Who We Are
In 2023, the Textile Study Group of New York (TSGNY) celebrates its 45th anniversary: a wonderful testament to the group’s ongoing vitality and importance in the lives of its members. TSGNY is dedicated to the study and appreciation of fiber arts in all forms, from historic cloth to contemporary installation, from textile design to tensile architecture.
TSGNY members are a diverse group. Some are enthusiastic beginners, while others are experienced professionals. Some work in textile-related fields as historians, teachers, critics, curators, and writers. But most members are artists, whose work is often informed by a grounding in both fine arts and traditional craft training. This lends an exciting openness to their art-making, and is reflected in the myriad genres showcased in their work: airbrush, appliqué, baskets, beading, collage, dyeing, embroidery, encaustic, felting, found materials, hooking, ikat, installation, jewelry, joomchi, knotting, mixed media, paper, papier-mâché, printing, quilting, rope, rugs, sculpture, sewing, shibori, tapestry, weaving, and wire!
Many TSGNY members are outstanding masters in their own right, and have been recognized for achievement at the highest levels. Some speak regularly at professional conferences and symposia; others teach workshops and judge shows across the country and around the world. Artist-members are consistently represented in important national group shows, major galleries, and museums. TSGNY members appear internationally, in solo shows, and in major fiber exhibitions, such as the Lausanne Biennial in Switzerland, the International Minitextile Biennial in Hungary, the Lodz Triennale in Poland, Quilt Nihon in Japan, and the Art in Embassies Program (through the U.S. Department of State). A number of TSGNY members participated recently in two invitational exhibitions at the Korea Bojagi Forum in South Korea: RED (2016), and RED + ONE (2018).
Work by TSGNY members is regularly reviewed and profiled in periodicals such as Surface Design Journal, American Craft, Fiber Art Now, and The New York Times, as well as in books and online. Residencies, grants, and awards have supported members’ research and travel. Funds have come from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Empire State Craft Alliance, the ArtsLink Partnership, the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the American Craft Council. Members’ work is held in private and corporate collections, and as well as in public collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Newark Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the New-York Historical Society.
Recent exhibitions in New York City include THE GOLD STANDARD (2020), at Westbeth Art Gallery, RED (2017–2018), at the Noho Gallery; YARDWORKS (2016), in the Durst Lobby Gallery; SQUARE (2014), in the Narthex Gallery of St. Peter’s Church; and Crossing Lines: the Many Faces of Fiber (2011–12), in the World Financial Center Courtyard Gallery. Rebecca A. T. Stevens, the consulting curator of Contemporary Textiles at the Textile Museum, Washington, DC, juried Crossing Lines.
Other TSGNY exhibitions have been curated by distinguished guests jurors. Janet Koplos, (senior editor, Art in America [1990–2009], and guest editor, American Craft [2009]) selected work for 9 x 9 x 3: NEW VISIONS (2012–2014), an exhibition that opened in New York in 2012 at the Durst Lobby Gallery, and then traveled to venues in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Montana, and Iowa. [Pieces not selected for the 9 x 9 x 3 show were also exhibited, in a “Salon des Refusés,” at the Guild Gallery II, in the Fulton Center of the Hudson Guild.] Lewis Knauss, (artist, and Moore College of Art & Design professor) juried Economies of Scale (2009), at the Phoenix Gallery. Jean Shin, (Installation Artist) juried Intimate Eye (2007), at the Phoenix Gallery. And Matilda McQuaid, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum exhibition curator and head of textiles, juried Fiber for the Future (2004-05), at A.I.R. Gallery II.
How We Grew
Six original members, including founder and first president Nancy Koenigsberg, met at the New School for Social Research in the 1970s as students of Gayle Wimmer, and later formed the group as a way of delving deeper into the textile arts, while also fueling their creative interests. Now in its fifth decade, TSGNY’s mandate has not changed, but its membership has grown exponentially. In addition its core program of monthly talks, TSGNY supports an expansive series of projects and activities. Its website helps members promote and disseminate their work via an online gallery and digital archive of member interviews. Two bi-monthly online newsletters keep members informed: one covers member news; while the other provides a wrap-up of current and upcoming fiberart and textile events and exhibits.
The central activity of TSGNY has always been its annual round of ten monthly meetings from September to June: eight or nine with invited speakers, and one or two with member presentations. Throughout the years, so many important artists and scholars have addressed the group that the roster reads like an encyclopedia of what’s happened and who’s who in the fiber art world over the last four decades. Expressive and accomplished specialists, drawn from around the world and across a wide spectrum of approaches to fiber, have addressed the group.