Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–80 Precis

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The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

Fiber Art and the
Hierarchy of Art
and Craft, 1960–80
Elissa Auther

Elissa Auther is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art
at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Her
essay for the Journal of Modern Craft is derived from her
book manuscript about the innovative use of fi ber across
the art world in the 1960s and 1970s. Recent publications
about the position of craft under modernism include “The
Decorative, Abstraction and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft
in the Art Criticism of Clement Greenberg,” Oxford Art Journal
27(3) (December 2004) and “Andy Warhol, Wallpaper and
Contemporary Installation Art,” for the forthcoming edited
collection Extra/Ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art.

Abstract
“Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–
1980” both explores the artistic, historical, institutional
and extra-aesthetic forces affecting the formation of the
fi ber movement and evaluates the curatorial strategies of
Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen to negotiate
the hierarchy of art and craft in order to elevate fi ber
as a medium of “high art.” The analysis considers the
emergence of the category of fi ber art in the 1960s and
1970s, the cultural contexts in which fi ber or textiles
were utilized in the period, strategies of transcending
the hierarchy of art and craft, and other relations
of dominance and subordination that defi ned fi ber’s
marginality in the hierarchy of the arts and shaped the
responses of artists, critics and curators to aesthetic
boundaries.

Keywords: fi ber, craft, feminism, decorative, hierarchy,
modernism, Mildred Constantine, weaving.

The Journal of
Modern Craft

Volume I—Issue I
March 2008
pp. 13–34

Reprints available directly
from the publishers

Photocopying permitted by
licence only

© Berg 2008

14 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

In 1972, Mildred Constantine—a former
curator of architecture and design at the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New
York—reproduced Adams’s Construction
in Beyond Craft, the fi rst in-depth study of
the emerging fi ber art movement.1 This
important text, co-authored with textile
designer Jack Lenor Larsen, chronicled the
movement’s evolution, defi ned its aesthetic
priorities and defended work made of fi ber
as “fi ne art.” In 1963, Adams’s unorthodox
woven works had been included in New
York’s Museum of Contemporary Crafts’
exhibition Woven Forms (Figure 3), a show
that Constantine and Larsen’s study singled
out as groundbreaking.2

Signifi cantly, critic Lucy Lippard also
exhibited Adams’s Construction in her
eclectic, “post-minimalist” show Eccentric
Abstraction, at the Fischbach Gallery in New
York in 1966 (Figure 4). Unlike Beyond
Craft, Eccentric Abstraction situated Adams’s
Construction among avant-garde work by
such emerging artists as Eva Hesse, Bruce
Nauman and Keith Sonnier. The show’s
works utilized a variety of non-traditional,
fl exible media, including wire mesh, vinyl,
cloth and rope.

Saret exhibited Untitled in 1970 in New
York’s Sidney Janis Gallery’s January group
show String and Rope (Figure 5), alongside
works by Christo, Fred Sandback, Bruce
Nauman and Robert Morris. Arts Magazine,
one of the era’s major fi ne-art periodicals,
reproduced Saret’s piece and a critic writing
for the Christian Science Monitor noted the
use of fi ber as an autonomous abstract
element. The “artists included,” he wrote,
“use string or rope (or thread), not as line,
but as falling, tangling, stretching, or coiling
matter” (Andreae 1970: 58).3

Fig 1 Alan Saret, Untitled, 1968, rope and wire,
variable dimensions.

Alan Saret’s Untitled (1968) (Figure 1), a
work of rope and wire and Alice Adams’s
Construction (1966) (Figure 2), of rope
and steel cable, share signifi cant formal
similarities. Both works are fl oor based,
of similar size and shape, and both utilize
materials associated with “craft,” hand labor
or industry. Indeed, one could conclude
that the same artist made both works. But
this is not the case, and the two artists
were associated with very different artistic
circles in the 1960s: Saret was an anti-form
sculptor, whereas Adams was associated
with what came to be known as the fi ber
art movement. Moreover, the works were
exhibited and received very differently.
Comparing the varied reception of these
two similar objects reveals not only fi ber’s
arrival as a new medium of “high art” but
also how this elevation of fi ber issued from
multiple sites or positions, each with a distinct
location within the complex network of
power relations governed by the application
of the term “craft” in the United States in the
1960s and 1970s.

Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 15

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

Studies like Beyond Craft (1972),
exhibitions such as Woven Forms (1963),
Eccentric Abstraction (1966) and String and
Rope (1969), and works in fi ber like Saret’s
and Adams’s are representative of a number
of projects in the 1960s and 1970s that
signaled fi ber’s potential as a fi ne-art medium
and illustrate different relations to the art
world’s center of power. In each case, fi ber,
that is, craft—typically dismissed or even
invisible as a force shaping the art world in
this period—was in actuality central to its

constitution. Beyond Craft and Woven Forms
attempted to elevate fi ber from the realm of
“craft” to that of “art” and were undertaken
by individuals and institutions dedicated to
legitimating new work in materials traditional
to craft. The goal of legitimating so-called
fi ber art as “Art” sets these projects apart
from exhibitions such as Eccentric Abstraction
and String and Rope, which attempted to
capture sculpture’s latest vanguard. Here craft
functioned as a conceptual limit, essential
to the elevation of art—in the words of

Fig 2 Alice Adams, Construction,
1966, rope and steel cable.
Robert Mates photographer.
Courtesy of the artist.

16 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

Fig 3 Installation view of
work by Lenore Tawney in
Woven Forms, Museum of
Contemporary Craft, New
York, 1963. Ferdinand Boesch
photographer. Courtesy
of the American Craft
Council Library/Museum of
Contemporary Craft Archives.

Fig 4 Installation view of Lucy Lippard’s Eccentric
Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery, New York,
1966. Rudy Burckhardt photographer. Courtesy
of the Fischbach Gallery records, 1954–1978.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Glenn Adamson, as “a border that can never
be reached, but is nonetheless intrinsic to
any sense of position” (Adamson 2007: 2).
Eccentric Abstraction and String and Rope
were both produced by members of the art

world whose authority in itself legitimated
the work in question, a privilege not fully
extended to Constantine and Larsen. Rather
than focusing on whether Saret’s Untitled was
a work of art, these exhibitions theorized the
artistic use of fi ber and fi ber-like materials
in relation to previous examples of non-
traditional media in sculpture and to other

Fig 5 String and Rope, Installation view, Sidney
Janis Gallery, New York, 1969. Photographer
Geoffrey Clements.

Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 17

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

conditions, such as craft, that oppose the
defi nition of art.

Despite these differences in the projects’
orientations and goals, they all probed fi ber’s
symbolic power, paradoxically generated
by its subordination in the history of art
through deep-rooted associations with
utility or craft, a phenomenon Saret’s and
Adams’s works also illuminate. In challenging
the subordination of fi ber as a medium of
craft or of primarily utilitarian value, Adams’s
and Saret’s works additionally illustrate the
role fi ber played in testing the art world’s
aesthetic boundaries in the 1960s and
1970s. Yet, with the exception of Adams’s
Construction, which circulated widely, the
status of “high art” remained elusive for the
objects that Constantine and Larsen featured
in Beyond Craft. In fact, fi ber art in this period
was typically viewed as neither art nor craft,
but as between the two categories, thwarting
the works’ potential to undermine the
hierarchy of media responsible for fi ber’s low
aesthetic status.

This article examines the efforts of
Mildred Constantine—the movement’s
principal architect and supporter—and her
collaborator Jack Lenor Larsen to eliminate
this ambiguity, securing fi ber’s identity as
a medium of high art. Their strategy was
defi ned by the goal of assimilating fi ber-based
work to the fi ne arts and did not address
the fact that the boundary separating art
from craft is constructed rather than natural.
Although this strategy led to an unfortunate
collusion with the very hierarchy of media
they sought to transform and in hindsight
might seem obviously fl awed, my analysis
suggests that the options available to them
as defenders of fi ber art were tremendously
constrained by the period’s artistic discourse

defi ning the work of art, particularly its
autonomy from social contexts and practices
outside the art world with which fi ber
was intimately connected. The reasons
surrounding the art world’s resistance to
fi ber art were complex and varied, involving
the cultural connotations of fi ber, popular
trends in fi ber crafts and gender bias deriving
from fi ber’s association with women and the
domestic realm; with such factors working
against their project, perhaps no curatorial
strategy Constantine and Larsen could have
adopted at the time would have fared better.

The Aesthetic Status of Fiber in the
1960s and 1970s
In 1961, with Lenore Tawney’s solo exhibition
at the Staten Island Museum, fi ber art as it
would be recognized in the following two
decades made its public debut in a fi ne-art
context. The show consisted of forty works
produced between 1955 and 1961 in a
technique now referred to as open-warp
weave: a structure in which large parts of
the warp are left unwoven. The reception
of this and subsequent work demonstrates
that from the start fi ber artists experienced
considerable resistance from the realms
of both craft and fi ne art for the way their
work violated conventions of both practices.
Tawney recalled that her early “open-warp
weaves . . . caused quite a controversy
[amongst weavers]. No one had done this
kind of weaving … It’s against the rules and
those people who go by the rules were
against it” (Tawney 1978: n.p.).

However, posing a challenge to the
defi nition of weaving in the 1960s did not
automatically confer the status of “art” on
Tawney’s work; in the “high” art world too,
her work’s identity was unstable. For instance,

18 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

the small catalog for Tawney’s 1961 exhibition
reveals that on the one hand the show was
sponsored by the “Section of Handcrafts” but
elsewhere attempts to position Tawney as
a “fi ne artist.” In particular, the appreciation
written by Tawney’s close friend, painter
Agnes Martin, defends her artistic identity,
praising the work’s “originality” and its
relation to larger art-world trends toward
exploring new media.

Before Tawney’s Staten Island Museum
show was even mounted, the artist had
started using her open-warp method to
combine different weave structures in a
single work by dividing and redividing the
warp as the weave was in progress. The
resulting works, which she called “woven
forms” (see Figure 3), were monumental in
scale, departed from the rectilinear shape
of loom-woven fabrics and were not even
remotely utilitarian. Given their size, which
ranged from 11 to 27 feet (3.3 to 8.1 m)
in height, their abstraction (like some of
her earlier open-warp weaves, the “woven
forms” have no pictorial content) and
Tawney’s method of hanging them from the
ceiling, her work sharply departed from the
conventions of the “decorative wall hanging,”
the category in which weaves without
everyday utility were normally classifi ed in
the 1960s.

Yet this work too fell between accepted
divisions between art and craft. For instance,
Tawney’s 1962 solo exhibition at the Art
Institute of Chicago was installed in the
Textiles Department and Woven Forms,
the 1963 group show at the Museum of
Contemporary Crafts that included her
work, also institutionally situated her weaving
as craft. Even so, a reviewer for the New
York Times remarked that Tawney “is more

than just a weaver—she is also an artist.
Unfortunately, craft work has for many
years implied to the general public work
done by amateurs . . . with little merit . . . Miss
Tawney’s craft is in marked contrast to this
mistaken concept and her woven forms are
considered by experts to be works of fi ne
art” (O’Brien 1963).

This reviewer’s willingness to embrace
Tawney’s work as “fi ne art” against prevailing
sentiment that connected craft media to the
amateur or hobbyist, however, was more the
exception than the rule. Subsequent reviews
continued to question her work’s artistic
status. As late as 1990, on the occasion of
Tawney’s retrospective at the American Craft
Museum, Roberta Smith drew a negative
conclusion in her review for the New York
Times, leaving the impression that the
intervening years had done little to resolve
questions about the works’ status and
identity within the art world: “Mrs. Tawney’s
work exists in a limbo that is endemic to
much contemporary craft: it has departed
from craft and function without quite
arriving at art . . . Handsome and impressive
as her best efforts often are . . . [m]ost of
them sustain comparison neither to such
achievements in weaving as Navajo blankets,
nor to contemporary painting and sculpture”
(Smith 1990).

Smith’s evaluation presents another facet
of the picture that often consigned Tawney’s
work to an art world “limbo,” the artist’s
refusal of the utilitarian associations of craft.
Instead of exploring this aspect of her work,
however, Smith uses Tawney’s departure from
utility or function to reassert the differences
between craft (Navajo weaving) and art
(painting and sculpture) that the woven
forms actually complicated.

Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 19

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

These equivocations over the value
of Tawney’s woven work indicate the
institutional obstacles artists, critics and
curators of fi ber art faced in trying to
legitimate their work or the genre of fi ber
art. Examining Constantine and Larsen’s
efforts to consecrate fi ber art provides an
opportunity to look more systematically
at the questions of artistic legitimacy that
Tawney’s work provoked.

Wall Hangings
The fi rst major American exhibition of the
new genre of fi ber art was MoMA’s Wall
Hangings (Figures 6 and 7), co-curated by
Constantine and, at her invitation, Larsen.
With this exhibition, the two established
themselves as the fi ber movement’s
leading experts and also set the canon of
vanguard fi ber art (or “Art Fabric,” as they
called it). Wall Hangings presented to the
American museum-going public the fi rst
international survey of primarily large-scale,
abstract woven and off-loom work in fi ber.

Planned by Constantine since 1966, the
exhibition toured eleven cities in 1968,
returning in early 1969 to MoMA, where it
was installed, at Constantine’s insistence, in
the museum’s fi rst-fl oor special exhibition
galleries, rather than in the Department of
Architecture and Design. To the American
fi ber world’s leading triumvirate of Lenore
Tawney, Sheila Hicks (Figure 8) and Claire
Zeisler, Constantine and Larsen added Kay
Sekimachi (Figure 9), Walter Nottingham and
Ed Rossbach, among others. Some of the
exhibition’s most advanced work came from
abroad, including that of the Swiss Françoise
Grossen, Yugoslavian (Croatian) Jagoda Buic,
and Poles Magdalena Abakanowicz and
Wojcieh Sadley, whose woven forms radically
departed from the conventions of tapestry
as practiced in Europe at the time.

Regrettably, given the exhibition’s
importance in the history of the American
fi ber movement, the only national art-world
press Wall Hangings received was a review
that Craft Horizons commissioned from

Fig 6 Wall Hangings, Installation
view, Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1969.

20 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

Fig 7 Wall Hangings, Installation
view, Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1969.

Fig 8 Sheila Hicks, The Principal Wife Goes On,
1977, silk, linen, and wool elements ca. 180 in. long,
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of
S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc.

sculptor Louise Bourgeois.4 Bourgeois’s
response to the show contrasts strikingly
with the curatorial statement written by
Constantine and Larsen for the exhibition
catalog. Whereas they asserted: “During the
last ten years, developments in weaving have
caused us to revise our concepts of this craft
and to view the work within the context of
twentieth-century art” (1969: n.p.), Bourgeois
concluded:

The pieces in the show rarely liberate
themselves from decoration . . . A painting
or a sculpture makes great demand on
the onlooker at the same time that it
is independent of him. These weaves,
delightful as they are, seem more engaging
and less demanding. If they must be
classifi ed, they would fall somewhere
between fi ne and applied art. (Bourgeois
1969: 33f)

These opposing evaluations speak to the
period’s symbolic boundaries between

Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 21

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

art and non-art and such boundaries’
centrality to maintaining a hierarchy of
media separating fi ne art from craft. They
also point to a set of real and conceptual
obstacles heavily borne by fi ber artists and
their supporters, who sought to transcend
the aesthetic boundaries structuring the
art world in the 1960s and 1970s. It is

clear that although Bourgeois disagreed
with Constantine and Larsen about the
works’ value, the question of their identity
preoccupied them all. This preoccupation
continued to burden Constantine and Larsen
and subsequent scholars of fi ber art, who
took up issues of category over the nature
of the work itself. Bourgeois also exhibits
concern about categories of art, which
she strategically upheld in this review by
using fi ber art to explain what painting and
sculpture were not.

Bourgeois’s evaluation of the works
in Wall Hangings as “decoration” traded
upon the distinction between art and
craft, reasserting the aesthetic boundaries
fi ber artists and their supporters sought
to overcome.5 In her words, the objects
were “delightful” and “engaging.” In the
writing of modernist critics such as Clement
Greenberg, to be either was to succumb
to the decorative by making “immediately
pleasing” what true artists achieved through
rigorous intellectual struggle and risk-taking
(Greenberg 1945; 1986: 41). Bourgeois
reasserts the high-art status of painting and
sculpture by claiming that these genres place
a “demand” upon the viewer absent in fi ber
art. The opposition she reinforces—that
between the merely attractive object and
that which requires sustained attention—is
central to the hierarchy of art and craft,
which associates art with the cognitive realm,
craft with mere surface effect.

In an interview, Constantine related
her reaction to Bourgeois’s review of Wall
Hangings: “I was furious,” she reported. “It
represented exactly the attitude we were
trying to work against” (conversation with
the author 1999). Despite their awareness of
the negative art-world attitudes concerning

Fig 9 Kay Sekimachi, Nagare VII, 1970, woven
monofi lament, 80 × 9 × 9 in. Smithsonian
American Art Museum.

22 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

media traditionally associated with craft,
Constantine and her co-curator attempted
to assert fi ber’s art status by introducing
the new genre into the fi ne art world on
the terms set by that world. This strategy
required that they adhere to the dominant
philosophy of art voiced by Bourgeois and
that they collude in maintaining the hierarchy
of media responsible for fi ber’s general
exclusion from “high art.”

Two factors in particular made this
strategy meaningful to Constantine and
Larsen, factors that were themselves effects
of the hierarchy of art and craft and indicate
its self-perpetuating nature. The most
important such factor was that contesting
the hierarchy of art and craft rather than
assimilating select objects (those without
utility, for instance) into the category of
“high art” would have been to destabilize
the very artistic status they claimed for fi ber
artists. The identity of fi ber artists, because
they worked in a medium traditional to
craft, required authorization different from
that bestowed upon artists working securely
within the “high art” world. The necessity of
establishing one’s art as art was a handicap
that belonged only to the artist working in
craft media. An excellent example of the
nearly automatic security afforded the artist
with a position within the “high art” world is
demonstrated by the critic Hilton Kramer’s
review of Lucy Lippard’s 1966 exhibition
Eccentric Abstraction for the New York Times.
About the show, which featured work that
radically fl outed sculptural conventions of
the time, Kramer wrote: “[although the] work
is neither painting nor exactly sculpture . . .
art—of some sort—it is” (1966). The lack of
legitimacy afforded an exhibition such as Wall
Hangings illustrates that this basic security

was not extended to fi ber artists in the
1960s and 1970s.

