Bert Gallery

Special Exhibit

Contemporary Fiber Artist Tracy Krumm

Curated by Rachele Romano

July 2014 | Exhibit Hours: Tuesday - Friday, 11- 5, Saturday 12 - 4

Contemporary fiber artists Debra Folz and Tracy Krumm are on view at Bert Gallery for the month of July. The artists came to the attention of Bert Gallery as a result of the exhibit High Fiber, organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2012 as part of the museum’s Women to Watch exhibition series. Folz and Krumm are long established artists known to national audiences for their fastidious and thoughtful work.

Folz blurs the boundaries between disciplines and their assigned material identities, lending consistent focus to the incorporation of textiles and embroidery techniques with furniture forms. Krumm incorporates intensely hand-made labor processes, simple physics (gravity, tension and suspension) and elemental materials (fiber, water, metal, earth and air), her sculptures merge technical proficiency with play, the domestic with the industrial, and the physical with the ethereal.

Both artists’ re-define the potential of traditional textile structures, Folz incorporating hand-stitchery into machine-made chairs and tables whereas Krumm crochets fine-gauge wire into forms that resemble textiles, she identifies as “hand constructed textile.” The exhibit gives viewers insight into how fiber artists have evolved and integrated into the mainstream of contemporary art.

Tracy Krumm’s involvement as an art maker is informed by 25 years of exploration and expertise. Through the labor-intensive process and unlikely pairing of the traditionally feminine art of crochet and the masculine metalwork of blacksmithing, Krumm creates sculpture of balance and equilibrium, weight and substance. Through her interest in duality, Krumm engages with art, craft, science, and history all at once in an evolving dialogue with feminism, popular culture, personal history and identity. Incorporating intensely hand-made labor processes, simple physics (gravity, tension and suspension) and elemental materials (fiber, water, metal, earth and air) Krumm’s sculpture merges technical proficiency with play, the domestic with the industrial, and the physical with the ethereal. Revealed in the process is the true strength and beauty of opposing and complimentary forces, fragile and forceful, powerful and poetic.

Courtesy of Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art