The Art Is The Cloth

The Art Is the Cloth: How to Look at and Understand Tapestries

Author: Micala Sidore

A colorful guided tour from an expert, enabling weavers, textile lovers, and art lovers to notice and appreciate what tapestries can do and how they do it. This guide from expert tapestry weaver and historian Sidore gives how-to strategies enabling weavers and nonweavers to notice and appreciate the meaning of these artworks.

You’ll discover much to enjoy in photos of more than 300 tapestries from the 12th to the 21st centuries. Sidore enables you to think about the weavings in ways you have never before considered as she groups pieces that talk with each other—and that also converse with the viewer. Enjoy learning basic elements of weaving to help you become increasingly sophisticated in understanding what you’re seeing. Then, learn six ways in which tapestries can call attention to themselves as cloth.

This eye-opening guide to seeing explains the great range of materials and visual themes, the use of trompe l’oeil, the importance of the direction in which the weaver weaves, and more. After this learning experience, you’ll bring smarter eyes to your museum wandering, deeper enjoyment to your collection and purchases, and surprising new skills and creativity to your weaving of fibers . . . and of life.

Micala Sidore completed her first tapestry in 1979 and, between 1984 and 1987, interned at the Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins in Paris, obtaining a rich foundation in the techniques and aesthetics of traditional French tapestry. In 1988, at their request, she represented the studios at the International Tapestry Symposium in Melbourne, Australia. For the past 40 years, she has given talks and workshops throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand and published many articles. She has exhibited her own work in individual and group shows in North America, Australia, and Poland. In 2014 she organized the touring exhibit The Art Is the Cloth, which included works by 60 weavers from Canada, Mexico, and the United States. That exhibit’s success has served as the inspiration for this book.

Product Details:

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Schiffer (July 28, 2020)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764359924
• ISBN-13: 978-0764359927
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 0.9 x 9 inches