Saturday, March 30, 2024

A Major Museum Supports its Community of Artists by Ileana Soto

In June of 2020, during the Covid-19 lock-down, artists of all media were unable to find venues open to display or perform their work. Museums, galleries, and all public performing halls were closed. 

The De Young Museum of San Francisco, a world premier museum, located in Golden Gate Park, announced an opportunity to support local artists. They offered a ‘call to artists’ residing in the nine counties that surround the Bay Area, to submit one piece for a 7-gallery salon-style exhibit opening in late September 2020.  They would accept up to 12,000 entries with a selection process winnowing down to the 850 accepted. The jurors wanted the show to reflect the diversity and inclusivity of our area. 

The show was called the “De Young Open.” I was lucky enough to have a piece accepted, “Heated Boundaries.” Not many textile pieces were included. The diversity of artists accepted was broad as well as the themes, including landscape, migration, climate issues, figurative pieces, and more. It was a success, but because of further lock-downs, it opened late (October) and closed early (December instead of January).
The organizers decided to make the “De Young Open” a triennial event. In June of 2023, the call went out. I had the opening entry date on my calendar, June 6th, and had already decided which piece I would enter, “Caravan: La Bestia.” I entered the first day. I knew that when they reached 12,000, they would close the entry. I couldn’t know when that would happen. That year, they received 8,000+ entries, and accepted 867. Luckily, mine was one of those!
This year’s exhibit was even more exciting than the first. There were many more textile pieces accepted: Alice Beasley, Young-min Lee, Denise Oyama Miller, Joe Cunningham, Adriane Dedic, to name a few. In addition, many pieces were fiber-based using weaving techniques in plastic, wire, paper, and metal: Deborah Corsini, Rachel Liebman. The background walls were painted a deep charcoal-violet that enhanced the art and gave the show a sense of community and gravitas. 

My goal in telling you about this marvelous exhibit, is to encourage you to contact your local museum to encourage them to do the same. Not only does it enhance the museum’s connection with local artists, but it brings in additional visitors. I brought friends (local and some who specifically travelled here to see my piece and the entire show) to walk through the galleries and look – in amazement. We 867 artists made money for the museum, and the museum enhanced the reputation of its wonderful local artists. 

 Let’s see if we can’t help local institutions recognize the artistic talent around them! Post Note: If you want to enter the only other Salon-style show (that I know about), the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London, you’ll have to wait, like me, until early 2025! Otherwise, I’ll be waiting until 2026 to enter the next De Young Open.  

By Ileana Soto

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Breaking the Boundaries of my Comfort Zone with Natural Dyes - by Sue Sherman

 

One of the most fundamental forks in the path of any career is the choice to be a generalist or a specialist.  Do I try to learn a little bit about a lot of different specialties in my discipline? Or do I try to become the absolute best I can be in a very narrow niche?  In my first career I took the former; it was a good choice as I got to work on quite a lot of different kinds of projects, and it also provided a great foundation for managing multidiscipline projects. 



But when I retired from my first job and started a serious career as a fibre artist, it didn’t take long for me to realize that I wanted to try the other fork in the road this time.  After about a year of playing the field, I settled on an artistic technique (painting with thickened dyes) and started developing a style of my own (creating realistic looking fibre art featuring animals based on my own photographs).  And a couple of years after that I specialized a little further by (mostly) creating art that makes a statement about the environment, like the quilt shown above (from 2023) with penguins using their vote to have a say in their collective response to climate change.  I have now been following this very specific path for a few years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how much more I can learn about doing this one thing – the rabbithole keeps opening up more and more opportunities as I dig deeper into it! 

So why would I want to learn a completely new technique?

Well . . . my concern for the environment always brings me back to the way in which I do my work.  In particular the dyes I use, Procion MX dyes, are synthetic dyes that involve the use of chemicals to bond with the fibres to create those rich, strong colours.  These dyes also require quite a lot of water for preparing, dyeing and washing out. 

The alternative to synthetic dyes is to use natural dyes, using bits of plant and rusty nails to create lovely patterns on fabric.  As a member of the Art Cloth Network I have seen some truly amazing work by other members who are masters of natural dyeing processes.  Natural dyes have always intrigued me, but seemed to involve a bit too much witchcraft and forest lore, and anyways I was pretty sure they couldn’t be used to create work within my selected niche.  But finally the siren call of the unknown was too loud to ignore, and it seemed a good time to take a class in natural dyeing just so I could finally set aside that thought and be content making realistic artwork with my chemical dyes.

Good thing I’m able to admit when I’m wrong!  Well, not about the witchcraft and forest lore part, but who knew that natural dyes could be used to create realistic artwork on fabric?  I signed up with Maiwa.com for their online class “Printing and Painting with Natural Dyes”.  It was designed around some simple methods of applying colour to fabric using thickened natural dyes.  Methods demonstrated in the online videos included block printing and painting simple shapes onto fabric.  But by using my own brushes (which range from teeny-tiny to medium sized) and my library of animal photographs to do the class assignments, it became evident that there is a lot of potential here! 


Natural dyes are more complicated than chemical dyes.  No doubt about it.  For starters, they don’t come in jars labelled “yellow” or “red”, but by the names of the plants (or bugs) they contain.  You need to learn how to prepare each raw material to create the liquid dye, and how each one reacts to tannins or iron.  Some need to be boiled and extracted, some just mix with water; some need to be strained and some not.  And you need to know about mordants and how to apply them to the fabric where they will react with the dye.  Bottom line, you can’t really be sure what you are going to get with a particular dye on a particular fabric using a particular method until you test it, so you need to keep good notes of what you did to create each colour, as shown in the above sampler.

