Connoissance
1967
Lenore Tawney American, 1907-2007
United States
An innovator in weaving, Tawney elevated the textile medium to the status of fine art. Born in Ohio, the artist moved to Chicago in 1927, working during the day as a proofreader for a legal publisher and taking evening classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This collage utilizes Egyptian silhouettes and two texts written in different styles of script, with the paper appearing interwoven like papyrus. Tawney often chose texts written in languages that she could not speak, and when the foreign words of her works were translated, she recalled, “they would mean just what I had intended.”
Pen and black ink, over collage of letterpress in black ink on tan wove papers, torn, and color lithographs on off-white wove paper, cut, and pasted onto tan laid paper book page with letterpress, laid down on two cream wove paper book pages with letterpress in black