A second factor informing Constantine
and Larsen’s approach was the fact that
overtly challenging the hierarchy of art and
craft might also undermine their authority
as curators, with negative consequences
for fi ber art’s legitimation. Constantine, like
others of her generation at MoMA (she
joined the staff in 1948), was committed
to the museum’s mission of identifying and
collecting modern works of the highest
achievement in art and design, a goal that
included examples of applied art or craft
to the extent such objects conformed
to modernist norms of innovation and
abstraction. Anni Albers’s solo exhibition in
1949, MoMA’s fi rst exhibition of weaving,
exemplifi es this approach to craft and design.
Albers’s association with the Bauhaus, her
commitment to experimentation and her
adaptation of non-objective form to weaving
all refl ected the museum’s vision of the
modern in art.

In the 1960s, exemplary objects of
craft and design were still subject to this
form of evaluation, which helped to shape
Constantine’s curatorial vision for Wall
Hangings. An anecdote of Constantine’s
about her experience as a curator while
MoMA was directed by René d’Harnoncourt
is revealing in this regard. Sometime in the
mid-1960s a hand-thrown vessel by the
celebrated Japanese potter Kitaoji Rosanjin
was under consideration for acquisition. In
Constantine’s account, d’Harnoncourt put
this rhetorical question to his curators at
the acquisitions meeting: “Do you know
when a pot is no longer a pot but a work
of art?” (in conversation with the author).6
To Constantine, such a question affi rmed

Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 23

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

that the distinction to be found between art
and craft resided in the object rather than
being culturally projected onto it. Such an
assumption underscores Constantine and
Larsen’s confi dence regarding the art status
they asserted for the objects exhibited in
Wall Hangings.

The story also foregrounds the authority
that rested in the curator (in the capacity
of his or her “eye”) to discern quality in
objects of cultural signifi cance—that is, to
distinguish between good and bad, “high”
and “low,” “fi ne art” and mere “craft.”7 A
theory of boundary maintenance in the arts
that pointed to the role of extra-aesthetic
factors such as gender, different contexts of
production, or cultural presumptions about
craft in the production of distinctions of
value had the potential to undermine this
curatorial and ultimately institutional form of
power in the 1960s. To the extent that the
authorization of an object as art is only as
good (that is, as convincing) as the authority
of the authorizer, undercutting the myth of
the “good eye,” could result in the forfeiture
of institutional validation required by a new
genre or movement.

A straightforward way of approaching
the conception of value that Constantine
and Larsen used—a conception of value
as intrinsic to an object—is to consider
it alongside the recontextualization of
non-Western objects from ethnographic
specimens to works of art, a taxonomic
shift to which Constantine and Larsen’s
conception is related. Recent anthropological
and art historical considerations of shifts in
classifying objects previously recognized for
their ethnographic value demonstrate that
museum strategies of acquisition and display
that elide issues of context, technique and

utility in favor of disinterested contemplation
of an object according to a modernist theory
of art are premised upon art’s autonomy
from the social realm.8 As Mary Anne
Staniszewski has shown in her study of the
history of exhibitions at MoMA, the type of
installation now considered standard in fi ne-
art museums—in which works are spotlit,
arranged at eye level on a neutral-colored
wall and widely spaced—emerged in the
US in the 1930s.9 This type of installation,
which “facilitated appreciation of the
singular artwork,” was also applied to the
exhibition of ethnic “artifacts” in museums
in the 1930s and 1940s, refl ecting a growing
aesthetic appreciation of non-Western
objects. In general, the aestheticized display
of ethnographic objects suppressed issues
of utility and highlighted form, creating an
atemporal, formalist viewing experience
unencumbered by the social formations
that gave rise to the work. As scholars of
exhibition history have pointed out, this
reconceptualization confi rms the aesthetic
categories and assumptions of the West’s
“high art,” leaving intact the hierarchy of
the arts and stripping those aspects of
non-Western objects in confl ict with that
hierarchy’s values.

Constantine, who assisted d’Harnoncourt
in a major exhibition that employed
this strategy—1954’s Ancient Art of the
Andes—was familiar with such a curatorial
strategy and it undoubtedly infl uenced the
conception of Wall Hangings and subsequent
fi ber-art projects. As installation photographs
of the show suggest (see Figures 6 and
7), Constantine and Larsen hung the
work according to a method of displaying
painting and sculpture calculated to enhance
the objects’ visual impact and autonomy.

24 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

Although such installation was by then
typical at MoMA for painting and sculpture,
its adoption in Wall Hangings can be seen
as strategic given fi ber’s lack of autonomy—
that is, its extensive use in cultural and
practical contexts outside the art world.
The exhibition displayed works in relative
isolation within the austere, white-walled
special exhibition galleries. This strategy was
carried over to the catalog, which lacked
detailed information about technique and
enhanced the works’ formal qualities by
using photographs in which each object was
suspended in space against a dark ground, a
classic mid-century method of photographing
ethnic objects that privileged form over
implied utility.10

Constantine and Larsen’s approach
to the consecration of fi ber art has a
logic rooted in a belief in formalism as a
democratic, legitimating discourse capable of
transforming any work into an object of pure,
aesthetic contemplation. As the negative
reception of Wall Hangings suggests, however,
applying a formalist exhibition strategy did
not resolve the hierarchy of art and craft
Constantine and Larsen sought to transcend.
An important factor at play here is the
way fi ber’s “low” aesthetic status derived in
part from its extensive use in cultural and
practical contexts outside the art world.
Briefl y examining these contexts illuminates
the larger challenge that Constantine and
Larsen faced in attempting to elevate fi ber as
a medium of “high art.”