And when the process is complete you will need to steam your fabric to heat set the dyes for a permanent bond, and which also modifies the colour of some of the dyes.  We used a bamboo steamer over hot water, for 30-60 minutes depending on the piece.  And depending on the method used to prepare and dye the fabric, you may need baths of chalk or bran or plain water to initiate certain reactions.  Yikes!  But in the end you can do some really great things with it.

I’m just at the beginning of exploring this particular branch of my rabbithole, but here is what I have found so far:

First and foremost, you can get a really good black with myrobalan and iron.  Given that my work involves a lot of penguins and a few zebras, this is no small thing.  I have never been able to get a true black with chemical dyes – it usually turns out as a very dark navy blue.  You don’t necessarily notice it to look at, but I can really tell when I go to stitch on it and the black thread doesn’t match. The zebra below was one of my first pieces painted with thickened natural dyes, and you can see how true the black stripes are.  The test splotches on the bottom are of four different natural dyes that come out black or close to it (myrobalan, gallnut, pomegranate and cutch) that I was auditioning for this piece.  I'm looking forward to getting this under my longarm for some thread painting!


Second, this class introduced me to painting with thickened dyes on silk and linen, and investigating how the colours look on these other fibres.  (To be clear, I could probably have learned how to do that with my thickened chemical dyes but just never got around to it.)  I love silk and linen, and can see this opening up a whole new area for me. 

The three images below are of the same rose created with mostly the same natural dyes on three different fabrics.  The second and third images were painted at the same time - the thin silk on the top allowed residual dye to pass through it to the lightweight cotton below.  I'm still trying to decide what to do with these.

Rose on heavy natural (unbleached) cotton

Rose on silk


Rose on lightweight cotton that was
underneath the silk when I painted it.


On the downside, I find the natural dyes to be much more difficult to clean, and much less forgiving if you happen to leave them too long before trying to remove them from brushes, palettes, mixing tools and my laundry sink.

And another downside is that natural dyes use a shocking amount of water in the various pre- and post-dyeing baths, not to mention the heat of dye preparation and steaming the finished pieces.  I still think that if you look at the total environmental impact of the two types of dyes, from manufacture through to disposal, the natural dyes are probably better, but not by the clear margin I was expecting.

I will definitely be adding a variety of natural dye techniques to my toolbox moving forward, especially for artwork involving penguins.  The piece below is 12"x12" and features a penguin image created using natural dyes.  The frame is part of the same whole cloth, and was created by painting with metallic fabric paint.  I then trimmed very near the quilting stitches and finished the edges with more metallic paint. 

 

 click here for Sue's website

 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Making the Most of Naïveté

by Russ Little

I'm a new weaver. I've got a total of 5 warps and about 10 yards of cloth to my name, but I'm hooked. I've resisted weaving in the same way that I resisted knitting for so many years. I really did NOT need another needle thing in my bag of tricks to distract me. I have a friend in heaven--a very accomplished weaver--who prophesied this years ago and I know he's laughing now. I'm not entirely sure that my resistance was the wisest course. But to everything there is a season, and perhaps this season (my 61st if you count by years) is the one. I'm now a passionate knitter and this weaving thing... I can't get over how quickly color and pattern develop as the shuttle flies back and forth and how much there is to learn.

All that being so, I am, as I said, a new weaver. With that comes a whole host of challenges--tension problems, unintended floats, and wonky selvedges, which are the left and right sides of the cloth that should be straight and neat but only become so with practice and mastery. The photo above is an example of a wonky selvage indeed. 

I'm working on a project that incorporates lengths of handwoven cloth, and as I prepared to join those pieces to make a larger whole I realized that those wonky edges posed a problem. I could cut them straight, but even to the untrained eye that waviness of the warp threads close to the edges would be obvious. Or, I could cut farther into the width of the cloth, sacrificing something like 25% of the total width to get to a straight edge that lined up with straight warp threads. Or, I  could look at my bouncing baby cloth and love it for who and what it is--early work by a student--and honor the naivete of the line formed by that wonky edge.

That's what I'm doing. I'm following the natural edge of the cloth, finishing it, and even accentuating it with additional stitch. 













It's an entirely innocent line and an unintended mark that has a power of its own. Though the maker is hardly young, perhaps the mark has some youthfulness in the sense of one in the early stages of a journey. 

Wherever you are in your own artistic journey, don't lose sight of the horizon, but honor the work that you are making now, if only because it is a milestone along the way.


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

ACN Instagram followers are on the rise by Kathleen Cunningham

One of our goals for our March 6 Textile Talk was to get people to look at our website and social media, I can confidently report that we had an uptick in engagement and reach on Instagram. Bravo to our team for representing ACN so well! 

We did a good job promoting the Textile Talk on Instagram, but, it wasn't just the posts about the Textile Talk that got people to our account at the end of February and beginning of March. Maria Billings created five posts about the upcoming Unfolding exhibition at the Sierra Arts Foundation in Reno, NV, April 3-29, 2024 so people who came to our IG could see current activity. Each of her posts features a photo and short blurb about one of the artists in the show. We got a lot of response to this. Maria is continuing to feature work in Unfolding.

I invite anyone on Instagram to re-post the posts about Unfolding at the Sierra Arts Foundation from the ACN profile between now and the end of the show on April 29. You can do it from your account--you don't need to be logged into the ACN account. Take advantage of the content being ready-made and share each of the posts at least once to your followers inviting them to attend the show or at least follow our account. 

Let's see how many people we can get to follow us on IG. We currently have 917 followers. Can you help us reach 1000???

Thanks.