SHFAP presents The Rag Trade, a group exhibition in two parts on the relationship of painting to textiles. Part One will take place at the NADA New York 2018 art fair, in their new location at Skylight Clarkson Sq, 550 Washington Street. Part Two will take place at our gallery, located at 208 Forsyth Street, just below Houston Street.

The relationship between painting and textiles is complex and longstanding. Linen, a primary support for painting, lends the painting a subtle rippling surface and texture. Tapestries from the Renaissance existed in close counterpoint to old master painting. Later, the correspondences between American quilt making and 20th century abstraction are evident in the arrangements of rectilinear forms and collage-like technique. In modern art, Anni Albers and Sonia Delauney moved in between painting and textile design. Artists as diverse as Blinky Palermo, Alan Shields, Katherine Bernhardt, Katerina Fritsch, Sam Gilliam, and Al Loving have embraced the multiple dimensions of textile and art. In The Rag Trade, works by Giordanne Salley, Sedrick Huckaby, Christopher Wool, Liv Aanrud, Matt Phillips, and earlier Gandy Brodie play with this correspondence.

At NADA, Meghan Brady shows a monumental cut and painted paper collage that plays with the lightness of its surface and refers to both quilting techniques, Frank Stella’s constructions, and children’s paintings. Brady obtained her MFA at BU. She lives and works in Camden, Maine. She has shown recently at Icon Contemporary and Perimeter in Maine and is represented by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

In a 2012 canvas of two lovers under a quilt, Giordanne Salley paints a fragmentary moment of love with the elegance of a Japanese print, using the overall pattern of the quilt to camouflage the pair. In her earlier work, Salley made a practice of working from life and her imagination. She then created a self-imposed rule which forgoes the use of source material, and allows painting only from what she could invent, remember, or imagine. She received her MFA in painting from Boston University. Her work appeared in the 2016 show, Intimisms, organized by Aliza Nisenbaum at James Cohan. Salley is represented by Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.

Christopher Wool’s, Untitled, 1988 oil and flashe on aluminum painting was made at a pivotal moment in Wool’s career. By the end of 1987 and early 1988, he was making his first language paintings. The work is related to a painting in the collection of the Bell Gallery at Brown University where a field of decorative black flowers was created using an oversized rubber stamp. Here, there is a sparseness and poignancy to the three isolated black flowers floating on a white ground, like a decorative minimalist haiku. The artist observed that “an interesting friction [is] generated by putting forms that were supposed to be decorative in such severe terms.”  Wool received a retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2013.

Sedrick Huckaby is a Dallas based painter who has moved his practice of painting from life into the realm of social sculpture. He documents his own family, families in his community, and portraits of individuals. He portrays people who might not be traditional subjects for portraiture. He has also painted quilts from his family and community, occasionally on a monumental scale, depicting the sense of handmade objects made with love related to a subculture of African American pictorial design. He received a BFA in painting at Boston University and a MFA at Yale. He had a solo exhibition at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in 2017. His work will be included in March in the 2018 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Liv Aanrud is a Los Angeles based textile artist. She changed her preferred medium from painting to to textile work, influenced by the hooked rug technique employed by her grandmother. Recently, her abstract (and painted) textile work has extended into figuration. First Date is a comic “Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe,” re-interpreted by Eilshemius. Aanrud received her MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2011, and just returned from a residency in Taiwan.

Matt Phillips is a Brooklyn based painter. His body of abstract paintings are often deeply related to textiles, specifically African American Gee’s Bend quilts which remain a profound influence on his work. Making his own paint from liquefied pigments suspended in a silica-based medium, his surfaces have an aqueous quality related to fabric printing just as his forms have a fluid building block structure related to quilting patterns. Phillips had one-person exhibitions at SHFAP in 2013 and 2016. He received his MFA from Boston University. He now teaches at F.I.T. in New York City.