Textile artist and Praxis Fiber Workshop founder Jessica Pinsky is set to deliver the last Chautauqua Visual Arts Lecture of the 2024 season at 6 p.m. tonight in Hultquist Center. With her lecture, in which she will discuss her practice as an artist and the evolution of her career, she said she hopes to get folks “really excited about the landscape of contemporary textiles at Chautauqua,” she said.
An adjunct professor at Cleveland Institute of Art, with her M.F.A. from Boston University, Pinsky brings a background in painting to her work as a textile artist and weaver. She utilizes her understanding of both painting and sculpture to inform her textile work.
She explained that when she was studying art in college, she didn’t know weaving or textile art was an option. She studied painting but later shifted toward fiber art during her graduate studies because it felt “more authentic to me and who I am as a person and artist,” she said.
She will also talk about the process of founding Praxis Fiber Workshop, a fiber arts-focused art collective based in Cleveland.
Pinsky said she had just started teaching at Cleveland Institute of Art when the Institute said they were eliminating the weaving program. She proposed that the equipment be repurposed and as a result, the Praxis Fiber Workshop was born in 2012.
“I did one small step at a time and I had a lot of really invaluable help and advice along the way,” Pinsky said.
She wants Chautauquans to understand the major, yet often overlooked, role of textiles in daily life.
“I want everyone to know that textiles are part of our everyday language and life,” Pinsky said. “We all wear clothing, we all sleep under blankets, walk on rugs, so this is a material and a process that belongs to everyone.”
She hopes that people will take away an understanding of the breadth of textiles and fiber art, both in functional uses and in fine art contexts.
“A lot of artists are using fiber and fiber processes more and more. There’s a resurgence, a new popularity,” she said. “It’s really exciting from a textile artist perspective, but it’s easy to look at it and call it painting or call it sculpture, but probably people will see now and notice and look a little closer and see that there’s a lot of fiber art everywhere.”
