Cooper Hewitt says...
Lenore Tawney was born in Lorraine, Ohio, and spent her young adult life in Chicago, where she worked as a proofreader for a legal publishing company. She began taking classes at the Art Institute as well as Chicago’s Institute of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus), studying sculpture under Alexander Archipenko and weaving with Marli Ehrman. In 1957, at the age of fifty, she moved to New York City to redefine herself as an artist. She established her studio (the first of nine in the city) at Coenties Slip on the Lower East Side, where she joined an artistic community that included Jack Youngerman, Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, and, most significantly, Agnes Martin, with whom she developed a close relationship.
Tawney soon became a key figure in the burgeoning fiber arts movement. Through an intensely personal and experimental approach, she developed techniques that redefined weaving, moving it beyond the traditional constraints of the loom and into three-dimensional space. Her open-warp weavings subverted functionality with their free-floating wefts suspended on a fragile scaffold of warps, like drawings in air, while her innovative open reed technique allowed her to dispense with both the grid and the traditional rectangular form of the wall hanging, and to explore additional compositional axes. These works, which she called ‘woven forms,’ shifted the perception of weaving from flat plane to sculptural expression.
Tawney’s work was prominently displayed in seminal exhibitions like Wall Hangings and Rugs (1957) and Woven Forms (1963) at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Woven Forms by Lenore Tawney (1962) at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Wall Hangings (1969) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her highly influential sculptural weavings were shown internationally at venues including the Brussels World’s Fair (1958), Milan Triennale (1964), and Lausanne Biennale Internationale de la Tapisserie (1974). In 1964, the Cooper Union Museum (today CHSDM) presented the exhibition Wonders of Thread to celebrate the donation by House Beautiful editor Elizabeth Gordon of numerous works in fiber, including important new work by then-emerging artist Lenore Tawney. Additional works were donated by Tawney to the collection the same year. That group of nine works, all dating between 1959 and 1965, forms a very strong core collection of Tawney’s woven work at Cooper Hewitt. It includes stunning examples of her open warp weaving (Vitae, 1959-60) and woven forms (Mourning Dove, 1962).
Tawney created her last woven work in 1976 and turned her attention to intimately scaled drawings and collages, many of which were sent to friends as mail art. In the 1980s she again turned to large-scale work in her majestic Cloud series, though now linen yarns were not woven, but hung simply in a grid from a canvas armature at the ceiling—massive volumes, defined weightlessly.
When her vision gradually failed in the 1990s, she continued making art with the aid of an assistant. Tawney died in 2007, at age 100.
