A September 2023 New York Times Style Magazine article declared, “Fiber Art Is Finally Being Taken Seriously. Long caught in the liminal space between craft and something more prestigious, works of thread and fabric are reaching newfound institutional recognition.”
I was fortunate to see both the spring 2024 show “Woven Histories: Textile and Modern Abstraction” at the National Gallery of Art, and the current show “Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women,” which hangs through January 5, 2025, at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. The latter seeks to “address the historic marginalization of fiber in contemporary artmaking” by featuring the work of 27 artists “who mastered everyday materials, subverted conventions, and transformed humble threads into sublime creations.”
It seems timely, therefore, that the newest gallery space in town, Gallery 2424 , which opened in November 2023 by husband-and-wife team Ben Walke and Erin Dunn, Telfair Museums’ curator of moden and contemporary art, has so fully embraced fibers. The talented and thoughtful Pheobe Plank who recently had her exquisite MFA thesis show in the open, high-ceilinged space, consider it to be “a fiber art haven in Savannah.”
In addition to showcasing MFA work by several of this year’s Savannah College of Art and Design Fibers class ― including Katie Hagen, Ivy Laurel Anderson, Pheobe Plank, Christine Moore, and Ashley Sanders ― the gallery has mounted a solo show by Jennifer Moss , and will showcase “Fenced,” a new site-specific installation by Katie Glusica . Opening during August’s First Friday in Starland, the work is on display through Aug. 18.
Repair, restore, weave, create
Glusica is a weaver and artist who has built a reputation as an expert repairer and restorer of handmade antique rugs, wicker, rattan, and chair caning. While attaining her undergraduate BFA in Crafts with a textiles focus at Virginia Commonwealth University, she took a job at Richmond’s Christian Lorraine Oriental Rug store, helping them implement and grow the restoration side of the business (“We made over a $100,000 that first year.”) Glusica went on to earn a full tuition scholarship to attend SCAD, graduating in 2010 with an MFA in Fibers with a focus on weaving. Now teaching part time at SCAD, her days are filled with juggling freelance repair work, restoration consultation (she most recently consulted on and did hanging preparation for the textiles in the Jepson’s current “Lingua Flora” exhibition ), and her own art practice.
I met the artist in her orderly disordered home-based studio, steps from SCAD’s Fibers department in Pepe Hall. One room of her basement-level apartment is a “constantly morphing scenario” of an eight-harness Gilmore loom, shelves of fabrics, a computer desk, rolls of cane of various thickness, rug-repair supplies, and a large work surface where the piece “Fenced” she will hang in Gallery 2424 is carefully rolled in unbleached muslin.
Two years in the planning and execution, “Fenced” derives from Glusica’s long-term exploration of “uncomfortable feelings of being fenced in and closed out.”
She tells me, “There will be one very long weaving that will be installed from one side of the gallery to the other, which, like a fence, will restrict and direct movement. It’s a metaphor for perception vs. reality, of what is restricting you, containing, or protecting you… I want viewers to have their own internal experience – to feel the space rather than try to understand it….to go home and think about their own restrictions.”
The 45-foot hand weaving creates for the artist “a record of space and time with each step of the process…The warp materials subtly reference ‘past’ in the sinew of silk and stainless steel, the ‘present’ in the fleeting of two silvery viscous threads and the ‘future’ in the uncertainty of translucent paper. The nylon monofilament sewing thread and stainless-steel weft materials reference different levels of consciousness in which we experience time and space.” This is a deeply academic and cerebral artist – indeed, while working towards her MFA she was given an award for the best thesis proposal: thinking that was subsequently adapted into an article “The Seen and Unseen: Weaving as a Metaphor for Wave/Particle Duality” published in 2016 in MIT’s peer-reviewed magazine Leonardo which explores the intersection of the arts with science and technology.
Accompanying the fabric fence will be a sound composition, a collaboration between Glusica and sound artist and musician Robert Donne. Friends for many years, they have collaborated previously in the 2017 show “ Making Waves” at the Mesa Contemporary Art Museum in Arizona. She hopes the music, which incorporates such sounds such as hand loom weaving, underground caves, guitar, and fire, “will bring the viewer in and out of the senses of realness and the abstract.” The other experiential element in the installation is light: “There will be a lot of light and shadow in the space which will make the work really come alive.” And finally, Glusica’s drawings will be displayed in the rear space of the gallery. The artist purposefully wants to show them at a distance from the installation so that visitors can “reflect further on fences and these uncomfortable, awkward, non-real spaces. Fences create controlled spaces that restrict by containing or excluding and are the space of in-between.”
Excited to finally unroll and install her weaving for the very first time, the unremittingly intellectual and analytical Glusica is already pondering her next project. “I had an epiphany the other day. I got obsessed with parabolic curves and want to translate them into basketry techniques.”
If You Go >>
What: "Fenced" site-specific installation, opening reception
When: 5 to 9 p.m., Aug. 2
Where: Gallery 2424, 2424 Drayton St.
Info: gallery2424.com
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: A Contemplation of Space and Time: Katie Glusica’s “Fenced” opens at Gallery 2424
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