Prairie Interlace provides an opportunity to reflect not only on the explosion of innovative interlace practices on the Canadian Prairies, but also on the specific joys and trials attached to curating textiles. Working virtually on this multi-faceted project during the COVID-19 pandemic brought into focus several of the considerations and requirements, often impossible to meet, of curating an essentially tactile medium. The pandemic also made more precious those moments of encounter with woven works, both in the past and in the course of our research, which inspired our deliberations. From the initial breathtaking encounters with pieces of exceptional skill and aesthetic impact, to the ordeal of locating artists and information, to the unique strategies needed for installing textiles, this essay gives expression to some of the specific concerns which we, as a curatorial team, faced in developing Prairie Interlace.

Wondrous Encounters and Resonant Longings

Foundational to Prairie Interlace are the sixty woven and interlaced objects which illustrate the breadth of textile-based work that occurred in the second half of the 20th century on the Prairies. Among these objects are a number that had long resonated in the minds of our curatorial team, composed of Michele Hardy (Curator, Nickle Galleries, University of Calgary), Timothy Long (Head Curator, MacKenzie Art Gallery), and Julia Krueger (Independent Curator and Researcher).¹ Literary historian Stephen Greenblatt explains that a “resonant” object is one with the power to pull “the viewer away from the celebration of isolated objects and towards a series of implied, only half visible relationships and questions . . . [and] to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged.”² These “resonant relationships,”³ as Krueger describes them, often begin with a wondrous encounter with an object. Greenblatt defines wonder “as the power of the object displayed to stop the viewer in his [or her] tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.”⁴ The dialogue that ensues between object, history, community, and researcher has the capacity to enlarge our horizons.

When wonder strikes, a curator or researcher cannot always follow up due to the constraints of time, capacity, or other commitments. A resonant longing often ensues, one lodged in the recesses of memory where it continues to tug at the unconscious. Krueger, for example, vividly remembers seeing her first Pat Adams weaving. While assisting with the installation of an exhibition at the Moose Jaw Museum & Art Gallery in 2011, she was tasked with unrolling the textile in preparation for hanging. The slow unfolding of the weaving was like watching the morning light spread over a honey-coloured swath of land below a brilliant mauve sky: a wondrous encounter with land and yarn. She recalls noting colours that perfectly echoed the seemingly unreal hues of a Prairie sky and a window-like view that stopped time and grounded within her the particulars of place. She can’t remember much else from that exhibition because her attention was so entirely transfixed. She wanted to learn more about Adams and his deft use of yarn, but she couldn’t as her focus at the time was on Prairie ceramics. By happenstance, a few years later Krueger climbed the stairwell of the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina and came face-to-face with Adams’ Prairie Sunset, 1983 (cat. 1).

Looking at its sky of brilliant pink and violet, she once again found herself overcome by wonder—for the Prairies, for Adams’ skill, for the calm and quiet in the work, and for a woven rendering of light unlike anything she had seen before. Her desire continued to build as she worked with Timothy Long on exhibitions which sought to expand the history of clay in relation to late Modernism and early Postmodernism in Regina. After co-curating Victor Cicansky: The Gardener’s Universe in 2019, a window opened as they asked themselves, “What’s next?” In that moment, the resonant longing for a history of textile art that would encompass craft, Modernism, and Postmodernism on the Prairies emerged from their mental recesses. For Krueger, there was a longing to understand the work of Prairie weavers such as Adams; for Long, the desire was to explore and expand the context of Kaija Sanelma Harris’ monumental architectural weaving Sun Ascending, 1985 (cat. 21), something he was unable to do at the time of its acquisition by the MacKenzie in 2014. Long and Krueger then approached textile curator Michele Hardy, who eagerly joined the project bringing a knowledge and passion that would be foundational to the project.