Utility and Amateurism
Outside the “high” art world, fi ber gained
a new visibility in the United States in
the 1960s and 1970s with revivals of the
traditional crafts of hand weaving, quilting,

embroidery, dyeing, knotting and basketry.
The social and artistic contexts and practices
surrounding these revivals included the
back-to-the-land and hippie movements,
the renewed interest in folk art around
the American Bicentennial, trends in the
personalization of clothing like the adoption
of African dress by African Americans, the
feminist recuperation of women’s history,
the revival of traditional arts of minority
communities in the South and Southwest,
and the popular craze of macramé. Increased
funding from the National Endowment
for the Arts to support regional arts and
a burgeoning commercial market for craft
and folk art bolstered interest in such
work.11 These contexts and practices
demonstrate both the richness of what
ought to be defi ned as a major craft revival
in the United States in the 1960s and
1970s and the diffi culty, for fi ber artists, of
distinguishing their work from this nebulous
conglomeration.

The frequent connection made between
fi ber art and macramé—an association
encouraged by fi ber artists’ extensive use of
off-loom techniques such as knotting, looping,
linking and plaiting—shows why fi ber artists
strove to distinguish their work from popular
craft. The term macramé, which denotes a
form of lateral knotting probably Arabic in
origin, referred in the late 1960s and 1970s
to a genre of useful objects (jewelry, belts,
handbags, lampshades, plant holders and
hammocks, for instance) produced using
“decorative” knotting techniques. Macramé’s
enormous popularity is attested to by the
fact that fi ber artist and macramé specialist
Mary Walker Phillip’s best-selling book Step-
by-Step Macramé (1970) had sold more than
a million copies by 1976. In 1971, macramé’s

Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 25

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

mass cultural appeal even led the Museum of
American Folk Art in New York to organize
a major exhibition on the subject as part of
its NEA-funded series, Rediscovery of Grass
Roots America.12 Unusually, this exhibition
placed contemporary macramé within the
larger history of knotted-fabric construction,
bringing together, among other examples,
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
European lace, knotted fabrics and jewelry
of North American Indians, the decorative
knotted work of sailors from the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, and the large-
scale knotted work of fi ber artist Françoise
Grossen, which emphasized the fi ber art-
macramé connection.

The macramé hobby craze was
problematic for the fi ber movement because
it reinforced assumptions about fi ber as
a woman’s medium or of “low” art status.
In her 1979 interview for Arts Magazine,
Claire Zeisler (Figure 10) took advantage of
a question about technique to distinguish
her knotting (often in macramé) from the
“decorative” knots used by “macramé artists,”
suggesting the sensitivity of the topic for
artists working in fi ber.

J. PATRICE MARANDEL: In your own mind,
do techniques such as knotting or cutting
. . . set you apart from other fi ber artists?

CLAIRE ZEISLER: When I fi rst started
knotting, it was not a trend . . . You
certainly have heard the word macramé.
Some people referred to my work as
Claire Zeisler’s macramé. That’s when
I hit the ceiling . . . I do mind the word
macramé because macramé today
means a decorative knot and I use my
knotting technique as structure . . . The
knot becomes the base for the piece, like

the canvas is the base for a painting. (Arts
Magazine 1979: 151f)

Zeisler’s insistence on distinguishing between
her work and popular craft underscores the
degree to which macramé had become a
cultural phenomenon that impinged upon
the fi ber movement’s bid for status as art. It
is likely that Zeisler’s discussion of technique
in the pages of Arts Magazine—then a
leading periodical of contemporary art that
rarely dedicated copy to work in traditional
craft media—was a deliberate attempt to
persuade readers that work in fi ber shared
important features with art rather than the
popular hobby of macramé. Her reference to
knotting as integral to the “structure” of her
pieces emphasizes her art’s formalist nature,
as does her explicit parallel between her
work and painting. The latter comparison
places her work fi rmly in the category
of “high art” by invoking its pre-eminent
medium to highlight not craft-oriented
technique but art-oriented practice. Zeisler’s
rhetorical strategy was similar to that
adopted by numerous fi ber artists and their
supporters who were work ing to change the
place of fi ber in the art world’s traditional
hierarchy, dismissing its con nections to
activities classifi ed as “non-art.”

This effort was actually initiated some
years earlier by Anni Albers, who in 1940
entered into a debate over the function and
value of hand weaving with Mary Atwater,
America’s leading spokesperson for the
non-professional weaver, in the pages of The
Weaver, a nationally distributed quarterly
for the American hand-weaving community.
Atwater and Albers’s confl ict over the
meaning and role of textiles not only helps
to demonstrate how deep the association of

26 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

Fig 10 Claire Zeisler, Coil Series III—A Celebration, 1978, natural hemp and wool, 66½ × 34 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum Purchase.

Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 27

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

amateurism with fi ber runs, but also points to
another serious hurdle fi ber artists (working
on or off the loom) faced in defi ning their
work as art in the 1960s and 1970s—fi ber’s
gendered associations.

Atwater, perhaps best known as the
founder of the Shuttle Craft Guild and
its correspondence course in weaving in
1920, advocated a view of weaving as a
leisure-time or therapeutic activity. She also
researched nineteenth-century weaving
traditions, publishing her fi ndings alone or in
publications for hand weavers. Her research
was instrumental to the survival of these
historical and regional practices, but her
practical how-to approach ran counter to
the idea of weaving as an art form. As Ed
Rossbach put it, “She told Americans what to
weave, how to weave, [and] what to do with
their weavings” (Rossbach 1983: 22).13

Unlike Atwater, Albers regarded herself
as an artist and was particularly outspoken
regarding hand weaving’s potential to move
beyond a leisure pursuit with utilitarian
imperatives. She encapsulated her views in
a statement from 1959 that implored, “let
threads be articulate … and fi nd a form for
themselves to no other end than their own
orchestration, not to be sat on, walked on,
only to be looked at” (Albers 1959: 5).

Albers’s article for The Weaver
commented upon the state of contemporary
hand weaving in the United States and
illustrated textiles produced by her students
at Black Mountain College in North
Carolina.14 The publication coincided with
the height of the Appalachian craft revival,
in which weaving played a major role,
providing the immediate context for her
sharp critique of “recipes” and “traditional
formulas, which once proved successful”

(Albers 1940: 3). Albers argued that “such
work is often no more than a romantic
attempt to recall a temps perdu” and that
it refl ected the state of “isolation” and
“degeneration” of US hand weaving in
the period (Albers 1940: 3). Albers called
for a return to “fundamentals” and free
experimentation on and off the loom to
foster innovation and she suggested that the
resulting development of new forms in fi ber
could be art.

