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By Hand...(cont.)

By contrast, the color scheme of Gabriella Hajnal is altogether different.  She uses a palette of brilliant red/orange and blue, that, like Riis’ work, calls attention to itself.  Her alternating panels of heads recall the sequential panels of cartoons in the Sunday funnies.  In Hajnal’s case, she is offering wide-ranging emotional responses, in facial expressions, and she also echoes the nature of tapestry because her heads reproduce the grid.  This piece is part of a larger series in this range of colors; in others, she has organized lines and lines of words.  Repetition also suggests the system of weaving; this is an educative choice of imagery.  Hajnal represents both the most senior of all the artists and the only one working with collaborators: Katalin Timàr and Kiry Nocsovics wove Hajnal’s design.  Interestingly, Andràs writes:

“Th[e] renewal of [Hungarian] tapestry art was made possible when the rigid separation between the intellectual creative artist on the one hand and the material bound subsidiary executor on the other was dissolved.”[7]

A theory running through the tapestry community would classify all tapestries woven and designed by the same person, the artist-weaver, as superior to those where the designer and the weaver are not the same person.  This latter system, the basis for many of the European studios, has existed for hundreds of years. but the weavers in this system often find themselves confronted with the challenge of having their contribution under-valued.  Members of symphony orchestras, where the composer get all the credit for the brilliant performance of the music—and the orchestra all the blame if the music doesn’t inspire—know this issue all too well.

Collaboration, the opportunity to include more than a single person in the making of a work of art, can add a liveliness to the results.  Large scale works become possible in a shorter amount of time.  A knowledgeable weaver, aware of both technical possibilities and the advantages of woven material, can make certain cartoons sing and perform in ways that the cartoon maker would not know how to do.  Jon Riis receives help in attaching some of the beads and pearls to his work.  Does this depreciate the results?

That thorny subject remains open for discussion in the tapestry community; the presence of this show at the Textile Museum opens a different category of question.  Rebecca Stevens, when asked about the paucity of tapestry exhibits at her museum, responds:

“I think what I would like to do is include contemporary tapestry in a more mixed kind of show instead of always segregating it.  Otherwise, it’s too self-referential; it doesn’t widen the circle.  So perhaps one could choose a theme, an issue that people were working on, and have works that do different kinds of things.  I really truthfully can’t envision doing another specifically contemporary tapestry show.  [There will be] another one, “Karpet 2,” next year in Budapest.  The American Tapestry Alliance has biennial shows.  [Those exhibits] sort of fulfill that function.”

Is she right? Would tapestry achieve adequate representation in such shows as she describes?  Those questions too need discussion, and this exhibit, with its superior collection of work, may well be the right place to start the talk.

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