Troubles with Textiles

Research for this exhibition has met with more than its share of troubles. At the onset of the research phase, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, disrupting our plans to visit archives and private collections and undermining efforts to view public textile collections in person. Inconvenient as they were, the pandemic restrictions shone a spotlight on the challenges of storing, documenting, and exhibiting textiles—challenges that have tended to stifle and suppress textile research even when there isn’t a pandemic. Outside of our own institutions, we found access to museum collections next to impossible due to closures. Reduced staffing at many institutions further impacted what could be accessed and when. For some institutions, collections staff had only sporadic in-person access to otherwise closed facilities. Hence, most of the research to select the artworks for Prairie Interlace was conducted through online databases or by collections staff who could access files remotely. In situations where records were meagre or photographs absent, we simply could not consider the works. In many cases, photographs were available but at such low resolution as to make study difficult. For some works, we did not fully understand their structure until they were unpacked at Nickle Galleries over the summer of 2022. While the textile selections we made are representative of the tremendous creativity and experimentation that characterized textile works of the Prairies between 1960 and 2000, just how representative is a question for future scholars.

Physical artist files, today increasingly rare, were difficult and in some cases impossible to access; holdings of archival materials related to fibre art are sporadic at best. Ironically, for a digital age, the Nickle’s hard copy artist files (files that have not been maintained for over a decade and linger in deep storage) proved an important resource. Once upon a time, librarians clipped newspaper articles and filed exhibition catalogues—fortunately for us, their efforts coincided with the period of investigation. Krueger identified the importance of provincial craft council publications, overlooked and difficult to search, and coordinated the digitizing of past newsletters of Alberta and Saskatchewan’s craft councils.⁵

Throughout the research phase, we began to postulate that these challenges—though exposed by COVID-19—have been major contributing factors to why the story of weaving on the Canadian Prairies has not been more thoroughly researched, exhibited, or written about. Collectively referred to here as “Troubles with Textiles,” our list of challenges helps to describe the inherent complications in researching textiles, complications that impact how, when, and where textiles are accessed, viewed, researched, and, ultimately, understood. The following is a brief synopsis of those troubles.

Lexical Lack

M. Anna Fariello has argued that there is a need for craft to have its own discipline-specific language.⁶ The same is true for the fields within craft such as textiles. While there are numerous words to describe textiles, these words are often misunderstood, used inconsistently, or appear like arcane jargon to those without specific textile knowledge. For example, to purists, “tapestry” is a discontinuous weft-faced pictorial textile like Murray Gibson’s Prairie Carpet, 1990 (cat. 14). Confusingly, when researching Prairie Interlace, Marge Yuzicappi’s latch-hooked rug, Tapestry (Ta-hah-sheena), c. 1970 (cat. 60), and William Perehudoff’s punch-hooked Untitled Tapestry (Loeb Commission), 1976 (cat. 42), not only have “tapestry” in their titles, but they were also categorized as such in their respective databases. These aren’t necessarily errors as “tapestry” is often used to describe pictorial fibre-based works that are hung on a wall. To further confuse matters, the free-form macramé pieces by Jane Sartorelli and the pieced and knotted leather work by Ilse Anysas-Šalkauskas have “tapestry” included in the “materials” fields of their respective databases. Needless to say, this lexical inconsistency fosters confusion and makes it hard to articulate the parameters of a research inquiry. In some cases, the catch-all term “mixed media” concealed the identity of textiles altogether. Lexical confusion acts as a barrier when searching through databases and muddies questions posed to staff who might have limited familiarity with textiles. A simple task, like a search for specific holdings, can easily become “too much trouble.”

Intransigent Baggage

Historically, and stereotypically speaking, textiles are associated with the domestic, hobby craft, and women’s work. Frances Borzello notes in At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art that the domestic interior as a subject has been invisible to the history of art and has “no official existence.”⁷ By extension, it would be safe to say the objects found within those interiors, such as Annabel Taylor’s rug Ten Shades of Sheep, 1983 (cat. 55), are largely invisible to curators because they are not considered art. Except in cases when they critique art world hierarchies (e.g., the work of Nancy Crites, cat. 9 & 10, and Cindy Baker, cat. 4), textiles are frequently “not at home” within the white cube of the art gallery and art publications.

