Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Art History
Advisor
Mona Hadler
Committee Members
Rosemarie Haag Bletter
Jennifer Ball
Kay Wells
Subject Categories
Fiber, Textile, and Weaving Arts | Sculpture
Keywords
Fiber art, Postwar United States, Exhibitions, 1960s sculpture, Art education
Abstract
Recent exhibitions of early U.S. fiber art (c. 1961–69) demonstrate its increasing visibility in institutional spaces. Yet its frequent placement among textiles or other fiber-adjacent work does not reflect the expansive networks in which fiber art first developed. This dissertation positions significant bodies of this work—Lenore Tawney’s “woven forms,” Claire Zeisler’s knotted objects, Sheila Hicks’s “ponytails”— in dialogue with the aesthetically and conceptually advanced circles to which the artists belonged throughout the postwar period. In the years leading up to fiber art’s emergence, émigré weaver Anni Albers offered a model for textile wall hangings reenvisioned: by embracing their materiality to distance her “pictorial weavings” from abstract painting, Albers moved them into the territory of bas-relief. As such, this body of work broached the concept of a sculptural fiber, on which the fiber artists would then expand.
Four interconnected case studies give an account of this process. The first chapter traces Albers’s privileging of the singular textile object between two key points in her later career—solo exhibitions in 1949 and 1959. Chapter 2 shows Tawney elaborating on the concept of sculptural fiber with her “woven forms,” the shaped textile objects that exist in dialogic relationship to the “herms” of Robert Indiana, “light-space modulator” of László Moholy-Nagy, and oversized ceramics of Peter Voulkos—all participants in the various spheres she inhabited in her early career. The third chapter elevates an underexamined 1968 exhibition of Zeisler’s radical freestanding work to landmark status and reads its sculptural characteristics against the early soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg. As modernist strategies underlie both bodies of work, Zeisler’s are traced to relationships with Chicago modernists Katherine Kuh, Alexander Archipenko, and James Prestini. Chapter 4 identifies a budding theatricality in Hicks’s early sculptural typologies. Fundamentally this quality stems from a concern with viewer engagement, as shared by contemporaneous installations by Gertrud Goldschmidt (Gego), Eva Hesse, and Niki de Saint Phalle, that can be credited to Hicks’s pragmatism.
Recommended Citation
Sato, Analisa, "The Networks of Early U.S. Fiber Art, 1949-69" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6914
