Textile Artists Today

by Kristine Schomaker

September is Textile Month as part of Textile Arts | Los Angeles.

I remember the first time I saw the work of Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse and Yayoi Kusama. These artists blew me away with their use of every day materials and traditional women’s work of sewing and weaving to create fine art objects that would be talked about in the Art Historical Canon for many years to come. They inspired and empowered many artists working today to experiment, play and create using whatever is at hand.

Of course, We can look at the powerful quilts of Harriet Powers whose work from the late 1800s empowered the fabric and design movement along with the second wave of feminism in the 1970s which brought domestic art into the artists every day practice.

This article isn’t about making any new revelations in the world of art involving textiles. It is about sharing the work of contemporary artists who may not be known. With the pandemic, artists have been experimenting more and more with items they have in their homes. It is natural to go back to craft work such as sewing and weaving and finding materials around their home they can play with.

This article has also been crowd-sourced. I already had a file on my computer of Textile artists to watch, but I wanted to know more. I posted on Facebook that I was looking for artists who use textiles in their work. I left the question open to interpretation because in today’s art world textile art is more broad than ever. My community did not disappoint.

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