Julia Bryan-Wilson notes in Fray: Art and Textile Politics that textile production across cultures, while not “uniformly considered feminized labor,” retains a feminized association that clings to “textiles across the spheres of applied art, everyday fashion design and industry.”⁸ During the 1970s, part of the period covered by Prairie Interlace, textiles and the labour associated with fibre-based arts were appropriated by feminist artists to reframe “women’s work” from the domestic sphere as high art.⁹ Since the 1970s, this reframing has become the default for textiles and has tended to reinforce the intransigent feminized associations (to borrow from Bryan-Wilson) that cling to textiles, meaning that unless one wishes to engage with feminist sexual and gender politics, the object holds no interest. In other words, textile projects come with a baggage of expectations that researchers may not want to engage or may not provide an appropriate frame for the objects under consideration.

Architectural Servitude

Elissa Auther explains that the weaver-designer of the 1950s adhered “to the notion of woven textiles as utilitarian products subordinated to interior design or architecture.”¹⁰ In the 1960s and 1970s, architects and interior designers started to commission larger, more expressive textile pieces that were as far from drapery as could be imagined. The notion of textiles being in service to architecture remained, however, undermining appreciation of them as art objects. As Surette points out in her essay, referring to the monumental tapestries shown at the Lausanne Biennials, Le Corbusier famously termed them “muralnomads,” acknowledging their potential removal from walls, a gesture that weakened, but did not altogether dissolve, the lingering association with architecture. Apart from the physical, logistical, and aesthetic challenges of creating textiles to suit and serve architectural settings (never the other way around), their servitude does not end with their removal from architectural spaces. Unlike a piece of furniture or painting, they can’t simply be moved, particularly if created to fit within a certain complex dimensional space. For example, Kaija Sanelma Harris’ Sun Ascending, 1985 was made specifically to warm the austere modernist interior of Mies van der Rohe’s TD Centre in Toronto (p. 82). Each of the twenty-four panels is almost four metres tall, making it next to impossible to install this work anywhere other than the TD Centre lobby—only half its panels could be included at Nickle Galleries and its height precluded inclusion at two Prairie Interlace venues altogether! Architectural textiles are typically created to complement a specific interior space and they tend to follow prevailing trends in interior design. Tastes and styles change, building interiors are renewed and renovated; what once looked modern can look embarrassingly dated years later.

When the decision is made to retire architectural textiles, the question arises, what to do with them? Many works the curators learned about have disappeared, having vanished into remote storage, private collections, or possibly landfills. Those tasked with dispersing large textiles do not always think to call a collecting institution to see if there is interest in acquiring the piece. Compounding this difficulty, not all institutions collect textiles or have the capacity to house large works. Transfer of ownership can be a long, drawn-out process making donation a nuisance for all but the most dedicated. Another critical factor is that the longer a textile is installed the more damage it is likely to have received from light, dust, pests, and wear. While museum recommendations suggest displaying textiles for only a few months,¹¹ architectural textiles typically remain on display for years. In other words, the conditions attached to architectural textiles are so specific that it makes it exceptionally hard to find other homes for them.

Fear-Based Avoidance

Striking fear into the heart of any museum professional working with textiles is the Canadian Conservation Institute’s ten “Agents of Deterioration,” a list developed in the 1980s. It identifies the ten biggest threats to the preservation of historic objects with suggestions on how to mitigate those risks.¹² Because textiles are vulnerable to all ten agents, their conservation is particularly fraught. The special care and handling textiles require can be a serious challenge for institutions and may result in fear-based avoidance. Textile donations, including architectural donations, can be turned down for any number of reasons: if appropriate storage space is unavailable, if the costs of conservation are deemed too high, if staff expertise is lacking. In many cases, it is easier to avoid these objects altogether rather than take on the challenge of bringing them into a collection. In the end, this means that textiles are not collected as widely as other forms of fine craft.

