May 16-October 20, 2019
Curated by Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim.

Textility is an exhibition that explores the inventive ways contemporary artists employ materials, concepts, and processes associated with textiles to convey their ideas. Many artists today are producing paintings and sculptures that resemble or reference textiles, using traditional materials like paint, canvas, wood, paper and glass.  Other artists are appropriating materials and techniques traditionally associated with fiber or textile arts—cloth or thread, crochet or embroidery, for instance—and using them to convey elements like color and line. And some artists are creating work that suggests fabric or textiles to incorporate a sense of the woven, knotted or stitched. Textility, a group survey of 28 artists, will examine art that draws from and is immersed in this textile sensibility.

Textility is co-curated by Mary Birmingham, Art Center Curator, and Joanne Mattera, a New York-based artist, curator, and art blogger. “Textility” is a word the curators created to express the idea of art that has some material or conceptual quality related to textiles.  Observing what they consider a trend in contemporary art, they conceived this exhibition to pose the questions: “Who is making work with fiber and textiles or work that suggests fiber and textiles?” and “How and why are artists doing this, and why now?”

January 27-March 24, 1991
Curated by John Perreault

Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art Snug Harbor, Staten Island, NY. “Bedrooms” is an exhibition that consists of site-specific installations by seven very different artists. The installations are site-specific insofar as they are made for particular bedrooms at Snug Harbor. Snug Harbor Cultural Center, of course, was originally Sailor’s Snug Harbor, opened in 1833 as an asylum for “aged, decrepit and worn-out sailors.” At its peak around the turn of the century the architecturally resplendent complex harbored almost a thousand retired sailors and merchant seamen.

From cradle to coffin, furniture is where human beings stage our most intimate moments.

In 1979-80, I made my first installation “in My Room” at Moma/PS1, in one of the old class rooms on the second floor of the former school. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/4146

In contrast to the minimal fashion of the day, I made sculptures with thickened paint and lace resembling furniture arranged to suggest a traditional domestic interior. “In My Room” was the first of many room installations highlights include Bedrooms, curated by John Perrault, 1991

“Jennifer Cecere has transformed one of the forbidding classrooms into a gaudy intimate place she names “In My Room.” No sternly minimal intellectual pretensions there. Just too much texture, color, humor, and a surfeit of marzipan genutlichkeit. The rug is a pink square painted on the floor, the overstuffed sofa is covered in an orgy of sequins and buttons and beads, and plastic squiggles seemingly laid on with a cake decorator. Ditto the curtains, and the tablecloths and the wall hangings and even the antimacassars everywhere.” Amei Wallach, Everyone Wants to get into P.S.1., Newsday, 1980.