Weaving New Patterns in Fiber Art

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While weaving is as old as civilization, new technology is enabling artists to make woven pictures in novel ways. On display at the Milwaukee Art Museum is recent work employing digital technology allowing the artist, Christy Matson, to control each thread on her loom. This enables her to paint threads in acrylics and watercolors with pinpoint determination and manipulate the materials with previously impossible exactness.

“Currents 38: Christy Matson” is the latest installment in the contemporary art series begun by MAM in 1982. It’s the first “Current” to feature a fiber artist. The exhibition includes 40 woven objects, many of them produced by Matson during the worst moments of the COVID shutdown.

“It was a two-year residency in my own studio!” she says. Even while juxtaposing home schooling her daughter with making art, the pandemic was productive. She describes “working at a different rhythm” with the patience gained from having fewer places to go and fewer things to do.

Many Horizons (2020) conveys a sense of lockdown isolation. Textured, three-dimensional and multilayered, Many Horizons is constructed as a series of woven horizontals intersected by a smaller number of verticals. The image places the viewer inside looksing out through a set of windows, the aperture of vision narrowed by Venetian blinds. The monumentally-scaled pandemic piece Magical Thinking (2020)—Matson explains that she though “the only way we can get through this is through magical thinking”—has become part of MAM’s permanent collection.

Modernist abstract painting provided Matson with direction in her earlier work. At first glance, some of her woven color bands suggest Mark Rothko in a bright mood while the pale shades of minimalism in other images are reminiscent of Agnes Martin. Figuration becomes more evident in floral and cruciform patterns that reference traditional crafts.

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“Currents 38” includes a video by Milwaukee expat Sam Macon, incorporating a montage of images from Los Angeles, where the Chicago-reared Matson has lived since 2012, into a documentary of her working methods, creating patterns of surface and structure from a pile of threads and a palette of paint.

Curated by Monica Obniski and coordinated by Margaret Andera, “Current 38: Christy Matson” will be on view through July 17. For more information, visit mam.org.