LAMAG’s ‘FiberLicious’ Weaves Craft and Culture in Tandem

Lucy Tiven

Now on view at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, “FiberLicious” features 16 emerging and established contemporary artists working with fiber materials and techniques.

Rooted in domestic craft traditions, “FiberLicious” pays homage to fiber as anthropological artifact, while shifting its focus to contemporary artists’ formal and thematic experimentation.

Featured works vary in theme and material, spanning mediums from installation, video and performance to interactive projects but are joined by a shared reflection on fiber’s cultural and aesthetic histories, speaking in conversation with past and present labor conditions, gender roles and political life.

Artist Enrique Castrejon renders the fragmentation of sexuality and representation, dissecting and reconstructing images from print and the web, while Performer Krista Feld looks to the family quilt as a source of ritual, memory and transformation.

Moving between fiction and history, a piece by Carole Frances Lung depicts working and living conditions after the fall of the Berlin wall through fictional East German Garment work Frau Fiber. “Frau Fiber and I have parallel life experiences, in different parts of the work,” says Lung. “These works are firmly connected to historical instances of organized labor, and are a vehicle to think about self-sufficiency, self-empowerment, communal experience and happiness in work, as well as a tool for fighting poverty and oppression.”

“Woven together” by co-curators Scott Canty and Carol Shaw-Sutton, “FIBERLICIOUS” explores human experience and its materiality in a diverse range of social, spiritual, political and personal narratives, while reflecting on histories of culture and craft.

The third and final panel discussion featuring the artists is set to take place on Saturday, Dec. 12 and is free and open to the public.

“FiberLicious” will be on view Oct. 25, 2015 until Jan. 3, 2016 at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.