Atwater, who had no interest in the
imperatives of industry, modern design, or
art, responded to Albers with the predictably
titled piece “It’s Pretty—But is it Art?” which
she published in her advice column for The
Weaver.15 Not surprisingly, Atwater took
offense at Albers’s criticisms of faithfulness
to tradition and reproduction of historical
patterns (or “recipes,” as Atwater called
them). Atwater found the idea that a textile
might lack utility or be considered art
preposterous and she asserted that fi ber and
weaving were essentially useful and of value
primarily as an “escape from the distresses
or the hum-drum detail of our daily lives”
(Atwater 1941: 13). Atwater responded to
Albers’s emphasis upon experimentation,
imagination and the creation of new forms
(key elements of modernism in the arts)
with similar disdain, defending the right of her
readers (mostly women isolated at home
with little access to artistic training) to draw
aesthetic pleasure from weaving regardless
of their level of expertise or whether they
relied upon a pattern. Atwater’s acceptance,
even promotion, of her audience’s
amateurism raises the issue of fi ber’s
connections to femininity and domesticity,
associations that plagued fi ber artists in the
1960s and 1970s.

28 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

Femininity and Domesticity
As Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock
asserted over twenty-fi ve years ago in
their groundbreaking study Old Mistresses:
Women, Art and Ideology, “the sex of the artist
matters. It conditions the way art is seen
and discussed” (Parker and Pollock 1981: 50).
This is nowhere more evident in the late
twentieth century than in the history of the
fi ber movement, whose status and reception
was affected by weaving’s near-universal
association with women and the domestic
realm.

At its worst, the effort to challenge the
gendering of fi ber as “women’s work” actually
reinforced its association with femininity and
its low place in the art-world hierarchy. In
the late 1960s, when off-loom techniques
rose to prominence, the work of fi ber artists
adopting these techniques was interpreted
as free from the craft tradition’s conventional
values by virtue of their rejection of the
loom. Critics such as Rose Slivka posited
an antithesis between loom and off-loom
construction techniques, praising the latter’s
superior artistic quality. In the provocatively
titled piece “Hard String,” her review of the
1972 group exhibition Sculpture in Fiber for
Craft Horizons, Slivka characterized the loom
as an impotent instrument, a gendering of
technology that had the unintended effect
(as did the title of the show) of associating
off-loom fi ber art with the perceived
masculine virility of modern art.16

Not surprisingly, given this context,
the housewife is a key fi gure in critical
considerations of fi ber art, where she
signifi es amateurism and lack of creativity.
In criticism about fi ber art, this set of
associations often had to be overcome
before the writer could consider a work

of fi ber art worthy of discursive attention.
Fiber’s problematic association with
the domestic accounts for the distinctly
confessional tone or hedging found in fi ber-
art criticism that invokes the fi gure of the
housewife. Katherine Kuh’s article about the
work of Lenore Tawney and Claire Zeisler
for Saturday Review in 1968, “Sculpture:
Woven and Knotted,” is typical. Despite her
eventual enthusiasm, Kuh opens the article
by admitting her own negative assumptions
about weaving, shared, presumably, by her
readers: “Until recently, I always considered
weaving a ladylike pursuit for frustrated
housewives, but I am drastically changing
my mind. The best weavers are, to be sure,
still women, but some of them are also
fi rst-rate artists” (Kuh 1968: 36). The use of
the qualifi cation “also,” as in “also fi rst-rate
artists,” echoes George O’Brien’s language
in his review of Tawney’s work in the 1963
exhibition Woven Forms cited earlier. In that
piece, Tawney is “more than a weaver—she
is also an artist,” a qualifi cation that O’Brien
used later in the review to question craft’s
amateur associations. In Kuh’s assessment,
the amateur associations of craft are now
infl ected by gender, yet another barrier to
participation in the art world in this period
faced by fi ber artists—a problem shared
by female artists generally, in fact. Critic
Gregory Battcock’s review of Claire Zeisler’s
show at the Richard Feigen gallery in 1969
provides another example of how the image
of the housewife was used to great effect in
backhanded compliments during the 1960s:

Mops, fl oppiness and house-wifey
dumpiness might distract the viewer,
but only momentarily. The colors are
certainly more arresting than the Sheriff

Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 29

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

in Darien Conn. and the general tone
is more elegant than The Hilton Inn.
Zeisler’s sculptures emphasize texture at
the expense of form and since texture is
emphasized in just the right way, it’s O.K.
(Battcock 1969: 65)

For Kuh the housewife is capable but
frustrated, while for Battcock she is dumpy—
differences that might have to do with the
differing gender of the two critics or the
audience for whom they were writing. In
any case, Battcock’s idea of the housewife
and the comparison of Zeisler’s work to
mops remove fi ber from even the sphere of
craft, downgrading it to drudgery. Ultimately,
Kuh’s and Battcock’s language permits notice
of Zeisler’s work only to the extent that
their own critical authority regarding the
evaluation of art is assured.

This brief examination of fi ber’s extra-
aesthetic associations sheds additional light
on Constantine and Larsen’s approach to
elevating fi ber in a manner that completely
elided its history as a craft and its presence
in numerous contemporary non-art
contexts. Alternate approaches proved no
more successful and further demonstrate
the severity of the constraints they faced
in championing a material historically
categorized and marginalized as craft.