Hidden Away in Plain Sight

Because they are particularly susceptible to damage from light, temperature, humidity, and pests, textiles tend to be stored in secure, dark, environmentally controlled rooms. Visible storage arrangements in museums, a trend since the 1970s, have excluded textiles.¹³ Flat textiles are often stored in map-drawers; larger flat textiles are rolled, suspended, and covered with cotton sheeting; three-dimensional textiles are hung or stored on shelves, typically wrapped or boxed to protect them from dust and light. This means that textiles tend to be shrouded from view—inaccessible except to a privileged few.¹⁴ This also means that textiles tend to be out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Textile scholar and curator John Vollmer once noted that “Unlike a painting, it’s easy to roll up a tapestry and forget about it.”¹⁵

If a collections staff member is asked—”Do you have any rugs with green stripes?”—it may be a challenge for them to answer what is contained in those wrapped rolls, especially if the works have not been photographed. Whereas libraries once consisted mainly of books you could peruse on shelves, digital libraries and museum collection management systems streamline and direct inquiries and inhibit casual searching and serendipity. This was a significant issue for Prairie Interlace as we didn’t always know precisely what we were looking for.

Demands on Human Resources

Museums and art galleries are frequently overstretched and understaffed. The pandemic’s restrictions on how many people could occupy a closed space highlighted the number of staff needed to care for and provide access to textile artifacts. In the case of Prairie Interlace, if more than one person was required to inspect a work, to be the eyes for the researchers who could not visit the facility, or to take a photograph of it, the request was often denied. Beyond the pandemic restrictions, it is important to note the extra work required by the sheer size and weight of many works, particularly architectural textiles. At the Canada Council Art Bank in Ottawa, it took several preparatory staff to hoist Katharine Dickerson’s West Coast Tree Stump, 1972 (cat. 11), from its flattened state in a crate. For both public and private collections, large tables or clean floor spaces were required to view textiles. For example, Murray Gibson’s Prairie Carpet, 1990 (cat. 14), designed specifically for the Esso Research Centre on the University of Calgary campus but since removed (p. 114), had to be rolled out in a boardroom in Imperial Oil’s Quarry Park offices in southeast Calgary, and William Perehudoff’s Untitled Tapestry (Loeb Commission), 1976 (cat. 42), was spread on a plastic-covered floor in the main lobby space of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown. There is a cost to the institution when several staff are required for a researcher to access or photograph a rolled textile. As might be expected, when budgets are tight or capacity limited, access can be restricted as a result.

Salvage over Curatorial Intent

The fact that most of the artworks included in Prairie Interlace were loaned from government collections is not accidental and is not due solely to COVID-19 closures. These collections are the main repository for these types of textiles on the Prairies, a reality that raises questions about their role in the composition of the historical record. As mentioned above, textiles through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were used to embellish government and corporate offices. When these facilities closed, their contents were often saved for posterity. A case in point is Alberta House in London, England, which was decorated by interior designer Carolyn Tavender¹⁶ with commissioned textile works that included Whynona Yates’ Hanging, 1974 (cat. 59), and Brenda Campbell’s Lava, 1974 (p. 115). When the facility was permanently closed in 1995, these works were transferred to the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.¹⁷ While any effort to preserve textiles is welcome, the resulting inventory of artworks is rather like a historic or ethnographic collection; it reflects a salvage paradigm rather than curatorial intention that takes into account the field of contemporary production or an artist’s career. This lack of curatorial intent is evident in the textile holdings of many government collections, and even in some art gallery collections, suggesting an entrenched de-valuing of textiles. With few exceptions (e.g., Aganetha Dyck and Ann Newdigate), textiles are collected piecemeal and opportunistically. Any sense of the development of a fibre artist’s oeuvre is lost within the scattered remains found in public collections. Compounding this situation is the often scant information about the artists and their commissions. A case in point is This Bright Land, 1976 (cat. 36), by Motter and Associates. It was commissioned for the entrance to the Calgary Convention Centre, but in 1983 it entered the collection of the City of Calgary where it has been in storage ever since. No installation photographs or instructions are to be found, and it was only recently discovered that the work, though designed by F. Douglas Motter, was woven by Carol Little. It is next to impossible to build a comprehensive understanding of the work of artists such as Little, Campbell, and Yates through their salvaged holdings in public collections.

