Statement:

“Along with cave paintings, threads were among the first transmitters of meaning” wrote Anni Albers in On Weaving. Even so, for most of contemporary art history, textile arts been categorized and dismissed as craft. Over the last few decades, the process of bridging this long-implied gap between mediums has been pioneered by artists outside of the Western art world.///

Today, as the contemporary art world continues to witness an increased presence of textile arts, the supposed dichotomy between “craft” and “art” is both challenged and examined.

The hierarchies which placed fabric beneath the paintbrush have often been motivated by cultural, gendered, and regional biases, and with every stitch, the artists in this show engage with their own experiences, losses, and histories at the hands of the same prejudices.

Textile arts, historically, were as much a tool of storytelling as they were practical.

Like the tapestries of Raphael, recounting scenes from the Gospels stitch by stitch on a massive scale, or like a great-great-grandmother’s quilt passed down generation to generation, each square holding family heritage that may have otherwise been forgotten, the histories that precede us—on ancestral, cultural, and regional scales—are as intrinsic to each textile as the thread they are born of.

Despite both the skill and artistry required of textile work, until contemporary movements, textiles have rarely been regarded as more than “craft”—both as a result of the pervasive necessity of textiles, from the clothes we wear to the sheets we sleep on, as well as the historical social implication of allowing a field pioneered by both women and the global south to be deemed “art.” As a result, the labor has gone mostly unrecognized and unacknowledged.

The artists in With every fiber challenge the outdated notions that have relegated textile work to a backseat view of the art world and disassemble the politics that placed it there.

Through repurposing cultural fabrics, weaving empathetic organic figures, or encompassing self-portraits with stitching, they step away from both traditional practices and traditional lines of thinking.

With every fiber presents textiles as both a tangible manifestation of labor and an extension of the canvas, while examining how even with this contemporary shift away from convention, the narrative thread is imbued in every stitch, as much purposeful as it is unintentional—for each one carries the weight of the huge cultural histories that precede it.

Negin Mahzoun (b. Iran) regards textiles as an act of remembrance.

Through her work, she is able to give form to oppression, using her sewing practices to engage with social and cultural trauma.

Stitching over her self-portraits mirrors the self-destructive tendencies that often accompany trauma, allowing her pieces to become both a visual metaphor for that suffering, as well as a path to healing.

Negin received her MFA in Studio Art from the City College of New York. Her works have been exhibited worldwide, including in Paris, New York, Italy, Denmark, and Iran. Mahzoun lives and works in New York.