27 Facts About Lenore Tawney

Lenore Tawney is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive.

Lenore Tawney was one of five children born in Lorain, Ohio to Irish mother Sarah Jennings and Irish-American father William Gallagher.

Lenore Tawney worked hard and eventually became head of the department.

Lenore Tawney worked in Chicago for 15 years while taking night courses at the Art Institute of Chicago.

However, Lenore Tawney found the work all-consuming and exhausting and wasn't ready to commit fully to the work of being an artist.

Lenore Tawney returned to Chicago and destroyed most of her work from this period, which she felt was derivative and not true to her own artistic vision.

At the Chicago Institute of Design and in her previous studies, Lenore Tawney focused in the areas of sculpture and drawing.

In 1948, Lenore Tawney bought her first loom, at age 41 and began learning how to weave.

From 1949 to 1951, Lenore Tawney lived in Paris and traveled extensively throughout North Africa and Europe.

Lenore Tawney returned to the United States and in 1954 she studied with the Finnish weaver Martta Taipale at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina.

Lenore Tawney's disruptions signified the beginning of an era of change in the fiber world.

In November 1957, Lenore Tawney demonstrated her commitment to her work and career by moving to New York City, the center of the modern art world.

Lenore Tawney settled in the Coenties Slip, where there was an established colony of well-known modern artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin and Jack Youngerman.

In 1961, Lenore Tawney studied the Peruvian gauze weave technique with fiber artist Lili Blumenau and pioneered an "open reed" for her loom in order to produce more mutable woven forms.

Lenore Tawney was interested in how the threads above the loom moved and this experience inspired a series of ink drawings on graph paper.

Lenore Tawney suspends threads in space with the help of plexiglass and wood framing.

In 1965, Lenore Tawney began to create work in collage and assemblage.

Lenore Tawney's collages ranged from postcards, books, three-dimensional drawer cases, and completely fabricated chairs.

The physical elements Lenore Tawney collaged with included rare book pages in different languages, photographs, cutouts from newspapers and magazines, cosmological charts, tantric symbols, illustrations from art history books and nature guides, musical scores, and her own drawing and handwriting.

Lenore Tawney's collages contained a variety of messages from secret to humorous.

Lenore Tawney began creating postcard collages in the 1960's when she was moving studios frequently and traveling internationally.

Lenore Tawney made assemblages in a variety of forms from sculptures to box constructions, and chests.

Lenore Tawney continued to collect and assemble these pieces until her death in 2007.

In 1977, Lenore Tawney created the first piece in her monumental Clouds series.

Lenore Tawney continued to create works in this series until 1983.

Lenore Tawney created the foundation with the goals of making the visual arts more accessible and to create opportunities for emerging artists.

Lenore Tawney's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.