Textiles are ephemeral. Frequently made for domestic use, they are often thrown away or recycled when no longer useful; hence old textiles are rare. Examples of ancient textiles are rarer still; their existence is predicated on their chance preservation in peat bogs, permafrost, or extremely dry conditions. But the perpetual absence of modern textiles is neither the result of disposal after use nor a lack of proper storage conditions but rather a compounding, continual loop of the seven points above. What we know about recent Prairie textiles is based on what may have been collected, may have been recorded, and may have been accessible on any given day. Textiles’ perpetual absence is a result not just of a series of inconvenient or unfortunate “troubles,” but of models and priorities antithetical to textiles that have reduced, if not outright negated, their presence within Prairie art and craft history and discourse.

The point of this reflection on the vicissitudes of textile curation is not to complain about the efforts of collecting institutions—indeed, the curators are indebted to them—but to point out the difficulties of curating textiles, suggesting reasons why they are seldom researched and exhibited. An exhibition of oil paintings, ceramics, or ancient coins poses its own challenges but none as restrictive or hidden as textiles. The hope is that by sharing these struggles, other curators, researchers, artists, and collections professionals will be inspired to address the specific needs of textiles and to no longer see them solely as sources of trouble.

Textile-centric Installation Strategies

Michele Hardy took the lead on the installation of Prairie Interlace at Nickle Galleries, which was the first venue and institution responsible for administering the major touring project grant from the Museums Assistance Program of Canadian Heritage. Her textile-centric approach focused on the selection of metatextiles and deployment of textile-specific installation strategies. A metatextile is an object with self-referential qualities that highlight the unique characteristics of the medium. For example, the selection of a work like Close Knit, 1976 (cat. 13), by Aganetha Dyck highlights the manipulable qualities of cloth because the placement and folding of each shrunken sweater’s arms varies with each installation. Other works embody the rich history and global reach of textiles: Murray Gibson’s Prairie Carpet, 1990 (cat. 14), self-consciously embeds transcultural weaving references in both its process and patterning. Other artists index the material foundations of weaving in their work. Annabel Taylor’s rug Ten Shades of Sheep (cat. 55) derives its pattern and colour palette from variations in the wool harvested from specific sheep. Similarly, Kate Waterhouse’s archive of dye-samples, the product of years of experimentation with different Prairie plants (cat. 58), provides a master key to foundational textile knowledge. Specific installation strategies also contributed to Hardy’s textile-centric curation. The installation plan was anchored by free-hanging works that recalled the decisive movement of fibre art into three-dimensional space during the 1960s and 1970s. Leading the way historically was Charlotte Lindgren; the very material and structure of Winter Tree, 1965 (cat. 28), a suspended lace-like tube of dark woven thread, extends into space through the dance of shadow on the walls. In Furrow, 1976 (cat. 29), with a nod to gravity’s effects upon textiles, Carol Little transforms a rather unassuming piece of yardage into a mid-air ballet by draping it over dowels suspended from the ceiling. One of the most significant decisions Hardy made was to suspend works at a distance from the wall, even if they would normally hang flush against its surface. This strategy enabled key textile qualities to come to the forefront, such as the independence of woven wall hangings from the frame of painting, a topic addressed by Long in his essay. Unlike a painting, the reverse side of a textile holds secrets to its fabrication; the complex construction of works such as Whynona Yates’ Hanging, 1974 (cat. 59), can only be understood through an inspection of its reverse side. Separation from the wall also brings attention to the previous life of certain works as architectural commissions. In this, the raw concrete walls of Nickle Galleries’ exhibition space, once the brutalist exterior of the University Theatre, provided an impressive and appropriate backdrop for those works made for architectural spaces, such as Harris’ Sun Ascending (cat. 21). In another instance, the scale of Nickle Galleries’ space allowed for the elevation of the small, domestically scaled rugs of the Sioux Handcraft Co-operative to a monumental register, as they were installed in a salon hang alongside Marge Yuzicappi’s colossal Tapestry (Ta-hah-sheena), c. 1970 (cat. 60). These engagements with space and scale provided a counterpoint to the intimate textural qualities that invited long and leisurely close looking.