For instance, hybrid categories that could
bridge the divide between “art” and “craft,”
presumably better accommodating fi ber art,
also faced serious resistance in the art world.
Two such categories were “soft art” and “soft
sculpture.” Both functioned as organizing
rubrics for several shows in the late 1960s
and 1970s such as the New Jersey State
Museum’s Soft Art (1969), curated by Ralph
Pomeroy; Lucy Lippard’s traveling exhibition

for the American Federation of the Arts, Soft
and Apparently Soft Sculpture (1968–9); and
the New York Cultural Center’s traveling
exhibition, Softness as Art (1973). Soft Art
included work by Tawney as well as Richard
Tuttle, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse and Claes
Oldenburg. Softness as Art included one
work by Françoise Grossen, amongst that of
Jackie Ferrara, Harmony Hammond, Richard
Serra, Robert Morris and Hannah Wilke.
Fiber artists recognized the potential of the
categories “soft art” or “soft sculpture” to
bridge the divide separating art from craft. In
a 1970 article for Craft Horizons, “When Will
Weaving Be an Art Form?” Virginia Hoffman
observed that “soft sculpture”

could logically include any three-
dimensional form made by fl exible joinings,
fi brous materials, modules with no fi xed
beginning or end, soft materials made hard
and vice versa . . . One thinks of . . . works
by Eva Hesse, Alan Saret, Robert Morris,
[and] Alice Adams. (Hoffman 1970: 18)17

However, art critics were not as
enthusiastic about the soft art phenomenon.
Some went to great lengths to reassert
boundaries between genres and materials
that the rubric blurred. In his Artforum review
of the New York Cultural Center’s exhibition,
Soft as Art, James Collins asserted, “one of the
things artists shouldn’t do today is to make
art with anything soft” (Collins 1973: 89).
Most problematic for him was the category
itself, which “denies criticism the luxury of a
single critical framework” (Collins 1973: 89).
His response to this dilemma was to divide
the work in the show into four categories:
“process,” “revamped painting,” “craft/fetish,”
and “novelty art.” In his review these
categories redrew boundaries distinguishing

30 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

“art” from “craft” through a separation of
works in fi ber into either the “process”
category or the “craft/fetish” category. In the
“process” category, Collins singled out a felt
work by Robert Morris (along with a work
by Richard Serra) as worthy of attention for
its “theoretical underpinnings” (Collins 1973:
89). The rest of the work in the exhibition
was “neither experientially nor theoretically
interesting” (Collins 1973: 90). In the “craft/
fetish” category, Collins placed the work of
Françoise Grossen, Jackie Ferrara and Brenda
Miller, all of whom exhibited work in fi ber.

Anticipating readers’ objections to his
application of the term craft to the work
of three female artists working in rope and
other forms of fi ber, Collins asserted that
“labeling a work as craft orientated isn’t an
attack on women” (Collins 1973: 90). He
continued:

[it] is only to say they give the impression
of manual over mental dexterity and
people who are manually dextrous aren’t
necessarily interesting artists . . . Both Jackie
Ferrara with her Four Balls II made of
cotton bailing, rope and chains and Brenda
Miller’s Abscissa, consisting of a numbering
system dictating the structure of a twine
wall piece just by the use and association
of their materials suggest a “grass skirt”
reference—a gender neutral one. (Collins
1973: 90)

That the term “grass skirt” in this context
is not gender neutral hardly requires
elucidation. By rejecting the hybrid category
“soft art” and reinforcing fi ber’s association
to femininity and primitiveness, Collins neatly
maintains the boundary between art and
craft. Given the degree to which fi ber’s
associations to craft overwhelm Collins’s

response to Ferrara and Miller’s work, one
can imagine how easily the hybrid character
of work by fi ber artists such as Grossen,
Sheila Hicks, or Ed Rossbach could be
dismissed as illegitimate.

Thanks to such challenging associations,
Constantine and Larsen’s goal of elevating
fi ber art, in Wall Hangings and subsequent
projects, was diffi cult if not impossible to
accomplish in the 1960s and 1970s. In
addition, their acceptance of the division
between “high” and “low” art—and, one
might argue, their refusal to engage with the
very non-art connotations of fi ber that were
so problematic for their goals—left art-world
prejudices intact. Despite Constantine and
Larsen’s efforts, the work of Alan Saret—a
male artist who had worked previously in
other media and was part of the “high” art
world—was critically received as art, while
Alice Adams’s remarkably similar work—
emerging from her previous practice as a
weaver—was viewed with skepticism.

Despite these setbacks, however, evidence
suggests that Constantine and Larsen’s work
did make an impact, albeit one that did
not come to fruition until fairly recently. In
1993 the well-known independent curator
Mary Jane Jacob wrote about the infl uence
of Constantine upon her own innovative,
unorthodox, curatorial mission, which has
been instrumental in promoting an open use
of non-traditional materials without regard to
the art world’s hierarchical distinctions:

Unbeknownst to me, I began following
[Constantine’s] work as a young visitor to
The Museum of Modern Art on frequent
occasions from 1965 to 1969. Reading
and just looking at the images in Beyond
Craft sent my own curatorial work in

Elissa Auther Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 31

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

another direction. Most of all, her avant-
garde philosophy of inclusionism remains
compelling and her career—battling
to bring into the mainstream art and
artists from the outside—is a model of
independent vision and courage. (Jacob
1993: 9)

Dramatic change in the use and reception
of fi ber in the art world has occurred since
the 1970s, thanks in part to curators such
as Jacob, as well as artists of the fi rst-wave
feminist art movement, who set as one of
their goals the analysis of the hierarchy of art
and craft and women’s low position within
it through the incorporation of fi ber into
their work. For feminists, fi ber craft played
a role in the construction of an alternate
history of art making. A shared marginality
between the female traditional artist and
the contemporary feminist artist helped
the latter negotiate the paradoxical goal of
seeking recognition in the mainstream art
world, while at the same time attempting to
critique it. In this context, the once negative
associations of fi ber or craft with femininity
and the home were recast as distinctive
and culturally valuable features of an artistic
heritage specifi c to women.

While I’m not convinced that the use
of fi ber by artists today demonstrates the
complete effacement of the hierarchy of art
and craft, the medium’s ubiquitous use in
contemporary art no doubt represents an
important stage in a decades-long process
of art-world assimilation of the medium.
The evolution of Louise Bourgeois’s attitude
toward fi ber—from one of dismissal in the
1960s to full embrace with her latest soft
sculptures made from her personal collection
of linens and fabric remnants—is only one

Fig 11 Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 2002, tapestry
and aluminum. 17 × 12 × 12 in.; 43.1 × 30.4 ×
30.4 cm. Private Collection, courtesy of Cheim &
Reid, New York. Christopher Burke photographer.

example of the medium’s new currency. The
limitations of their strategy aside, the work
of Constantine and Larsen in the 1960s and
1970s to legitimate fi ber as a medium of art
represents a historically important moment
in this process.

