NEW YORK, NY.- Kasmin is presenting Crossings, an exhibition that brings together an international and intergenerational group of artists exploring the enduring resonance of weaving, textiles, and embroidery in contemporary art. On view at 509 West 27th Street from June 27 through August 9, the exhibition examines a variety of practices that engage the poetics of fabric—its languages, genres, forms, and modes of composition. Examining the ability of woven material to expand, transform, and complicate artistic disciplines, the exhibition incorporates work by artists whose practices span textile, painting, sculpture, installation, and conceptual art, including Claudia Alarcón, Olga de Amaral, Hellen Ascoli, Teresa Baker, Vamba Bility, Julia Bland, Vivian Caccuri, Dee Clements, Kenturah Davis, Jacques Douchez, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Sonia Gomes, Suchitra Mattai, Maria Nepomuceno, Norberto Nicola, Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Judith Scott, Tyrrell Tapaha, T. Vinoja and Sarah Zapata.

Including new works made especially for the exhibition, this cross-section of 21st-century practices probes the expressive possibilities of fiber, fabric, and interwoven material, contextualized by three influential wool and tapestry works from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Exploring the foundational dialectic of warp and weft, the works represent just some of the generative articulations of humanity’s earliest binary language and original information technology. A structural rhythm, imparted by the crossing of threads over and under one another, resounds through the exhibition into a salient agent for spatial, material, and metaphorical complexity. Each artist approaches fabric, whether social, material, or historical, as a repository for encoded meaning, memory, and narrative.

Inspired by the etymological connection between “text” and “textile,” the exhibition spotlights singular practices that reconfigure the limits of artistic possibility, borrowing elements of abstraction, critical theory, and autobiography. Each work on view investigates history, mythology, and the psychology of self to imagine new frameworks for telling one’s story.

The artists on view employ a variety of processes that make innovative uses of textiles to blur boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation. The exhibition underscores the range of material that can be woven, incorporating not just natural fibers but also copper, as Ximena Garrido-Lecca demonstrates with embedded references to contemporary and ancient uses. The sculptural forms of Olga de Amaral or the Shifu weaving of Kenturah Davis point to the wide range of possibilities achieved with various types of paper or precious metals. Stitching, bending, and hanging their materials, artists including Hellen Ascoli and Maria Nepomuceno explore the elements of weight and tension with rope, beads, wood, or wool, activating the architecture of the gallery. For some, weaving provides a framework to examine humanity’s relationship to natural ecosystems, seen in Vivian Caccuri’s manipulation of mosquito nets or Tyrrell Tapaha’s use of plant dyes. Others, such as T. Vinoja, gesture to the ability of textiles to act as both a force of recovery and an index of past experience. Artists including Sonia Gomes, Suchitra Mattai, and Vamba Bility, give new life to repurposed materials whose combinations reclaim and weave new modes of expression.

The works on view capture the stylistic diversity kindled by the versatile nature of textiles, with references to the earth and the touchstones of collective memory. The abstract patterns of Claudia Alarcón or Julia Bland, and the protruding shapes of Dee Clements or Judith Scott, are seen alongside forms that allude to life, including the sensuous forms of Sarah Zapata and the pastoral scenes of Madalena Santos Reinbolt. Incorporating pigments to challenge conventions of painting, Jacques Douchez and Norberto Nicola’s respective tapestries approach sculpture, vitalizing the three-dimensional quality of works such as Teresa Baker’s exploration of nature and artifice. Unearthing rich and varied developments in the decades since the 1960-70s fiber art movement, Crossings celebrates the role of artistic imagination in shaping generations of human experience. Considered together, these works demonstrate the breadth of possibilities that weaving offers to contemporary art, broadening our understanding of the medium as a creative force untethered to identity, geography, or historical period.