Mad About MAD

1. La Ciudad Frondosa (2011-2012)I visit the Museum of Art and Design each time I come to New York.  The current exhibitions are always well-curated and filled with surprising and fresh art.  Weaving is present in both of the current exhibits, New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America and What Would Mrs Webb Do?: A Founder’s Vision, the latter an exhibit of pieces from the permanent collection.  As a weaver, it is not only textiles that draw me to MAD; the grids, textures, shapes, and inventiveness of works in many media are inspiring.

The New Territories exhibit, featuring the work of young designers from Latin American countries, included a fabulous woven hanging. In “Homage to Cruz-Diaz,” Colombian artist Jorge Lizarazo was inspired by the intersecting elements and grids in the paintings of Carlos Cruz-Diaz.  The result is a shimmering, shadowed, multi-layered work  that bears examination from several angles and distances.

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Three pieces from Venezuelan artists Maria Eugenia Davina and Eduardo Portillo were woven in triple weave of silk, mache palm fiber, and copper.  Those pieces are fun for a weaver to examine and dissect.  The third piece was a portion of the highly textured piece cast in bronze.  Amazing.

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A few weavings hung in the exhibit of pieces from the permanent collection, What Would Mrs Webb Do?: A Founder’s Vision. I was interested in the technique in Mary Balzer Buskirk’s transparency piece (a terrible photo; it was in a glass case.) It looks like the background has open areas, where you see the black part of the stripes, as opposed to the gray.  On closer examination I saw that the black stripes have black warp, so it’s a striped warp that is used as the base for the laid-in design.  Nice.  I also like the small flags at the bottom of the weaving.

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When searching for weaving inspiration in NYC, The Museum of Art and Design is not to be missed.