ON VIEW:  June 24 - August 19, 2017
Curators Jessica Smith and  Susan Falls will be in the gallery on Saturday, June 24, 2:00 pm.

UNFOLDING EVENT AND RECEPTION: August 19, 2PM

The Lyndon House is pleased to announce the exhibit, Fold Unfold featuring commissioned contemporary coverlets created by artists about the United States.

This project has been in the making for a year now.  We just received some fun news from curators Jessica Smith and Susan Falls:
There are over 100 weavers participating from states such as Ohio, Kansas, Vermont and California. Included are artists, designers, guild weavers, students and others with some working individually and others collaboratively.  The catalog, now a printed publication, will include essays by Sarah Kate Gillespie, Curator of American Art, Georgia Museum/UGA and Catherine Ellis, textile artist ans educator.

The coverlet, a wonderfully elaborate example of woven bedding, is lesser-known than the quilt when it comes to Southern material culture. These bed coverings are often devalued (viewed as castoffs) or romanticized (connected to mythical narratives about community and gift giving) rather than recognized as having provided real value to households. To address this oversight anthropologist Susan Falls and artist Jessica Smith held a call for weavers to create their own coverlets now featured in Fold Unfold.
The contemporary art installation explores coverlets from both an art-historical and museum perspective, while challenging current aesthetic judgments that relegate coverlets to the realm of “craft” instead of “art.” 

Fold Unfold invited skilled makers to weave functional bedding on manually operated looms as part of this installation. Each coverlet is informed by an overshot geometric patterning popular in the South.
Intentionally and to undermine traditional signifiers of class and race, makers used a modernist color scheme of black, white, and gray. This neutrality will draw attention to the hands of individual makers. 

The coverlets are folded and stacked to form sculptural pillars.  Installed in the contemporary Lyndon House Arts Center and the historic Ware-Lyndon House, connotes the role that southern women played in the aesthetic narrative of their living environment thus uniting the historic with the contemporary. 

UNFOLDING EVENT - To reveal individual creative work, the pillars will be taken down and the coverlets will be unfolded in a public performance. Each coverlet will be professionally photographed in reproduced in a catalog that will be available for purchase.