Lenore Tawney, innovator in weaving, fiber arts; at 100
NEW YORK - Lenore Tawney, an artist whose monumental sculptural weavings redefined the possibilities of both sculpture and weaving in the second half of the 20th century and helped create the genre of fiber art, died Sept. 24 at her home in Manhattan. She was 100.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when art and crafts were viewed in America as mutually exclusive disciplines, Ms. Tawney united them decisively and controversially. Trained as a sculptor and as a weaver, she combined several different techniques - plain weave, gauze weave, slit tapestry and open-warp weaving - to invent large, abstract and free-standing, or rather free-hanging, sculptural forms.
Traditionalists on both sides of the art-craft divide found fault, but she persisted in work that came to assume a grand architectural scale. Her "Waters Above the Firmament" (1976), the last work she made on the loom, was 12 feet by 12 feet. The 1983 "Cloud Sculpture," a suspended environment made of thousands of knotted blue threads, was three times as large, an ethereal Niagara.
Lenore Agnes Gallagher was born in Lorain, Ohio. She moved to Chicago in 1927 and worked as a court proofreader while taking evening classes at the Art Institute. At the city's Institute of Design she studied sculpture with Alexander Archipenko, drawing with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and weaving with Marli Ehrman. Later she studied tapestry with the Finnish weaver Martta Taipale in North Carolina.
In 1941, in Chicago, she married George Tawney, a psychologist. (Ms. Tawney leaves no immediate survivors.) After his sudden death a year and a half later, she began to travel, first to Mexico, then to Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Back in Chicago in 1957, she packed a few possessions into a car and drove to New York City. "I left Chicago," she later wrote, "to seek a barer life, closer to reality, without all the things that clutter and fill our lives. The truest thing in my life was my work. I wanted my life to be as true. I almost gave up my life for my work, seeking a life of the spirit."
She settled in Lower Manhattan as one of a handful of artists who, seeking space, quiet and a chance to work apart from the New York art world, lived near the South Street Seaport.
Beginning in the 1950s, Ms. Tawney executed several large-scale commissions in Chicago, New York and Santa Rosa, Calif. None of them remain on view.
In the 1960s, in addition to small-scale weavings influenced by American Indian, Peruvian and African art, she began producing enigmatic assemblage boxes and collages, including postcard collages, which she sent to friends.
Many of the postcard collages she made over the years had fragile objects attached to their surfaces: seashells, feathers, tiny bones of birds and the like. But she did not consider a piece finished until it had traveled though the mail, and she never enclosed it in an envelope when she did. She would take the postcard to the post office to be hand-stamped and leave it with the clerk.
Ms. Tawney said that over decades of sending art this way, no piece was ever lost. Every piece arrived at its destination, she said, its fragile attachments unharmed as if it had been carried every step of the way by loving hands.
Her work has entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. 