Notes

1 Constantine, Mildred and Larsen, Jack Lenor.
1972. Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric. New York: Van
Nostrand. For an assessment of Constantine’s
career see Sorkin, Jenni. 2003. Way Beyond
Craft: Thinking Through the Work of Mildred
Constantine. Textile 1(1): 30–47.

32 Fiber Art and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960–1980 Elissa Auther

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 1—Issue 1—March 2008, pp. 13–34

2 Woven Forms. 1963. New York: Museum of
Contemporary Craft.

3 See also Atirnomus, “String and Rope at Janis.”
Arts Magazine. February 1970: 58.

4 Bourgeois, Louis. 1969. “The Fabric of
Construction.” Craft Horizons 29 (March): 31–35.

5 On the subject, see my 2004 essay “The
Decorative, Abstraction and the Hierarchy of
Art and Craft in the Art Criticism of Clement
Greenberg,” in Oxford Art Journal 27(3): 339–64.

6 Constantine also recounts this experience in The
Art Fabric: Mainstream (New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1981, p. 8).

7 Thanks to Judith Bettelheim, Constantine’s
daughter, for helping me clarify this point.

8 On the subject, see Marcus, George E. and
Myers, Fred R. (eds). 1995. Traffi c in Culture:
Refi guring Art and Anthropology. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

9 Staniszewski, Mary Anne. 1998. The Power of
Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the
Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, chapter two, passim.

10 See Price, Sally. 1989. Primitive Art in Civilized
Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and
Staniszewski (1998).

11 See National Endowment for the Arts. 1977.
To Survey American Crafts: A Planning Study; and
McLean, John. (ed.). 1981. National Crafts Planning
Project. National Endowment for the Arts.

12 See Macramé. 1971. New York: Museum of
American Folk Art. See also Mary Walker
Phillips’s review of the exhibition for Craft
Horizons (December 1971): 62.

13 Rossbach also reported that “[Atwater’s]
writings were consulted (often a bit sheepishly)
by many who deplored her approach to textiles,
who did not believe that weavers should be
provided with ‘recipes,’ as she called them, for
works that ought to have been creative and
individual. I remember the small regard I once
felt for Atwater and her coverlet weaves, even

though my fi rst weaving experience consisted of
following a pattern carefully selected from her
book” (1983: 22).

14 Albers, Anni. 1940. Hand Weaving Today: Textile
Work at Black Mountain College. The Weaver
6(1): 3–7.

15 Atwater, Mary. 1941. It’s Pretty, But is it Art? The
Weaver 6(3): 13–14 and 26.

16 Slivka, Rose. 1972. Hard String. Craft Horizons
(April): 16–17.

17 See also Meilach, Dona Z. 1974. Soft Sculpture
and Other Soft Art Forms with Stuffed Fabrics,
Fibers and Plastics. New York: Crown Publishers.

References

Adamson, Glenn. 2007. Thinking Through Craft. Oxford
and New York: Berg.

Albers, Anni. 1940. Hand Weaving Today: Textile Work
at Black Mountain College. The Weaver 6(1): 3–7.

Albers, Anni. 1959. Pictorial Weaves. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.

Andreae, Christopher. 1970. String and Rope. The
Christian Science Monitor, January 23.

Atwater, Mary. 1941. It’s Pretty, But is it Art? The
Weaver 6 (3): 13–14, 26.

Battcock, Gregory. 1969. Claire Zeisler. Arts Magazine,
43(6): 65.

Bourgeois, Louise. 1969. The Fabric of Construction.
Craft Horizons 29: 31–5.

Collins, James. 1973. Review. Artforum 11(10): 89–93.

Constantine, Mildred. 1999. Personal interview with
the author, February 23.

Constantine, Mildred and Larsen, Jack Lenor. 1969.
Wall Hangings. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Constantine, Mildred and Larsen, Jack Lenor. 1972.
Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric. New York: Van Nostrand.

Greenberg, Clement. “Review of Exhibitions . . .”
17 November 1945. The Nation. Reprinted in John
O’Brian, ed. 1986. Clement Greenberg, The Collected

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Essays and Criticism. Vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose,
1945–1949: 39–42.

Hoffman, Virginia. 1970. When Will Weaving Be an
Art Form? Craft Horizons 30: 18.

Jacob, Mary Jane. 1993. Beyond Craft: Curating for
Change. Small Works in Fiber: The Mildred Constantine
Collection. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of
Art, pp. 1–9.

Kramer, Hilton. 1966. And Now “Eccentric
Abstraction”: It’s Art But Does It Matter? New York
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Kuh, Katherine. 1968. Sculpture: Woven and Knotted.
Saturday Review. July 27: 36–7.

Lenore Tawney: A Personal World. 1978. Brookfi eld,
CT: Brookfi eld Craft Center.

Lippard, Lucy. 1966. Eccentric Abstraction. New York:
Fischbach Gallery. Reprinted in The New Sculpture
1965-1975: Between Geometry and Gesture. 1990.
New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, pp.
54–8.

Marandel, J. Patrice. 1979. An Interview with Claire
Zeisler. Arts Magazine 54(1): 150–152.

O’Brien, George. 1963. Many Materials Used in
Unusual Technique. New York Times. April 29

Parker, Rozsika and Pollock, Griselda. 1981. Old
Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. New York:
Pantheon Books.

Phillips, Mary Walker. 1970. Step-by-Step Macramé: A
Complete Introduction to the Craft of Creative Knotting.
New York: Golden Press.

Rossbach, Ed. 1983. Mary Atwater and the Revival of
American Traditional Weaving. American Craft 43(2):
22–26.

Smith, Paul. 1963. Woven Forms. New York: Museum
of Contemporary Craft.

Smith, Roberta. 1990. Lenore Tawney’s Work in Fiber
and Beyond. New York Times. May 18.

String and Rope. December 1969/January 1970. New
York: Sidney Janis Gallery.