Drop, Cloth

Adela Akers, Chellis Baird, Paige Beeber, Lynda Benglis, Jenny Brillhart, John Chamberlain, Lia Cook, Anna Fasshauer, Sam Gilliam, Al Held, Kenichi Hoshine, Suchitra Mattai, Jenny Morgan, Catherine Murphy, Elaine Reichek, Nicola Stephanie, Leslie Wayne, Betty Woodman, Kennedy Yanko Drop, Cloth is a group show that presents a 50-year lineage of draping in contemporary art, both in the literal sense in which the substrate of the canvas is activated, and in the representational sense, where textile forms are depicted. Curated by Glenn Adamson and Severin Delfs and spanning two Chelsea gallery spaces, Drop, Cloth is a group show that presents a 50-year lineage of draping in contemporary art, both in the literal sense in which the substrate of the canvas is activated, and in the representational sense, where textile forms are depicted. The exhibition also navigates the social implications of textile and drapery as a feminist intervention and a method of identity exploration. Proudly co-presented by Susan Inglett Gallery and Hollis Taggart, Drop, Cloth is accompanied by a physical catalogue with illustrations of works and essays by both Adamson and Delfs. Featuring approximately 30 works by 25 artists, Drop, Cloth embodies both visual pleasure and conceptual rigor. It takes as its starting point the myriad ways artists have engaged with drapery throughout art history, recognizing how fabric often assumes a freely expressive, proto-abstract quality. Drop, Cloth stages the double resonance of fabric: formally through its folds, patterns, and articulation of surface and space, as well as symbolically through its rich actions of hiding, presenting, revealing, and representing. Keeping in mind the recent resurgence of attention paid to contemporary fiber art—a genre which flourished in the 1960s and '70s but was consigned to obscurity until recently—this exhibition traces the evolution of this amorphous genre. The artists in Drop, Cloth offer radically different ways of negotiating with the possibilities of cloth and fabric. It features pioneering artists like Sam Gilliam who played a key part in the revolutionary expansion of fabric as an avant-garde material in the '60s, as well as Lynda Benglis who investigated the flexibility and mobility of fabric using non-fabric materials, like poured resin and cast metal. Contemporary artists like Kennedy Yanko carry these legacies forward in her work which, as noted by Severin Delfs in his catalogue essay, 'performs a kind of material alchemy: pigment becomes skin, skin becomes drapery, and drapery becomes spatial movement.' The artists featured at Hollis Taggart include Adela Akers, Chellis Baird, Paige Beeber, Lynda Benglis, Jenny Brillhart, John Chamberlain, Lia Cook, Anna Fasshauer, Sam Gilliam, Al Held, Kenichi Hoshine, Suchitra Mattai, Jenny Morgan, Catherine Murphy, Elaine Reichek, Nicola Stephanie, Leslie Wayne, Betty Woodman, and Kennedy Yanko. Artists featured at Susan Inglett Gallery include Lynda Benglis, Liz Collins, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Rosemary Mayer, Beverly Semmes, Greg Smith, Leslie Wayne, Kennedy Yanko, and Nina Yankowitz. As curator and art historian Glenn Adamson writes in his catalogue essay, 'This exhibition is about the relationship between painting and textile, two disciplines that have always been closely tied. Since the seventeenth century, most paintings have had a woven canvas substrate; long before that, cloth was already a pervasive presence in art. . . Across the length and breadth of art history, drapery has served many concurrent purposes. Our exhibition is intended to be similarly multivalent, taking on all these guises and adding others that are coming into being. What better metaphor could there be for the great fabric of aesthetic possibility, after all, than fabric itself, which yields new shapes so readily—just a fold here, a tuck there, and a flick of the wrist?'