CategoriesStyles and Movements
Pattern and Decoration Movement
An American movement of the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s that brought ornament, textiles and repeating pattern back into ambitious art.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Pattern and Decoration Movement are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In the mid-1970s a group of American painters and sculptors began meeting to discuss something modern art had long dismissed: ornament. Against the bare grids of Minimalism and the austerity of Conceptual art, they looked to Islamic tilework, Persian carpets, kimono, American quilts and Henri Matisse's decorative paintings, and to sewing and embroidery long written off as women's craft. The critic Amy Goldin, who wrote on Islamic art, helped give them a vocabulary.
Look for repeating motifs, lush colour, fabric and glitter, and surfaces without a single focal point. Miriam Schapiro stitched lace, handkerchiefs and printed cottons into painted collages she called femmages; Valerie Jaudon painted interlacing geometric bands; Robert Kushner made costumes and hangings from cut fabric; Joyce Kozloff painted tile-like patterns and later designed public mosaics. The movement faded in the 1980s but anticipated later interest in craft, textiles and ornament from many cultures.
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