Notations/William Kentridge

Incisively political and profoundly poetic, William Kentridge's protean artistic investigation continues in his beautiful series of tapestries begun in 2001. The tapestries stem from a series of drawings in which he conjured shadowy figures from ripped construction paper and collaged them onto the web-like background of nineteenth-century atlas maps. As the fourth and most ambitious installment of "Notations"—the Museum's ongoing series of installations that explore specific aspects of contemporary art—William Kentridge: Tapestries is the first exhibition of the artist's tapestries in the United States. The tapestries, along with related works—drawings, bronze sculptures, etchings, and an artist book—fill two galleries, plotting a course through the artistic context from which the tapestries originate.

Exhibition Minutes

Layers represent the passage of time... var f_width=133; var f_height=150; var f_divname="flashCast"; var f_file="Kentridge Tapestries,Kentridge On Medium,Kentridge Office Love,Kentridge Shadows,Kentridge Porters,Kentridge Maps,Kentridge Literature"; var f_filetype="exhibitionMinutes"; var f_title="Tapestries,On Medium,Office Love,Shadows,Porters,Maps,Literature"; Listen to or download artist William Kentridge's 7-part Podcast.
var f_width=133; var f_height=60; var f_divname="flashCast2"; var f_file="Kentridge Overview,Kentridge Organic Feeling"; var f_filetype="exhibitionMinutes"; var f_title="Overview,Organic Feeling"; Listen to or download Curator Carlos Basualdo's 2-part Podcast. Available in The hybrid figures that emerge in multiple mediums throughout the exhibition derive from Kentridge's longstanding interest in shadows and projections. Collaged atop atlas pages in Kentridge's Puppet Drawings, marching across the accordion-style encyclopedia in his Portage book, and materializing into bronze sculptures, the figures—often burdened with the weight of objects and the world—become refugees, migrants, and movers of possessions. Silhouetted so that porter and parcel become one, Kentridge's processional characters evoke the political and cultural volatility that characterized recent South African history while also alluding to a global condition of transit and transition. To reincarnate these figures into tapestry, Kentridge worked in close collaboration with the Johannesburg-based Stephens Tapestry Studio, mapping out cartoons from enlarged photographs of the drawings and hand-picking dyes to color the locally spun mohair (goat hair). The tapestries' processional figures trek across mapped geography and into new artistic territory for Kentridge, but one in which the mechanism of drawing and the power of shadows remain central to his representations of a world in transition.

Stephens Tapestry Studio

Stephens Tapestry Studio

Opened in 1963 as a branch of a carpet and curtain business in Swaziland, the Stephens Tapestry Studio moved in 1965 to Diepsloot, a suburb of Johannesburg in South Africa, where it established itself as an independent workshop focused on raising awareness of weaving as an art. The studio has collaborated with a wide array of artists from South Africa and Europe—including Gillian Ayres, Gerard Sekoto, Eduardo Villa, and Tito Zongu—allowing them to experiment with and realize works in the tapestry medium. Included in many public collections throughout the world, the tapestries produced by the studio have also been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries—most notably at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg since 1970.

Exhibition Minutes

See another whole world open up... var f_divname="mp3player"; var f_width=133; var f_height=80; var f_file="Stephens Collaboration,Stephens The Process,Stephens Studio History"; var f_filetype="exhibitionMinutes"; var f_title="Collaboration,The Process,Studio History"; Listen to or download artist Marguerite Stephens' 3-part Podcast. Available in Stephens and her team of weavers create tapestries that range from wall-sized to monumental. Production begins as a cottage industry in Swaziland, where mohair shorn from goats and purchased in bulk is carded and spun, a process requiring at least ten to fifteen women for each tapestry. Four dyers then achieve a variety of subtle tones working from the three primary colors. The weft is dyed in vats over a wood fire and hung to dry in the sun. The rest of the process takes place at the Diepsloot studio, where Stephens currently employs thirteen women as weavers. Stephens herself participates in the crucial stage of translating the artist's work by hand into a large-scale cartoon. The cartoon is a full-sized map for the weavers to follow with exacting detail, and it includes annotations specifying colors as well as outlining the patterns, forms, and characteristics that comprise the artwork's imagery. Using the French Gobelin high-warp technique, the weavers work on vertical looms, and the weft is woven in a horizontal motion. The cartoon is placed behind the loom face as a guide to the weavers as they create the tapestry from the bottom up. var f_width=310; var f_height=200; var f_asset="stephensTapestryStudio"; var f_divname="flashSlideShow"; Stephens recognizes that the artist involved in the collaboration can be one whose sensibilities exclusively resonate with the decorative aspect of tapestry, or one whose work is also considered political or controversial. While the art of tapestry is based in precision, it also possesses plasticity that can capture many different artistic expressions and can allow for successful collaborations such as the series produced with William Kentridge. Since 2000 Stephens and the weavers in the studio have created nearly a hundred tapestries from the artist's series of seventeen Puppet Drawings. For Stephens, the combination of a strong artistic vision and meticulous execution is what produces a successful tapestry, and it can be judged only when the tapestry is released from the loom and hung for the first time, becoming a work of art in its own right that possesses reverberations of the touch of all who participated in the process of its making. The Stephens Tapestry Studio

Head Weavers: Margaret Zulu, June Xaba
Weavers: Zanele Zulu, Virginia Mzimba, Treasure Zulu, Phuti Zulu, Rhoda Tibha, Daphne Lukhele, Mavis Manzini, Tracy Ncube, Philele Shongwe, Gladis Mzimba
Spinners: Christine Vilakazi, Ida Shongwe, Sipewe Mhonza, Dudu Dlamini
Dyers: Sylvia Mantanga, Hlobsile Fakude, Dunsile Shongwe, Selvia Dlamini

Notations

"Notations" is an ongoing series of gallery installations named after the 1968 book by American composer, writer, and visual artist John Cage, who was widely celebrated for his experimental approach to the arts. Cage's Notations was an international and interdisciplinary anthology of scores by avant-garde musicians, with contributions from visual artists and writers. At the same time, it was an exhibition in book form—in which the scores doubled as drawings. The "Notations" series serves as a flexible tool to explore contemporary art in the Museum's expanding collection, allowing for experimentation with various exhibition alternatives.