Lenore Tawney

Lenore Tawney (born Leonora Agnes Gallagher; May 10, 1907 – September 24, 2007) was an American artist working in fiber art, collage, assemblage, and drawing.

She is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive.

Tawney was born and raised in an Irish-American family in Lorain, Ohio near Cleveland and later moved to Chicago to start her career.

In 1927, she left home at age 20 to move to Chicago, where she worked as a proofreader for a publisher of court opinions.

She worked hard and eventually became head of the department.

Tawney worked in Chicago for 15 years while taking night courses at the Art Institute of Chicago (now School of the Art Institute of Chicago).

While living in Chicago, she met George Tawney, a young psychologist, through friends.

In the 1940's and 50's, she studied art at several different institutions and perfected her craft as a weaver.

In 1941 the two married, but 18 months later George passed away suddenly.

His untimely death provided her with the means to pursue her creative work without financial constraints.

After he passed, she moved to Urbana, Illinois to be near his family and enrolled at the University of Illinois to study art therapy from 1943-1945.

Tawney's introduction to the tenets of the German Bauhaus school and the artistic avant-garde began in 1946 when she attended László Moholy-Nagy's Chicago Institute of Design.

While studying with Alexander Archipenko, she was invited to work and study at his studio in Woodstock, New York in the summer of 1947.

There she worked in clay creating abstract, figurative forms.

However, Tawney found the work all-consuming and exhausting and wasn't ready to commit fully to the work of being an artist.

She returned to Chicago and destroyed most of her work from this period, which she felt was derivative and not true to her own artistic vision.

At the Chicago Institute of Design and in her previous studies, Tawney focused in the areas of sculpture and drawing.

In 1948, Tawney bought her first loom, at age 41 and began learning how to weave.

There she studied with cubist sculptor Alexander Archipenko and abstract expressionist painter Emerson Woelffer, among others, and in 1949, she studied weaving with Bauhaus alumna Marli Ehrman.

From 1949 to 1951, Tawney lived in Paris and traveled extensively throughout North Africa and Europe.

She returned to the United States and in 1954 she studied with the Finnish weaver Martta Taipale at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina.

Soon after, she began experimenting with new fiber techniques and color palettes in her weaving and creating her own designs.

In 1955, she started creating her signature open-warp weavings that featured plain weave, laid-in designs, and large areas of unwoven warp, which utilized negative space as a visual element.

A year later, her work was part of the exhibition Craftsmanship in a Changing World at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Arts and Design) in New York.

This was the first time she was involved in a show at an important national institution alongside other visionaries in contemporary fiber art.

Because of her unorthodox weaving methods, Tawney was spurned by both the craft and art worlds, but her distinct style attracted many devoted admirers.

Beginning in 1955, Tawney's work became more widely known and consequently, more widely criticized and discussed.

In 1957, she moved to New York where she maintained a highly successful career into the 1960's. In the 1970's Tawney focused increasingly on her spirituality, but continued to make work until her death.

Tawney was one of five children born in Lorain, Ohio to Irish mother Sarah Jennings and Irish-American father William Gallagher.

In 1957, her friend Margo Hoff wrote the first critical assessment of her work in an article titled, Lenore Tawney: the warp is her canvas for the magazine Craft Horizons.

In this article, Tawney reflected that painters liked her work, whereas weavers tended to reject it.

Tawney's open-warp weavings were controversial and disrupted longstanding historical traditions and techniques in weaving.

Her disruptions signified the beginning of an era of change in the fiber world.

In November 1957, Tawney demonstrated her commitment to her work and career by moving to New York City, the center of the modern art world.

She settled in the Coenties Slip, where there was an established colony of well-known modern artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin and Jack Youngerman.

The artist would develop a close friendship and artistic relationship with Agnes Martin, who would write the essay for Tawney's first solo exhibition at the Staten Island Museum.

After eight months, Tawney began leasing three floors of a former sailmaker's loft which had a top floor with a high cathedral ceiling to accommodate her growing textile pieces.

In 1961, Tawney's first solo exhibition, which included forty weavings she had produced since 1955, opened at the Staten Island Museum . This exhibition was the first public display of the artist's new open-warp hangings.

In 1961, Tawney studied the Peruvian gauze weave technique with fiber artist Lili Blumenau and pioneered an "open reed" for her loom in order to produce more mutable woven forms.

The open reed allowed for warps to be looser and easily manipulated by hand to accommodate Tawney's new visions.