Textile Arts
Art made with fibre and cloth, including weaving, dyeing, printing, quilting, knitting and felting, from ancient crafts to contemporary art.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Textile Arts are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Textiles are among humanity's oldest technologies, though fibres rarely survive the way stone and clay do. Cloth has carried value and meaning across cultures: Andean weavers made garments more prized than gold, Chinese silk travelled west along trade routes, Indian painted and printed cottons reached markets from Southeast Asia to Europe, and Kuba and Akan weavers in Africa developed their own geometric systems. In 1804 Joseph-Marie Jacquard's loom used punched cards to control complex patterns, a step toward computing.
In the 20th century, textiles became a medium for modern art and design. Sonia Delaunay printed fabrics with abstract colour blocks, Anni Albers treated weaving as a structural art at the Bauhaus, and Olga de Amaral later wove large surfaces covered in gold leaf. Faith Ringgold painted and quilted story quilts such as Tar Beach (1988), and Ghada Amer stitches drawings onto canvas.
