Displaying items by tag: fabric

A little-known Dutch collection of Indian chintzes, newly acquired by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., is revealing centuries of changing habits in fabric exporting, collecting and tailoring.

The museum paid an undisclosed price for about 170 textiles, including bedspreads, caps, jackets and robes, dating to the early 1700s. The designs combine European folk patterns and botanical motifs typical of Mughal landscape paintings.

Earlier this year, the Institute of Contemporary Art got disappointing news: It would no longer be in charge of painting the massive Dewey Square wall mural, at the head of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. The job would instead go to the more mainstream Museum of Fine Arts.

Jill Medvedow, ICA director, was not pleased. “Really?” she said. “It’s walking distance to the ICA.”

Other Greenway changes, perhaps more universally welcomed, are in the works. On Wednesday the nonprofit funder ArtPlace will announce a $250,000 public art grant for the Greenway, a 15-acre network of parks in downtown Boston. That follows by just a few days the announcement of plans for a $1 million public art expansion that will include the installation next year of a huge, billowing fabric work meant to hover over the park, by Brookline-based artist Janet Echelman. The Greenway is even hiring its own art curator.

This October, the UK’s largest ever survey of the contemporary American artist Richard Tuttle will take place in London. It will include a major exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, a large-scale sculptural commission at Tate Modern, and a new publication. The project, titled “I Don’t Know, Or The Weave of Textile Language,” was conceptualized by the artist and focuses on the importance of textiles across his body of work and into the latest developments in his practice.

Tuttle, who came to prominence in the 1960s, has worked in a range of media, including sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and furniture. Using humble, everyday materials such as cloth, paper, rope, and plywood, Tuttle creates subtle, intimate works that elude historical or stylistic categorization. He began experimenting with textiles in 1978 during a residency at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Tuttle employed his interest in the silkscreen printing process and made a series of clothing -- "Shirts" in 1978 and "Pants" in 1979. Functional in nature, the articles of clothing play with line, volume, pattern, and shape -- attributes the artist continues to explore.

Bulgarian-born artist, Christo, is best known for his large-scale artworks that transform their environments. Working with his late wife, Jeanne-Claude, Christo draped Berlin’s parliament building, the Reichstag, in metallic-colored fabric (1995); completely wrapped Paris’ oldest bridge, the Pont Neuf, in 450,000-square-feet of golden material (1985); and surrounded 11 islands in Florida’s Biscayne Bay in pink fabric (1983).

The artist’s next endeavor is expected to be the world’s biggest permanent sculpture and will cost approximately $340 million, making it the most expensive as well. The structure, which will be built in the desert of Al Gharbia, 100 miles from Abu Dhabi, is a flat-topped pyramid that will stand 492 feet tall. The sculpture, titled The Mastaba, will be made out of 410,000 oil barrels painted in various colors inspired by the yellow and red sands of the desert, which will create the effect of an Islamic mosaic.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude conceived the idea for The Mastaba over 30 years ago, but were derailed by the Iran-Iraq war, among other things. Working with Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the representative of Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Christo financed the project through sales of his own works and funds from various investors.

The Mastaba, which will take about 30 months to complete, will be Jean-Claude and Christo’s only permanent large-scale work.