Inquisition, 1961

Linen
© Lenore G. Tawney Foundation; courtesy the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, New York and Alison Jacques, London. Photo by Michael Brzezinski.

Lenore Tawney was a renowned pioneer of fiber art whose revolutionary approach to weaving helped to determine the course of the movement in the 1960s. Over a five-decade career, which began when she was in her forties and ended with her death at the age of one hundred, she produced weavings, sculptural installations, and boxlike assemblages alongside works on paper, including drawings and postcard collages. Inspired by the Peruvian textiles she had studied—as well as by the knotted or woven rope fenders on the tugboats she could see from her loft in Coenties Slip, a tiny street near the seaport in Lower Manhattan where many artists lived at the time—Tawney began incorporating knots and braids into her works in the 1960s. The results were, in her words, “expanding, contracting, aspiring forms.” She created Inquisition—its title as characteristically evocative as those of Tawney’s other “woven forms”—around the same time, using the same techniques.