Exoskin by Kim Hahn and Ja-Young Hwang. Ruby Szekeres Photos.
After traveling 500 miles from Fairlawn, Ohio, Ja-Young Hwang and Kim Hahn’s Exoskin stands erect in the corner of the Guilford Art Center’s gallery, there for all to see. From afar, the crisp sleeves appear to be ghostly bluebells. The lower skirt puffs out at the hips. It's a dazzling white dress, created entirely out of repurposed N94 protection masks and stitched together with a purpose.
Eerie? Maybe. Innovative? Definitely.
Exoskin is part of Fiber Reimagined III, running at the gallery at the Guilford Art Center (GAC) now through July 27. A collaboration with Fiber Art Now Magazine and several jurors, the exhibition captures the depth and versatility of fiber as a medium, with everything from woven garments, baskets and sculpture to furniture and tapestry. While some pieces come from artists in New England, others have journeyed thousands of miles, from Ukiah, California, from the Midwest and from the South.
All of the selections are also published in Fiber Art Now. Unfortunately, the first prize winner, Pennsylvania-based artist Holly Layman's Propper Chopper Bobber, a mixed-media motorcycle created from recycled cardboard, thumbtacks, and other elements, is not part of the physical show.
Top: Praying for Rain by Laura Fogg. Bottom: Mammy by Beth Altomonte; Robert by Eileen Woods; Cubiculum of the Mind by Mary-Ann Sievert, Everything's Derivative by Mark Heffley. Ruby Szekeres Photos.
“We got some really loud, commanding pieces,” said Ashley Seneco, educational coordinator at the Guilford Art Center. This year—the second that the GAC has partnered with Fiber Art Now—Seneco worked closely with GAC Executive Director Maureen Belden to communicate with artists and mount the exhibition. That was also true two years ago, when the art center worked with Fiber Art Now to bring FELT: Fiber Transformed to life.
Seneco noted how powerful many of the works are. She pointed, for instance, to Sandra Guze’s The Price, a 1950s-style bra held up by a steel lattice armature, and Beth Altomonte’s Mammy, a quilt that both references and subverts the project of America as it riffs on the flag. In the first, part of Guze’s project A Woman of a Certain Age, the artist uses a standard image of female beauty to highlight power and sexuality, as well as impossible standards to which women are often held. Guze's work is supported by The Puffin Foundation.
In the second, Altomonte has fashioned the same recognizable stripes and stars of the United States flag, but is covered with vintage ads, cartoons and photographs, as well as dolls made from Aunt Jermima advertisements. All of it is sewn together with machine quilting and hand embroidery. The result is a piece that responds to centuries of structural racism at a time when it feels very much alive.
Jesse Aviv’s Honey Pot. Ruby Szekeres Photos.
Other artists have used the exhibition—and fiber art itself—as an opportunity to turn one’s expectation of the medium on its head. When a person thinks of “fiber art,” after all, the images that most readily come to mind may be jute rope, ribbon or even bark, often woven finely into baskets. That’s true, initially, of Jesse Aviv’s Honey Pot, a work of anodized aluminum chainmail ciphering that is in fact not a pot at all, but an inverted basket.
If a viewer looks inside, they can see the white pedestal it sits on, and almost hear a clink of metal.
For Aviv, the name Honey Pot isn’t necessarily referring to a jar of honey, but represents a trap. Maybe the basket is really a device to fool creatures into coming too close, luring them in with the golden shine. Some sections do appear to be darker; perhaps those are marks from its victims' struggles to escape.
Hooked and Coiled by Elizabeth Quinn. Ruby Szekeres Photos.
Also using aspects of metal is artist Elizabeth Quinn, whose 2024 Hooked and Coiled uses tan-colored linen, wool and a meat hook to create a form that looks mammalian, like something found in nature. Inspired by the bending and twisting of the human form—and a reckoning with modern machinery and its ability to produce—Quinn created Hooked in Coiled, imagining having to scrounge for materials in the ruins of a dilapidated world.
Using vibrant shades of blue, yellow and red paint, meanwhile, Red Norvo paints a picture where insects are the star. In an accompanying text, artist Ruby Szekeres explains that she wanted to explore the watercolor works of French painter Bernard Durin after reading about this 19th century artist in a New York Times article.
“I wanted to explore the possibility of achieving something similar in my own woven work,” Schulze said in the Fiber Art Now. Covering the pot with mulberry paper on one side and antique African record beads on another, she successfully impersonated a bug-inspired paradise.
“We really love working with fiber art,” Belden said. “There’s just so much one can do with it.”
Fiber Reimagined III runs through July 27 2025 at the Guilford Art Center, 411 Church St. in Guilford. Learn more about the GAC, including gallery hours, here. Ruby Szekeres is a graduate of the Arts Council's 2024 Youth Arts Journalism Initiative.