Woven Histories

Lynne Cooke is senior curator of special projects in modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Her work has been published in Burlington Magazine and Artforum, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogs and books. The catalog for her National Gallery of Art exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art was also copublished by the University of Chicago Press.

• ForewordModernist Histories: Braided, Interlaced, and Aligned — Lynne CookePlatesArtists’ ResponsesLisa OppenheimHarmony HammondJeffrey GibsonAnn HamiltonEllen LesperanceUlrike MüllerCarole Frances LungUnavoidable Nature — Darby EnglishTextile Thinking — Briony FerNot Your Grandmother’s Labor — Bibiana K. OblerDimensions of Basketry — Elissa AutherTextility and Technology — Michelle KuoNotesList of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIndex

"This major looker of an exhibition catalog loosens up the warp and weft of conventional views of modern art—all those tight-knotted hierarchical categories (high versus low, art versus craft) on which our institutions and markets still rest—and demonstrates the universe of formal and conceptual brilliance that has always traveled on a parallel track. The sheer variety of work produced by more than 50 artists chosen by the book’s editor, Lynne Cooke, will knock your socks off. (Just wait till you see what’s happening in the field of basketry alone.) So will the visual imaginations of individual geniuses we already know like Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Gego, Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks, and the others we’re introduced to here."