Bhakti Ziek:
A Tenuous Thread
form & concept | February 2024
“Weaving is always slow compared to most methods of making,” says Bhakti Ziek. For example, when she hand-weaves a brocade structure, Ziek can complete about one quarter-inch passage per hour at most. This retrospective, representing over 50 years of Ziek’s fiber practice, is a tribute to the patient math of her monumental endeavor. A Tenuous Thread captures the dynamic between Ziek’s voracious artistic intellect and humanity’s most intricate and painstaking sculptural discipline. The exhibition also charts the technological leaps that brought Ziek into prolific harmony with her practice.
Now a septuagenarian living in Santa Fe, Ziek has traveled the world seeking craft knowledge and artistic inspiration. Her path begins in New York City, where she was born in 1946 and first studied weaving at the Craft Students League. It winds through Mexico, Guatemala, Kansas, Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Philadelphia College of Textiles & Science (PCT&S), Chicago, Arizona, India, Italy, Vermont, and beyond.
The foundation of Ziek’s weaving practice is analog; early in her career, she mastered myriad weave structures by hand on the floor loom, backstrap loom and tapestry loom. She first encountered a jacquard loom, which automates elements of the weaving process, in 1986 during her studies in Manhattan. In 1991, she was teaching at PCT&S when the institution swapped its 19th-century jacquard looms for fully electronic jacquards that could be digitally programmed.
Ziek has since established herself as a preeminent scholarly authority on the artistic use of the computerized jacquard loom—and has used the technology to supercharge her own practice. A Tenuous Thread features artworks from every phase of Ziek’s creative evolution, from her formative studies of techniques and aesthetics across the world, to her career spanning efforts to textually surface the knowledge that is encoded in her textiles.
One entrypoint to the exhibition is Wheel of Life, Ziek’s early-career magnum opus that wrestles with legacies of the theft and dissemination of knowledge in craft community. There are two churning endpoints: Ziek’s floor loom, which she will activate throughout the show, and a display of her former students on the gallery’s second-floor catwalk.
Press
"‘What's interesting about weaving is that we know so much about cloth,’ says Ziek. ‘From the minute we're born, we're swaddled in it. We're buried in it. (...) It's invisible. Who thinks about it being made of these individual threads?’”
-Spencer Fordin, Pasatiempo