Spotlight on DONNA LORAINE CONTRACTOR

By Karen Crislip

ATA member Donna Loraine Contractor is very well known throughout New Mexico for her tapestries comprised of bold “frames” of seemingly three dimensions which highlight colorful New Mexico landscapes. Her images of windows set within frames, with a view to another place, is a unifying theme in her weaving. Donna states “The placement of dark and light create the illusion of depth and the endless combinations of these placements intrigue me.” Donna weaves her tapestries with hand-dyed wool and believes “no pigment on paper could reproduce the texture and luminosity of the hand dyed and tightly spun wool I use in my tapestries.” Her work is a blend of representational and abstract and demonstrates a bold approach to color.

I met Donna at the People’s Bank in Albuquerque where she was having a one-woman show. Donna, a native of Waukegan, Illinois, fell in love with a man and the State of New Mexico while attending college in Santa Fe. After graduation, she apprenticed with Victoria Rabinowe in Santa Fe. Donna moved from cloth weaving to rugs and then to tapestry weaving--which she taught herself! Donna weaves fulltime, and her recent accomplishments include selling a tapestry to the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, creating this year’s Bravo Awards (9 small tapestries) for the Albuquerque Arts Alliance, selling “Abundance” through the New Mexico Art in Public Places Programed Acclaimed Arties Series for a wall in the Maloof Building in Albuquerque, having “Road Maze” published in the “Threads of New Mexico Catalogue” in conjunction with a show at the Albuquerque Museum and being featured on the Carol Duvall Show on HGTV. Donna also shows and sells and four New Mexico galleries. Also, Donna had a tapestry, one of a hundred (out of 600 works juried), chosen by Kenneth Trapp, curator of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, for the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts at Penn State.

We wish Donna continued success and look forward to seeing her framed depictions of the “land of enchantment”!