Department of Weaving and Textile Design, commissioned a loom
for Studio Loja Saarinen by Swedish woodworker John Bexell. The legacy of this loom extends to the present day, and
is a connective thread for many artists within Warp and Weft, and those who inspire this new generation of textile-based
artists. For example, a class with Marianne Strengell, head of Cranbrook’s Department of Weaving and Textile Design (after
Saarinen’s retirement) led Olga de Amaral, pioneer of the Fiber Arts Movement, to begin to work in textiles.
As current Head of the Fiber Department, Joey Quiñones creates mixed media assemblages reflective of her hybrid Afro-Latinx identity, asking viewers to consider the intertwined histories of labor, race, and class in North America. This extension of pedagogy and access will be found in Fiber Club’s residency at the Shepherd. Fiber Club is a community of artists and creative practitioners in the Detroit metro area. They bring together people of all backgrounds, identities and ages who share one simple thing: curiosity and passion for fiber and textile-based processes. During the run of “Warp and Weft,” they will be organizing a series of drop in events.
Within “Warp and Weft,” industry informs and guides the dialogues. The jacquard loom, which revolutionized the textile
industry, was the precursor to punch card computers, and eventually the computer technology that is readily accessible in
everyday life. While the Industrial Revolution found its anchor in Henry Ford’s assembly line and automotive technologies
in Detroit, the machination of textile production was rooted in Manchester, England.
With White Out, You In (RBG) (2024), jewelry maker and metalsmith Tiff Massey uncovers the material histories of gingham. Often used to clothe enslaved, entire economies were built around the supplying of this cloth to southern plantation owners, including textile mills in Northern England that relied on the cotton output from Southern plantations in the United States.4 Massey has embedded excised portions of gingham check fabric into gold-framed, mirrored surfaces, inviting the viewer to encounter their reflection within the material, and ultimately consider themselves in relationship to these histories.
With an experimental approach and interest in industrial-scale weaving, Liz Collins created Rainbow Mountains First Moon,
(2024) a woven loom assemblage developed as a prototype for Rainbow Mountain Weather and Rainbow Mountain Moon
(2024), the two tapestries that Collins debuted at the central pavilion in the Giardini at this year’s Venice Biennial. With
Rainbow Mountains First Moon, Collins returns to a language of abstraction she has developed over time, envisioning a
queer utopia that is just out of reach beyond cascading, icy blue mountain ranges giving way to bursts of chromacolored
rainbows. A stylistic moon perched atop the composition is a reference to Sonia Delaunay, who, due to her bold, playful,
wild abstraction and engagement across art and design, Collins sees as part of her creative lineage. This lunar motif is
a foreboding one, underscoring the precarity of the times we are living in. Starting with a drawing, Collins created this
expansive panorama with a new 12-foot wide digital jacquard loom at the TextielLab in Tilburg. Trained in textile design
with experience in fashion, Collins has been working with various mills for a decade, only recently experimenting with
the scale that is possible with this new digital loom.
Carrying along with the intersections of fashion and industry, Margaret Hull’s practice engages with critiques of Eurocentric
models of fashion production by experimenting with various textiles and patterns that push against the excesses of the
fashion industries. Using zero-waste blouse patterns and plant-based dyes, including marigold, indigo, and cochineal,
Hull cuts and hand dyes strips of fabric, reassembling them into banners evocative of quilt making techniques.
“Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles” presents artists with practices that are rooted in the haptic, presenting a wide
range of approaches. Please join us at the opening reception on Saturday, January 25, 2025, for a dialogue between
Submerge artists Cornelius Harris and John Collins, who will discuss histories of techno and house music as they reflect
on the relationships between the warp and weft of textiles to sound, and the legacies of Underground Resistance (UR),
a music collective from Detroit, Michigan, followed by a UR DJ-set and reception with the artists.
Library Street Collective
Since its inception in 2012, Library Street Collective has presented exhibitions and programming that connects Detroit
to the international arts community while maintaining crucial support to the local creative renaissance of the city. The
gallery’s influence extends beyond its walls into the city’s public, private and heritage spaces.
A crucial aspect of Library Street Collective’s efforts involves raising awareness and funding for nonprofits and other worthy causes, particularly those based in Detroit. The gallery has rapidly evolved to include exhibitions, collaborations, and partnerships with major museums, as well as large-scale public projects and community-based initiatives that inspire participation from Detroit residents and visitors alike.
the Shepherd
The Shepherd is a century-old Romanesque-style church transformed into a cultural arts center with multi-faceted
programming.
