Nickle Galleries exhibit highlights `explosion' of innovative textile arts
It was the recent donation of a massive textile piece by Finnish Canadian weaver Kaija Sanelma Harris to the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina that started the ball rolling.
Made up of 24 separate panels, Sun Ascending was the largest piece created by Harris. The artist, who died in late August at the age of 82, was based in Saskatoon at the time and among those commissioned in the early 1980s to produce textiles to adorn the interiors of the TD Centre in Toronto. Donated to the Mackenzie Art Gallery by Cadillac Fairview Corporation Ltd., the gift had curators Julia Krueger and Timothy Long thinking about a particularly fertile and revolutionary period in the history of textile art created on the Canadian Prairies. They eventually contacted Michele Hardy — curator and acting director of the University of Calgary's Nickle Galleries who has had a long history studying, curating and celebrating textile art — and the ambitious exhibit Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, 1960-2000 was born.
“The more we talked about it, the more we realized that some fantastic art had been created across the Prairies during this time period but has not been written about or examined in any great depth,” says Hardy. “There seems to be a resurgence in interest in textile arts, so it was a really great moment to explore this.”
The exhibit, a partnership between Mackenzie and Nickle galleries, will be in Calgary until Dec. 17 and features the work of 48 artists who helped bring on an “explosion of innovative textile-based art on the Canadian Prairies” from 1960 to 2000. The curators scoured private and public creations for the pieces. Some were European immigrants who brought techniques from their homelands, while Indigenous artists displayed practices and cultural traditions. Many of the artists on display embraced new techniques and themes to broaden the possibilities of textile art.
The earliest piece in the exhibition is Charlotte Lindgren's Winter Tree, a three-dimensional piece that showcased the artist's interest in architecture and was featured at Expo 67 in Montreal. While the piece was created in Halifax, Lindgren spent years developing her practice in Winnipeg in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The exhibit also includes a reproduction of Calgary artist Nancy Crites' 1991 hooked rug Threshold: No Laughing Matter. The original, which is fragile and still in Saskatchewan, included pink and blue condoms that had been hardened over time to spell out “Welcome.” It was made during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Crites remade the piece this year, without the condoms, for the display.
“Her intention was really to normalize the experience of condoms, the language of condoms, the importance of using condoms.”
Most, although not all, of the artists featured are women and many were exploring feminist themes and using textile arts as a way to offer commentary on social issues.
“There was this (period)— '60s, '70s, '80s – when textiles suited the feminist agenda, it suited modernist architecture, it suited a number of initiatives that were going on,” Hardy says. “It was also a way for women to challenge the hierarchy of the arts where painting and sculpture are at the top and textiles and crafts are at the bottom. It was traditionally the realm of women and feminists started to use textiles to challenge those things and challenge the role of women in society.”