This is the year of new tapestry books! Today’s example is Micala Sidore’s new book, The Art is the Cloth: How to Look at and Understand Tapestries from Schiffer Publishing.
This book is not quite what I expected it to be. I thought it would be a book with a fair amount of text that gave us some guidelines for how to understand what we’re seeing when we look at tapestries. I think I can be forgiven for that considering the book’s subtitle. Instead, it is a book with hundreds of images of tapestries and almost no text. It turns out this is a fantastic advantage for my education. You see, I’m really good at words. I like to string them together, often use way too many of them, and though I love pictures, if I can read about something, I’ll use my brain to mull the words instead of studying photos.
This book is ALL about the photos.
The Art is the Cloth: How to Look at and Understand Tapestries by Micala Sidore
Once I’d shifted my expectations from a book that teaches me how to think about tapestries to one that presents images for me to enjoy, it became a long romp through some of the best examples of contemporary, ethnic, and historic tapestries that Sidore could get images of.
I believe the idea for the book came from a show of the same title that Sidore curated in 2015. I dug out the show catalog and had a look through that as I was reading the book. The show catalog helped me place the book in more context. The categories Sidore used for the show are not quite the same ones in the book, but that just perhaps indicates that she was able to expand the work represented in the book significantly beyond that in the show.
“About twenty years ago, Helena Hernmarck faxed me the comment, “the art is the cloth”. Her statement opened up a way for me to understand tapestries, both historic and contemporary. It made me aware of how they gesture toward their own nature. This exhibition offers six ways in which tapestries can call attention to themselves as cloth.”
Something this book really brought home to me as I looked at tapestries I have and haven’t seen in person, is that books fool you in terms of size of the work (this is true of all books)! Of course it makes sense to make an image the largest that it will fit in a book. That allows us to see the tapestry the best. But it took some careful attention on my part to realize when I was looking at a piece that was actually quite small versus one that was monumental. When you page through the book, make sure to look at the sizes of the tapestries and imagine what it would be like to be standing in front of them. A 12 x 12 inch Joyce Hayes piece is a very different experience than a 5 x 6 foot piece by Marie-Thumette Brichard. The size matters. That isn’t a comment on the book, just a tip for your own reading of it.
Images, presentation
There are a lot of images in this book and they are very clear and well-presented. Sidore has clearly gone to great lengths to get these images from what may be hundreds of artists, museums, and curators and she has done a marvelous job keeping the pages clean and uncluttered so we can focus on the image content. Many of the images are quite large and some span two pages. Sidore has maximized her real estate well with these images.
Drawbacks
Like most Schiffer Publishing books I own, this book has no index.* I feel this is a big detriment to a book that contains so much tapestry work. The only way to find an artist’s work is to page through 223 pages. There is no list of plates or artists to assist with locating content anywhere in the book. My copy of the book is already extensively flagged with sticky notes so that I can return to artists I want to look up online. (see update below, index now available HERE)
My other comment is that I feel Sidore has taken some liberties in her interpretation of the artist’s work in her text captions. Perhaps this is one way of teaching the viewer that many interpretations of art are possible, or maybe this is part of the curator’s job description. But some of her assumptions seem misleading such as a comment about Rebecca Smith’s work that compares her three-dimensional tapestry to a bustier. On Smith’s website, this piece is discussed as an exploration of light and the Aurora Borealis. The caption for my own piece erroneously identifies the technique used to weave it. And the caption on Linda Wallace’s piece misidentifies the medical events that led to the piece shown (read the actual story HERE).
Of course, viewed another way, that is the magic of experiencing art. Every viewer experiences a piece differently. However, some of the commentary seems to guide the reader in a direction that might not be accurate to the artist’s intentions. This feeling comes largely from the lack of explanatory text in the book that might make some comments clearer. Sidore’s comments, though sometimes welcome, do demonstrate the intense subjectivity of artistic interpretation. I recommend taking the time to look up work you find interesting in this book and then form your own opinions about the statements they are making.
Summary
This book does not present a definitive account of tapestry or even help us understand through descriptive text how to look at tapestries we might see in person or in images. Instead, it attempts to show how certain tapestries reflect back on what they are: pieces of cloth. As a collection of images about tapestry sorted into broad categories, it is an excellent experiential guide. As a reference tool it is less useful due to the lack of an index. This book will make us look at tapestry and I recommend spending time studying the fantastically wide variety of tapestries presented here. The author has done us a great service by collecting these images in one place. From your perusal of this material, I suggest further internet research where possible to broaden your understanding of the organizational categories this book sketches out.
Bottom line
This book is well worth owning. The collection of tapestry images is varied and instructional and has already led me down many rabbit holes online. Do not hesitate to purchase a copy if your goal is to gain a wider experience of artwork in the medium of tapestry in the late 20th and 21st centuries with some examples from the distant past.
Below is a gallery of images from the book. Click to enlarge, hover for captions.
“In our three-dimensional world, tapestry can be optically perceived—and just as often dismissed—as flat and two-dimensional.
Tapestry is not flat. It is not two-dimensional, literally or metaphorically.
On the contrary, tapestry is rich and textured, tactile and visual.
It is woven of fiber, interlaced strand by strand, over and under, in a time-consuming process that simultaneously constructs both the physical cloth itself and the pattern. Though traditional tapestry weave is an ancient technique, it remains ever vibrant. Its possibilities are as boundless as human creativity.”
The official publication date for the book is July 28th. I recommend a pre-order from an independent bookstore such as THIS.
You can find out more about Micala Sidore on her website: https://www.hawleystreet.com/
UPDATE November 2020: Micala has made an index! You can find it attached right HERE. She says Schiffer is going to format it so it looks like the book and if you care about that, another version will show up here when that is done as well as on the Schiffer website. Micala has also put this on her blog at the bottom of this page—click the blue text in case you want to find it there.
Disclaimer: I do have one tapestry represented in this book. I was not asked to review the book and I paid full price for my copy. This review is my opinion only.
*Seriously Schiffer. This is a HUGE problem with your books. Please include indexes.