film quilts

“Interlaced: Animation and Textiles” exhibition /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

“Interlaced: Animation and Textiles” (with catalog)

Govett Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Gallery

New Plymouth, New Zealand

Dec 7, 2024 - April 27, 2025

Spanning the gallery and cinema spaces of the Len Lye Centre, Interlaced brings together moving-image works fashioned from textile materials and patterns alongside fiber works inspired by visual transformations made possible by animation.

Artists featured in the exhibition explore ways of embroidering with projected light, quilting celluloid films, and weaving digital tapestries. By braiding together contemporary animation and textile art, Interlaced highlights the influence of textile history and culture on artisanal media production.

The work of renowned experimental filmmaker Len Lye (1901-1980) plays an important connective role in the exhibition. Interlaced makes a compelling case for the influence of Pacific tapa design and British textile production on Lye’s innovative animation techniques. Nesting Len Lye’s animated films in a broader field of analogue and digital media, Interlaced explores the enduring capacity of textile forms to make visible animating forces and to reanimate intergenerational cultural memory.

"Implicit Explicit" at Hauser & Wirth Feb 27 - April 7, 2024 /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to mark the sixth anniversary of its UK-based contemporary craft gallery Make Hauser & Wirth with ‘Implicit Explicit,’ its first Los Angeles presentation, on view at the gallery’s Downtown Arts District complex from 27 February through 7 April 2024.

This exhibition will showcase works by four American artists whose practices encourage thoughtful consideration of our perceptions of and assumptions about craft. The participating artists—Joe Feddersen, Keiko Fukazawa, Sabrina Gschwandtner and Shari Mendelson—share a predilection for combining materials and imagery in ways that overtly challenge some of the established hierarchies of materials and processes most often associated with the handmade. For example, in ‘Untitled (Arts and Crafts Hands at Work)’ (2017), Sabrina Gschwandtner physically stitches together archival film footage using traditional quilt patterns. The result is an exquisite—and quite literal—tapestry of Gschwandtner’s exploratory approach to filmmaking. In Joe Feddersen’s work, the artist intricately weaves contemporary symbols of urban life, such as traffic signs and high voltage towers, into waxed linen baskets or uses them as motifs on his blown glass vessels. This seamless integration of techniques and imagery from both the past and the present adds depth to his work, introducing an unexpected dynamism to traditional practice.

As the title alludes, the territory between implied notions and explicit expressions of craft is rich for investigation. Each of the four artists in ‘Implicit Explicit’ cleaves to the inherent characteristics of craft by engaging with a traditionally craft-associated technique or material. Equally, each artist uses his or her work to focus upon both the historical application of a craft practice or medium, and the wider context of contemporary artmaking, culture and imagery. The resulting dialogues that exist within and among the works on view will underscore Make Hauser & Wirth’s commitment to showcasing the achievements of exceptional makers and activating critical thinking about how craft is defined and how it impacts our world.

‘Implicit Explicit’ was conceived and curated by Meaghan Roddy, in collaboration with Make Hauser & Wirth.

"Social Fabric" exhibition /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

“Social Fabric”

Newport Art Museum

Newport, RI

December 3, 2022 - June 11, 2023

From the cradle to the grave, human beings are wrapped in, and surrounded by textiles. What people make to clothe, protect, and decorate themselves and their spaces, tells us about their cultures, eras, identities, families, and lives. This exhibition brings together a diverse array of contemporary textile artists who are weavers, sculptors, quiltmakers, and visionaries to examine the complex issues of our time. Together, their practices demonstrate and reimagine the expressive and social functions of textiles. Some of the themes include: climate change and sustainability, adaptation and reuse, war and survival, human rights and social justice, the reclamation of history, the reaffirmation and celebration of communities, and gender, ethnic, and racial identities.

The artists in this exhibition take on the challenges of a variety of materials, pushing textiles in new directions and seeing how far they can go. Through textiles, they inspire new conversations about contemporary issues.

Featured artists include: Jim Arendt, Elizabeth Duffy, Brooke Erin Goldstein, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Letitia Huckaby, Tamara Kostianovsky, Jesse Krimes, Dinh Q. Lê, Aubrey Longley-Cook, Veronica Mays, Alison Saar, Marie Watt, Emma Welty, Nafis M. White, and more.

Lecture: Artists Celebrate Suffrage /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

The National Arts Club presents an artistic celebration of suffrage. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Curator Mary Murray showcases three artists and their work, linking contemporary issues to 19th-century practices. Panelists include artist Sabrina Gschwandtner, artist Lesley Dill, and Linda Ferber, Director Emertia and Senior Art Historian, New-York Historical Society.

"Celebrating Suffrage: Women Artists from the Collection" /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

Celebrating Suffrage: Women Artists from the Collection

Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute
310 Genesee Street
Utica, NY 13502

February 28 - April 19, 2020

Celebrating Suffrage marks the 100-year anniversary of Congress’s ratification of women’s suffrage, the right for American women to vote in all government elections. Overnight, this momentous event enabled the disenfranchised half the population to participate in the electoral process of American democracy.

The Museum of Art honors the dedicated tenacity of suffragists in organizations from the National American Woman Suffrage Association to the Nation Association of Colored Women to gain the rights women exercise today.  All of the artwork on view is from the Museum’s collection or was created by women in the full-time Pratt MWP faculty. Women found unique creative outlets before and after they were officially recognized as full citizens of the United States. This exhibition explores the role of art as a vehicle for women, as individuals or in groups, to reflect, reform, or challenge social beliefs and political practices of their era.

During the 1800s, social mores banned women from attending public art schools  so they found creative pursuits appropriate to their largely homebound circumstances. The works of art on view dating from this period demonstrate the various ways in which women transformed the materials and subjects available to them into works of art. These creative practices historically have been dismissed as minor. But quilting, watercolors, or silhouettes were all important means of artistic expression for women who had no access to the education or materials required for fine art. Leaping ahead in time to the 1970s, feminist artists embraced traditional women’s art, such as china painting or needlecrafts, and celebrated them as worthy counterparts to painting and sculpture.

Since the early 1900s, opportunities for women in the arts have expanded—more women have enrolled in art schools, more women have become instructors in those programs, more women are exhibiting their work, more collectors and museums are acquiring works of art by women. Statistically, even if women remain outpaced by men in exposure and in pay, today there are legions of women designers, illustrators, painters, sculptors, printmakers, and videographers who are innovators in the arts.

Celebrating Suffrage examines how women created their place within the larger art community, adding an important vision that has often been overlooked or undervalued. This historic anniversary presents the opportunity to celebrate the contributions to subject matter, materials, and means of expression that women have made to the visual arts in the United States.

Miranda Hofelt, Curator of 19th-Century American Art
Mary Murray, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

“Winter Workspace 10 Year Anniversary: Returning to the Source,” Wave Hill, Bronx, NY /  by Sabrina Gschwandtner

Winter Workspace Artists: Returning to the Source

Wave Hill
4900 Independence Avenue
Bronx, NY 10471-2899 

January 19 - March 29, 2020

Since 2010, 111 artists have had studios at Wave Hill through the Winter Workspace residency program. This time of experimentation and reflection in the garden proved immensely influential to their practices, launching new and expanded directions. The work they created was often exhibited widely, finding new audiences, meanings and contexts. We are celebrating the 10th anniversary through the exhibition Winter Workspace Artists: Returning to the Source, on view in Wave Hill House from January 18 - March 29. This will include works inspired by Wave Hill during the residency or after, a video screening program, and a showcase of public programs that workspace artists have facilitated over the years.