Lenore Tawney

Lenore Tawney (born Leonora Agnes Gallagher; May 10, 1907 – September 24, 2007) was an American artist known for her drawings, personal collages, and sculptural assemblages, who became an influential figure in the development of fiber art.

Early life and education

One of five children born in Lorain, Ohio to Irish American parents Sarah Jennings and William Gallagher. She left home at age 20 and worked in Chicago as a proofreader while taking night courses at the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1941 she married George Tawney, who died eighteen months later. After his death, she to moved to Urbana, Illinois to be near his family and enrolled at the University of Illinois to study art therapy. Tawney's introduction to the tenets of the German Bauhaus school and the artistic avant-garde began in 1946 when she attended László Moholy-Nagy's Chicago Institute of Design. There she studied with cubist sculptor Alexander Archipenko and abstract expressionist painter Emerson Woelffer, among others, and in 1949, she studied weaving with Marli Ehrman. While living in Paris from 1949-1951, she traveled extensively throughout North Africa and Europe. In 1954, she studied with the distinguished Finnish weaver Martta Taipale at Penland School of Crafts and began working tapestry and introduced a new palette into her work.

Career

In 1957, she moved to New York City, where she became associated with a generation of Minimalist artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin and Jack Youngerman.

In 1961, Tawney's first solo exhibition, which included forty weavings she had produced since 1955, opened at the Staten Island Museum That year, she also pioneered an "open reed" for her loom in order to produce more mutable woven forms. Throughout the 1960s Tawney created drawings, postcard collages, and college and box forms and she combined collage and woven works. After 1977 she ''"...developed a series of architecturally scaled 'clouds', composed of thousands of shimmering linen threads suspended from canvas supports..."'' From the late 1950s up until her death in 2007, Tawney lived and worked mainly in New York City, traveling abroad frequently. "The first hundred years", she said with a smile on her hundredth birthday, "were the hardest."

Widely known in the New York art world and beyond, she was the veteran of more than two dozen solo exhibitions in leading galleries and museums and she participated in dozens of important group exhibitions. The American Craft Museum (New York City), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, New York), the Renwick Gallery (Washington, D.C.), and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam are among the Tawney public collections. ''Lenore Tawney: A Retrospective: American Craft Museum'' was published in 1990 by Rizzoli, and ''Lenore Tawney: Signs on the Wind, Postcard Collages'' was published by Pomegranate in 2002.

Artwork

Fiber

Tawney began weaving in 1954. Her early tapestries combined traditional with experimental, using an ancient Peruvian gauze weave technique and inlayed colorful yarns to create a painterly effect that appeared to float in space. Because of her unorthodox weaving methods, Tawney was spurned by both the craft and art worlds, but her distinct style attracted many devoted admirers. She is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive.

Tawney's weavings fall into three categories: the solid straight weaving, the open warp weave, and the mesh or screen woven as background for solid areas. Tawney often went beyond traditional definitions of weaving, including needlework to add action to the line of a woven design. Furthering her experimentation, Tawney began creating what she called "woven forms". These totem-like sculptural weavings abandoned the rectangular format of traditional tapestries, and were suspended from the ceiling off the wall. She sometimes incorporated found objects such as feathers and shells into these pieces.

Drawing

Beginning in 1964 Lenore Tawney began a series of linear drawings using ink on graphing paper. This eight piece collection would go on to inspire the 1990s series Drawings in Air, a three dimensional study of lines as threads in space. Tawney suspends threads in space with the help of plexiglass and wood framing.

Collage

In conjunction with her drawing series Tawney began a number of collage works. The artist utilized antique book pages, envelopes, and postcards as a working surface to which she liberally applied imagery, text, and drawing. These works contained a variety of messages, some secret to humorous messages. The artist sent collages to friends and eventually created a series of collage books along with other items.

Assemblage

In 1964, Tawney began creating mixed media assemblages of small found objects including feathers, twigs, pebbles, string, bones, wood, and pages from rare books. These delicate, poetic pieces were often spiritual in nature, containing elusive messages about finding inner peace and the fragility of life. She continued to collect and assemble these pieces until her death in 2007, aged 100. Her assemblage ''Crow Woman'' from 1993, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates the artist's delicate spiritual approach.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

* ''Lenore Tawney'', 1961, Staten Island Museum, New York, text by James Coggin and Agnes Martin.
* ''Lenore Tawney'', 1975, California State University, Fullerton, text by Dextra Frankel, Bernard Kester, and Katharine Kuh.
* ''Lenore Tawney: A Personal World'', 1978, Brookfield Craft Center, Connecticut, preface and interview with Lenore Tawney by Jean d'Autilia.
* ''Lenore Tawney'', 1979, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, text by Katharine Kuh and Leah P. Sloshberg.
* ''Lenore Tawney: A Retrospective'', 1990, American Craft Museum and Rizzoli International Publications, New York, edited by Kathleen Nugent Mangan, foreword by Katharine Kuh, text by Erika Billeter, Kathleen Nugent Mangan, and Paul J. Smith.
* ''Lenore Tawney'', 1996, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, foreword by Rudi Fuchs, text by Liesbeth Crommelin and Kathleen Nugent Mangan.
* ''Lenore Tawney–Meditations: Assemblages, Collages, and Weavings'', 1997, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, text by Judith E. Stein.
* ''Vestures of Water: The Work of Lenore Tawney'', 1997, Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania, text by Kathleen Nugent Mangan.
* ''Lenore Tawney: Celebrating Five Decades of Work'', 2000, browngrotta arts, Wilton, Connecticut, foreword by Kathleen Nugent Mangan, text by Sigrid Wortmann Weltge, notes by Lenore Tawney.
* ''Lenore Tawney: Drawings in Air'', 2007, browngrotta arts, Wilton, Connecticut, text by Kathleen Nugent Mangan.
* ''Lenore Tawney: Wholly Unlooked For'', 2013, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland and University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, foreword by Kathleen Nugent Mangan, text by Sid Sachs, Warren Seelig, and T'ai Smith.
* ''Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe'', 2019, John Michael Kohler Arts Center

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