Lenore Tawney

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Lenore Tawney is an American fiber artist (born in Lorain, Ohio) who became an influential figure in the development of woven sculpture as an art medium.

Her introduction to the tenets of the German Bauhaus school and the artistic avant-garde came in 1946 with her attendance at Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Chicago Institute of Design, her study with Moholy-Nagy, cubist sculptor Alexander Archipenko and abstract-expressionist painter Emerson Woelffer. In 1949, she studied weaving with Marli Ehrmann. And in 1957, she moved to New York where she became associated with a generation of non-Expressionist artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indianer, Agnes Martin and Jack Youngerman. Since then Tawney lived and worked mainly in New York.

Leonore Tawney's weavings hang freely in space. Referring to Kathleen Nugent Mangan (in "Lenore Tawney": Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1996) Tawney's open-warp weavings vary from areas of transparency to more solidly woven sections, thus allowing light to act both as a visual and symbolic force, to represent what is not seen.