Visitors invited to help craft new KMA exhibit

This detail photo depicts “Rewinds,” an installation Chicago artist Anne Wilson created using glass bobbins, which premieres in Knoxville as part of the Knoxville Museum of Art’s exhibit “Wind/ Rewind/ Weave,” opening Jan. 22.

This detail photo depicts “Rewinds,” an installation Chicago artist Anne Wilson created using glass bobbins, which premieres in Knoxville as part of the Knoxville Museum of Art’s exhibit “Wind/ Rewind/ Weave,” opening Jan. 22.

The Knoxville Museum of Art opens a new and interactive art exhibit based on textiles, production and craft today. And museum visitors won’t only be looking at art. They’re invited to help make it.

“Wind/Rewind/Weave” is at the 1050 World’s Fair Park museum through April 25. It’s comprised of three separate installations and focuses on the work of Chicago artist Anne Wilson as well as the process of creating textiles. The three major parts are “Rewinds,” “Wind-up: Walking the Warp” and the work-in-progress “Local Industry.”

“Rewinds” is Wilson’s 12-foot-long art piece that uses glass bobbins to create a “deconstructed carpet.” “Wind-Up” is a video of 10 artists building a 40-yard weaving warp on a 17-by-7-foot frame over six days last January at Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery. The warp became a textile sculpture in the gallery.

“Local Industry” turns a museum gallery into both art and production space. Here a single blot of striped cloth will be created during the exhibit’s run. Fifty to 60 selected weavers from Tennessee, the Southeast and other areas will take turns weaving on a floor loom loaned from the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts.

The weavers will use thread already wound on bobbins. The public is invited to come to the museum and wind the thread, creating bobbins on hand-cranked machines.

Those wound bobbins will be usable art during the exhibit. One end of the bobbin’s thread can be tied to a spot along a wall. The bobbin will fall to the floor, its thread trailing in the air. Weavers can look at the thread combinations before they begin their turns at the loom.

In the end, weavers will create a bolt of cloth about 2 feet wide and as much as 50 feet long. The finished piece will be part of the museum’s collection. All bobbin winders and weavers will be asked to record their participation in a book that will be kept as part of the project.

© 2010, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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