Joanne's Textility

Stephen Maine, Mesh painting #11-011

If you haven't seen the Joanne Mattera Art Blog, click the links in this post and get on over there. Joanne is a New York based artist who works in encaustic and digital media, and she has a special fondness for textile art. She and Mary Birmingham have co-curated an exhibit at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey called Textiliy. The works in this exhibit, to quote from the catalog, "draw from a textile tradition, or ... exhibit a material presence or conceptual quality related to textiles." So the works selected either use textiles as a medium or reference textiles in their concept and presentation. Here is a link to the exhibit catalog which Joanne reprints on her blog. There are all kinds of wonderful pictures of the art.

Here is a link to Joanne's most recent blog post where she talks about artists' ghettoizing themselves according to the media they work in. I think this is relevant to many of us who think of ourselves of artists first and textile artists second, but who tend to get boxed in by our medium. I follow Joanne's blog faithfully. You should too.

Beverly Alice Nash