Behind the Curtain: Fine Art

Photograph by Samantha Dittmann

There are those of us who hear “fiber art” and think “basket weaving.” Then come the snoring noises. Just a minute, says “Innov8tions in Textiles” maven Luanne Rimel, director of education and exhibition programs at Craft Alliance, the organizing body of the biannual exhibit. “Fiber is such a familiar medium—it’s your clothes, your dish towels,” she explains. “We’re showing a way to look at fiber differently. We have emerging artists, national artists, juried shows, and even a performance project at SLAG [St. Louis Artists’ Guild]. Craft Alliance in Grand Center will have a huge installation that will transform the environment… Third Degree is joining glass and fiber. All this is going to be very interesting.”

“All this” is a monumental, every-other-year collaboration between 19 galleries that blankets (pun intended) the bistate region in textile art and focuses the fiber-art world on St. Louis. You might think that coordinating 19 simultaneous gallery exhibitions would be a logistical nightmare, but Rimel says the various curators are actually pretty laid-back about the festival. “We started meeting last August, so we’ve been meeting monthly. Craft Alliance began this back in the ’90s. The last three have been collaborative events. We all participate in decision-making, in PR,” she says. “Each gallery plans its own show—no one else tells them what to do.”

The adventurous will be rewarded by the chance to ogle Michael Aaron McAllister’s embroidered portraits of Jackie O. and Samuel Beckett, Sun Smith-Fôret’s “film quilts” of Brokeback Mountain and Field of Dreams, Lindsay Obermeyer’s embroidered medical textbooks, and the works of “Quilt National 2009,” the nation’s premier quilt exhibition, coming to the Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles. That last one even manages to prove you can safely put the words “avant-garde” and “quilt” in the same sentence. There are bus tours, a self-guided gallery hop, gallery talks, family programs, and workshops, too.