Beyond the Exhibition

The resonant, wondrous, troublesome nature of textile art accounts for its widespread appeal and general invisibility. This exhibition, website, and publication attempt to address both sides of the equation, by amplifying textile’s visceral and conceptual appeal while mitigating the factors that often lead to its omission from display and discourse. Reflecting on the curation of textiles is part of our strategy, one which we hope plants the seeds of future projects. The hope is that collectors, museum professionals, archivists, building managers, and others will be attentive to the specific needs of textile art, and will collect, conserve, and document these remarkable works with intention and care. Ultimately, we hope this publication conveys something of the wondrous encounters we experienced in researching and producing Prairie Interlace, and stirs resonant longings that will foster future creation, study, enjoyment, and understanding.

Notes

1. 1 For Julia Krueger in addition to the work of Pat Adams, it is Katharine Dickerson’s West Coast Tree Stump, 1972 and the work of Margreet van Walsem that have resonantly beckoned to her for almost two decades. For Timothy Long, a resonant longing began with the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s acquisition of Kaija Sanelma Harris’ Sun Ascending, 1985.
2. 2 Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43, no. 4 (January 1990), 19–20, 23.
3. 3 Julia Krueger, “Indisciplined Ceramic Outhouses and Blob-like Glass Bunnies: Four Case Studies on Canadian Prairie Ceramics and Glass” (PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 2020), 2–3.
4. 4 Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” 19–20.
5. 5 For the Saskatchewan Craft Council’s The Craft Factor, visit: https://saskcraftcouncil.org/the-craft-factor-archive/; The Alberta Craft Council’s Alberta Craft, visit https://issuu.com/albertacraft.
6. 6 M. Anna Fariello, “Making and Naming: The Lexicon of Studio Craft,” in Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Elena Buszek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 23.
7. 7 Frances Borzello, At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 26.
8. 8 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 10 & 12.
9. 9 Glenn Adamson, “The Fiber Game,” The Journal of Cloth and Culture 5, no. 2 (2015): 169.
10. 10 Elissa Auther, “From Design for Production to Off-Loom Sculpture,” in Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design, ed. Jeannine Falino (New York: Abrams, 2012), 145.
11. 11 Renée Dancause, Janet Wagner, and Jan Vuori, “Caring for textiles and costumes,” Preventive Conservation Guidelines for Collections (Canadian Conservation Institute), https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/preventive-conservation/guidelines-collections/textiles-costumes.html#a34, accessed December 27, 2022.
12. 12 Canadian Conservation Institute, “Agents of deterioration,” https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/agents-deterioration.html, accessed December 18, 2022.
13. 13 UBC’s textile collections were not regularly featured in visible storage until the completion of a major Renewal Project in 2010, https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Museum_of_Anthropology_at_UBC, accessed December 18, 2022.
14. 14 Michele Hardy and Joanne Schmidt, “Radical Access: Textiles and Museums,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings (2008), https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/1089/, accessed March 17, 2023; Fiona Candlin, “Don’t Touch! Hands Off! Art, Blindness and the Conservation of Expertise,” Body and Society 10, no. 1 (2004): 71–90. 
15. 15 John Vollmer, “Tamara Jaworska: Tapestry weaver was a Canadian cultural treasure,” Globe and Mail, November 22, 2015, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/tamara-jaworska-tapestry-weaver-was-a-canadian-cultural-treasure/article27434364/, accessed March 18, 2023.
16. 16 Andrea Lang, “Artistic Interiors: Fine Art and Interior Design,” Artswest 6, no. 6 (June 1981): 18–27.
17. 17 Textiles transferred from Alberta House to the AFA collection after its closure in 1995 include 1997.013.00 and 1997.051.001 by Brenda Campbell; 1997.116.001 and 1997.116.002 by Lavoine McCullagh; 1997.085.001 and 1997.118.001 by Whynona Yates; and 1997.117.001 by Elisabeth Vander Helm. Gail Lint to Julia Krueger, “Textiles from Alberta House London,” email, October 14, 2021.