"Line & Thread" at the NYPL Reveals the Bond Between Prints and Textiles, Past and Present – PRINT Magazine

A first-of-its-kind exhibition drawing connections between prints and textiles both in the past and present is on view now at the New York Public Library. Curated by the Curator of Prints and the Spencer Collection at the NYPL, Madeleine Viljoen, Line & Thread: Prints and Textiles from the 1600s to the Present traces the work of twentieth-century artists who embraced the textile qualities of prints, and explores how aspects of their practice have been silenced— many of whom were women and minorities. The exhibition ultimately offers a path for the use of prints and textiles in favor of experimentation and greater inclusivity.

Line & Thread invites a reexamination of the place of prints and textiles in our understanding of art, and presents artworks that use the mediums as sites of resistance, critique, and expressions of self.

Explore a sample of images from the 50 or so pieces featured in the show below, along with Viljoen’s reflections.

What was the development process like for this exhibition? What was the genesis of the show?

The exhibition grew largely out of close study of the wide-ranging collection of prints in The New York Public Library’s Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs. Prints owns several examples of late seventeenth-century/early eighteenth-century “adorned” prints— works that were made by carefully cutting out parts of original printed artworks and facing and/or otherwise embellishing them with small pieces of fabrics and lace. It was an activity that literally engaged its makers (often women) in the act of “dressing” their creations— not accidentally, they are also commonly referred to as “dressed prints.”

The department also has early modern etchings and engravings on fine silks, as well as several contemporary artworks impressed on humbler fabrics, including an old plaid handkerchief (Alison Saar) and vibrant African wax fabrics (Jonathan Monk). Most prints are printed on paper, so these examples intrigued me.

After confirming that still little research had been done on the intermedial connections between prints and textiles and finding wonderful additional examples in the collection, I proposed to the Library’s Exhibitions Committee the idea of devoting an exhibition to the topic.

Given the breadth of our holdings, my goal was to focus not on a single period or type of object alone but to explore the many and varied ways in which prints have intersected with textiles. My aim was also to bring the early modern examples into conversation with works from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Historical evidence confirms the many ways in which printed works of art were created in response to and in concert with textiles (and vice versa). The fifteenth-century discovery of a means to create reproducible images on paper has its origins in methods devised by textile designers to stamp repeatable patterns on fabric. Conversely, by the eighteenth century, textile designers looked to professional printmakers for knowledge about how to print on fabric from the sorts of copper engraving plates that were specific to their craft.

What was the curation process like to select the works featured in the show?

I wanted the exhibition to draw attention to the many ways in which printmaking has thought and continues to think of itself vis-à-vis textiles. For this reason, the show features not just prints on fabric but also prints made with, for, on, and about textiles, as well as paper as a textile-like support. I also wanted to frame the notion of what constitutes a textile expansively to include not just fabric but also lace, quilts, embroidery, knitting, and even a modified mesh window screen.

Broken into six sections, the exhibition begins with a section of early modern examples titled “Text(ile) Precedents” to uncover some of the earliest examples of the ways prints have intersected with textiles. The following five sections focus on works produced in the 20th and 21st centuries, entitled “Prints on Fabric,” “Textured Prints,” “Prints and the Dress”, “Prints as Textiles/Textiles as Prints” and “Stitched Prints.”

“Textured Prints,” for example, considers how printmakers have sought to replicate the rough, nubby qualities of fabrics, often by printing directly from various kinds of textiles. Significant examples in this section include works by Sue Fuller, an experimental printmaker active at Stanley William Hayter’s famed Atelier 17, who cut up and printed from an old Victorian collar, a collagraph by Dindga McCannon, and a print by Chakaia Booker composed of quilt-like strips of paper that are blind embossed to enhance its texture.

An important sub-theme to the exhibition is the role gender has played—and continues to play—in prints’ involvement with textiles. Prints were an important conduit for women’s work with fabric, traditionally regarded as the province of female labor, often within the home. The well-known feminist artist Miriam Shapiro makes this the topic of her work Anonymous Was a Woman II: Mimi’s Baby Bonnet, which uses a bonnet as a matrix for printing. The title of the series points to how examples of women’s creative expression were habitually produced anonymously within the private or domestic realm and have consequently been both less visible and less regarded within the history of art.

Similarly, Julia Jacquette in White Square (Wedding Dress) portrays a swatch of sequined and embroidered cloth to demonstrate how mass media has encouraged women to regard the perfect white wedding as the consummate expression of femininity and womanhood. The exhibition features many other examples too.

What sort of experience do you hope viewers of the show have when they attend?

I’m hoping that attentive viewers will not only appreciate the full range of how prints have interacted with textiles, but also notice the visual and conceptual overlaps between some of the earliest examples in the exhibition with works created in the 20th and 21st centuries. The dressed prints of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are echoed, for example, in works like Valerie Hammond’s Great Memory (above) and Delita Martin’s Two Moons (below). Hammond uses an antique lace dress as a matrix, which she embellishes with minute tiny beads, conflating the print with the original textile. Martin, meanwhile, sews printed paper gowns onto the bodies of her printed figures, treating the paper itself as a sort of textile.

The exhibition offers many opportunities for close looking and is arranged in ways that encourage viewers to make connections of this sort.

Is there a particular piece in the show that speaks to you the most? Why does this one stand out to you?

This is a really hard question! I love all the works in the show, and would find it very hard to pick a single work that speaks to me the most. The one that comes closest to visualizing the title of the show, “Line and Thread,” however, may be Analia Saban’s Transcending Grid, Black (with Fringe).

Drawn to unconventional techniques, Saban consistently works across and between media to create her art. Here she employs linen as a support on which she imprints a grid of wavering etched lines, creating a dialogue between the fabric’s rigid weave and the etching’s freer, looser strokes. The marriage of textile and print is consummated at the margins, where the artist’s printed uneven lines meet and intermingle with the fabric’s wild, frayed edges.

Line & Thread is on view in the NYPL’s Rayner Wing from September 7, 2024– January 12, 2025

Hero image above: Sanford Biggers, The Floating World: Lotus (125th) (2013). Screenprint and collage. Print Collection, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library. © Sanford Biggers.

Charlotte is a New England expat currently living in Los Angeles, CA with her cat, Joan Cusack. She is a power-clashing maximalist with an inordinate disdain for the color navy. When she's not writing about ad campaigns and colorways you can find her scouring estate sales or attempting to teach herself calligraphy.