March 19, 2022
Ukrainian Institute of America
The Fiber Effect
February 25–March 27, 2022
Art at the Institute is delighted to announce a special exhibition of textile-based artworks by contemporary artists Stanley Bulbach (New York), Volodymyra Hankevych (Lviv, Ukraine), Jaroslava Lialia Kuchma (Chicago), and Yaroslava Tkachuk (Lviv). The exhibition examines the themes and techniques and the relationships among material, process and the maker — within a contemporary context — representing one of the world’s longest and most accessible aesthetic traditions.
Ancient cultures knew something that artists, along with new generations of craftspeople, are rediscovering — that fiber (woven, knitted, braided, quilted, crocheted, embroidered) can be an expressive medium, one more powerful, perhaps, than for its ubiquity. Textiles, after all, accompany us on nearly every step of life: we are born and swaddled in it, kept warm by it, buried in shrouds, and are used for cultural identity, ritual and decoration.
A renewed embrace of fiber may have something to do with our increasingly virtual world, removed every day of personal contact and interaction. Textiles, in contrast, are earthy and inherently tactile. We describe the “hand” of fabric, meaning the feel of it — whether smooth and cool or rough and grainy. We speak, too, of the “fabric of society,” especially when it is unraveling.
The foundation for this project is to encourage discourse on the role of fiber art in society, its cultural and spiritual identity, the exhibiting artists’ creations as expressive discovery, celebration of the handmade, and invoke wonder and that rarest and most coveted of emotions: Joy.
Ukrainian Institute of America,
2 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075
Phone: 212-288-8660, Fax: 212-2882918 mail@ukrainianinstitute.org
