Artwork Details
- Title
- In the Dark Forest
- Artist
- Date
- ca. 1959
- Location
- Dimensions
- 136 1⁄2 x 54 1⁄2 x 1 1⁄4 in. (336.6 x 138.4 x 3.2 cm.)
- Copyright
- © 1959, Lenore G. Tawney
- Credit Line
- Gift of the James Renwick Alliance and museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program
- Mediums Description
- woven linen, wool, and silk
- Classifications
- Subjects
- Abstract
- Landscape — forest
- Object Number
- 1992.90
Artwork Description
I left everything in Chicago. I just brought a couple things . . . a refrigerator and my cat and my loom. And I didn't know whether I'd stay but I stayed. I immediately felt free.
--Lenore Tawney
In the Dark Forest represents Lenore Tawney's "open warp" technique. She pulled fiber through the vertical threads (the warp) by hand to create painterly, gestural forms. Tawney created this work at a crucial transition in her career. In 1957 she moved from Chicago, where she trained as a weaver, to New York City to embrace life as an artist. Her loom became a means to shape new dimensions of fiber art.
Here, Tawney achieved the transcendental effect of sunlight filtering through a shadowy forest. The open warp weavings like this one seeded Tawney's lifelong experimentation with light, scale, and volume, which eventually reached the sky in her Cloud series.
Exhibitions
