PROVIDENCE, RITerm Limits: Textiles in Contemporary Art surveys some of the most exquisite and groundbreaking textile artworks made since the 1950s—all from the collection of The RISD Museum. It also serves as a springboard for asking questions essential to art in any medium: What is art? What is craft? What is design? And who defines these terms, anyway? On view from November 18, 2005 through February 5, 2006, Term Limits* presents works that challenge traditional hierarchies by twenty-four artists and textile designers from around the world.

For centuries the arts and luxury textiles were intertwined, but in Western cultures a distinction was always drawn between the artist and the craftsperson, perhaps most famously in the large woven pictures we call tapestries. Late in the 19th century, however, the Arts & Crafts movement encouraged artists to think and work across conventional arts disciplines. By the early 1900s many artists explored textile techniques, creating their own unique fabric works for the walls as well as designing fabrics for apparel and furnishings that would be produced by others. After World War II, the divisions between art and industry, concept and craft again became entrenched. In the 1960s, work that intermingled textiles with fine art gained an official coinage (Fiber Art) and in the 1970s a sister term (Wearable Art) was born. These hybrids both benefited and suffered from their new-found nomenclature. For what’s in a name? Both increased legitimacy and the “term limits” that this exhibition simultaneously acknowledges and dispels.

“Categorization is a blessing and a curse,” says Madelyn Shaw, Acting Curator of Costume and Textiles at The RISD Museum. “Terms like art, craft, industry, decorative, and functional all provide a useful context on one hand and on the other impose boundaries that arbitrarily marginalize certain art—most often art made in mediums associated with craft or utility, such as glass, and of course textiles.”

The works in Term Limits, created by artists from the U.S., Europe, South America, Japan, and Korea, prove that medium is no obstacle. Each of these pieces—whether unique or severally produced, conceptual sculpture or functional fashion—possesses theoretical rigor and technical mastery and stands as an important work of art.

Take, for example, Claire Zeisler’s Private Affair III, 1990, a six-foot-tall waterfall of blue cotton-and rayon braided rope that showcases a mastery of off-loom technique. One of the most influential fiber artists of the twentieth century, Zeisler (1903–1991) made bold, three-dimensional structures that lack evident utility and contest the functional tradition of tapestries—the original fiber art.

Mark Pollack, renowned designer of commercial textiles and RISD alum, demonstrates a more functional facet of contemporary textiles with equally complex artistry. His Labyrinth fabric, created in 1981 for Jack Lenor Larsen, Inc., explores algorithmic optical effects of color on pattern, in this case with a crossed-warp weave that is manufactured at only one mill in the world. Pollack’s Flapper, 2001, is both a double-layered window treatment and an evocative piece of art; setting bands that float in the slightest breeze against a static layer anchoring them beneath.

Other works in Term Limits that defy categorization include Olga de Amaral’s Cesta Lunar 24 (Moon Basket), 1989, a painted textile form that recalls the artist’s native Colombian landscape; Alighiero Boetti’s Il Tesoro Nascosto (The Hidden Treasure), 1986–88, an “embroidered painting” designed by the artist but made by anonymous Afghani needleworkers; Barrier, 1985, by Norma Minkowitz, who uses thread to “draw” in three dimensions; a garment from Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please collection, for which the designer collaborated with artist Yasumasa Morimura; Reiko Sudo’s Agitfab, 1993, designed for the NUNO Corporation and promoting a political message; and, from Sheila Hicks, The Principal Wife, ca. 1969, in which bundled and wrapped yarns become metaphors for elemental life forces.

Term Limits also features the work of Junichi Arai, Bonnie Cashin, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Lillian Elliott, Françoise Grossen, Diane Itter, Ferne Jacobs, Richard Landis, Chunghie Lee, Dorothy Liebes, Mary Merkel-Hess, Ed Rossbach, Cynthia Schira, Hisako Sekigima, Kay Sekimachi, and Wendy Wahl—all masters of contemporary textile art making works of limitless interpretation and imagination.

* This exhibition was inspired by one held in 2000 at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, which challenged viewers to think about the terms commonly used to describe and classify art and culture. The title appears here courtesy of Dr. Joseph Traugott, curator of that exhibition.