Jodi Stevens, Artist

http://jodistevensart.com/work/#/undergrowth/

Contemporary fiber art is a vast field populated with artists pushing boundaries beyond what is expected using materials sculpturally and conceptually. Artists working in the field today owe a major debt to those who shifted textile arts to a seriously considered fine art form starting in the 1970s, dubbed the American craft movement. Pioneers such as Sheila Hicks, Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Miriam Schapiro, Faith Ringgold, and Claire Zeisler exploded long-held notions and elevated works made with these materials through sculptural experimentation. This lecture will discuss artists who build on this legacy through their practice as sculptors, employing these materials weighted with radical history. source: https://www.textileswest.org/event-3033780

http://jodistevensart.com/work/#/brevity2/

http://jodistevensart.com/work/#/resting-place/

Sue Williams, Artist

Lorna Simpson, Artist

lssimpsonstudio.com

A Collection of Drawings, Prepared Surfaces

I found this image on stylink

Dieuwke Spaans, Artist

more to see here

Yuko Takada, Artist

Source is artist's website. Link here. 

Gunther Uecker, Artist

Above images found at MNUCHIN GALLERY

Above images found on Google Images under Gunther Uecker

5 Robots Named Paul by Patrick Tresset

Lise Stoufflet, Artist

Artist website link here. 

Lise Stoufflet, Artist

Artist website link here.

J. Parker Valentine, Artist

Tracey Williams, Artist

A Short History of Some Other Things, 2006

“It’s about storytelling and trying to engage people. It’s a narrative that defies closure – it opens up questions – ie it doesn’t tell you what to think,” she says.
“You are put in a place where you have a different relation to things that you may already know [Disney characters, cowboys, pukeko]. When things are really familiar  you never question them. Images that you have grown up with background your psyche.”
Williams says her work is an antidote to the “grand narratives” people define themselves by. She is interested in the way people pick and choose from their life experience to define themselves. 
It’s part of the adopt-a-culture trend in modern life, she says.
“People look outside themselves to find meaning. It’s a collaging of images. US culture seems to have taken its contemporary rules off TV and we are kind of doing that here. I find that really sad. People are desperate to find an identity but they don’t stand still long enough.
“We have become such a commodified culture. I buy that car, I am that car. I buy those clothes, I am those clothes. There’s a sad lack of ethics underneath it.”
In identifying ourselves or our race as possessing certain traits, we risk overlooking shared humanity, she says.

Image and text source from ARTZONE. 

Kara Walker, Artist

Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between
the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart

Kara Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. Beginning with Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), she became known for her panoramic friezes of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery. Gone includes a tree bough that suggests a typical novelistic setting for a lovers’ meeting, yet all manner of surreal activity takes place: the woman of a white couple that is about to kiss has four legs; the man seems to touch the bottom of a nearby black boy with his sword; this boy is holding a swan that has emerged from a black woman, who floats on the water (a set of metaphors for miscegenation). 

Above text from Guggenheim.org

Watch on YouTube. Kara Walker talks about her work. 

Link here.

More work by Kara Walker below.

Robin Ward, Artist

The Elephants in the Room(s), found paint box with mixed media, 14 x 14 x 17," 2010

Source link here. 

Carline Slotte, Artist

Artist's website here.

Francesca Woodman, Artist

Francesca Woodman: Untitled, Boulder, Colorado 1976

Source is New York Book Review

Francesca Woodman, Artist

"Taken between 1972 and 1981, Woodman’s photographs are almost all black-and-white and have a general softness of focus not often seen these days. They depict a world almost identical to the one captured by earlier generations of photographers, as if Woodman’s camera were a filter through which the neon clutter of contemporary life could not pass. Some of these images have the polished smoothness of Surrealist photographs, like those of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer, in which precisely-rendered objects are arranged so deliberately it seems the slightest movement would alter the meaning entirely. (Fluent in Italian, Woodman spent her junior year in Rome, where she paid frequent visits to the Libreria Maldoror, a bookshop-gallery that specialized in work about and by Surrealists, and which ultimately hosted her first small show.) She makes use of many Surrealist motifs, among them mirrors, gloves, birds, and bowls. Like Magritte, she often shrouds her subjects in white sheets."

Image and text source from The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman by Elizabeth Gumport, The New York Review of Books.  Link here to read and see more. 

Heather Smith Jones, Artist

From the artist's website.  Link here.

The pinhole method is one I have been employing since around 2000 and one I use on it's own or combined with other media. While researching Australian Aboriginal art during graduate school I was inspired by their use of dots. By poking holes through paper, I translated those dots and understood I had found a new way to communicate, in my voice. There is an austere and delicate beauty in making a pattern, image, or text with a subtractive process. It has been said my "works marry fierce and fragile through the exquisite and obsessive technique of pin-pricked imagery."

Pinhole relates to drawing and also fiber work. The repetitive process of poking one hole after another is like the accumulative gestures found in sewing, stitching or weaving. A friend of mine one remarked that he found my work to be "like sewing without thread". My mother was a weaver for many years and my grandmother embroidered. My pinhole process recalls those traditions.

James Michael Starr, Artist

Link here to read about this piece and see more by this artist.

Tim Sandy, Artist

Source link here.