While teaching in Taos, NM in January, I visited the Harwood Museum. I saw many marvelous things there, one of them being the Agnes Martin room. On my Tacoma trip this month, I wove a tapestry diary piece in tribute to Agnes Martin (1912-2004).
In the photos below I’m warping my smallest pipe loom in Tacoma while doing a demonstration day at Red Alder Fiber Arts Retreat. There were a lot of interested people there. The warping is four-selvedge and the loom is not commercially available (because you’ll ask. You can make your own pipe loom HERE, HERE and HERE).
Warping the Fringeless tapestry diary piece while doing a demonstration at Red Alder Fiber Arts Retreat in Tacoma, WA
Warping up the four-selvedge tapestry diary piece while doing a demo day in the rotunda of Hotel Murano. Red Alder Fiber Arts Retreat
Back in January I was in Taos to teach a design retreat at Mabel Dodge Luhan House. I had a few hours to myself before the retreat started and I was finally able to go to the Harwood Museum of Art. I enjoyed several shows there but the Agnes Martin room was the thing that stuck with me when I left.
The Harwoood Museum of Art, Taos, NM
The room is an octagon with a skylight in the center. It reminded me of a Diné hogan though I do not know if that was the inspiration for the room design. The room has seven paintings in it that were created in 1993. The gallery was created for these paintings and Martin herself suggested the Donald Judd benches in the center of the room. Take a minute to watch this time lapse video of one day in this room. It includes Agnes herself at the beginning and her voice at the end.
The Agnes Martin room at the Harwood Museum in Taos, NM
There are other paintings of Martin’s in the museum, but the ones in this room were the ones I spent time studying. The paintings have a mysterious quality which I think in part stems from the layers of paint. They feel very cool and calming especially when viewed from farther away. Up close you can sense the blue paint under the white. She uses graphite lines which rarely go from side to side of the canvas and seem to be made with a straight edge.
Rebecca Mezoff, Experiencing Agnes Martin, tapestry diary, 2 x 2 inches, wool, cotton
I wanted to play with these feelings in a tapestry diary piece both to think more about how her paintings were constructed physically but also as a way to remember my reaction to the work. The tiny 2 x 2 inch tapestry is nothing like an Agnes Martin painting, but the experience of making it absolutely cemented something about the work in my mind and made me excited to learn more about her creative experience.
The making of this little tapestry diary piece was nothing special and indeed, did not take long to weave. But the experience and process of making it helped me revisit the art in my mind and think again about how and why it was made. I’ve just started reading Nancy Princenthal’s biography of Martin and we shall see if that book sends me deeper into Martin’s life and work.
The tapestry was woven on a small pipe loom with the four-selvedge method taught in the Fringeless class. The warp was 20/6 cotton seine twine set at 8 epi. The weft was 4 strands of 18/2 weaversbazaar wool in mixed bundles of cool gray-blue and cream. When I studied Martin’s work alone in that museum in January, I was fascinated by the graphite lines. In truth, I had known almost nothing about Martin’s actual work before visiting the Harwood and the graphite lines were a surprise to me. They appear and disappear throughout the paintings. Some don’t have any of these lines at all. They are barely visible an arms length away from the paintings and not visible in a concrete way from the center of the room. But I loved how they came and went and I played with that in the weaving.
For me, this piece was a reminder of how powerful this tiny practice of making these little experiential pieces is especially when I don’t have time or energy to make anything larger. This practice keeps me connected to the wool and in this case, to my love of abstraction.
“To be abstracted is to be at some distance from the material world. It is a form of local exaltation but also, sometimes, of disorientation, even disturbance. Art at its most powerful can induce such a state, art without literal content perhaps most potently. Agnes Martin, one of the most esteemed abstract painters of the second half of the twentieth century, expressed—and, at times, dwelled in—the most extreme forms of abstraction: pure, silencing, enveloping, and upending.”