Textiles touch every aspect of our lives and connect us to history. “Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning,” the artist Anni Albers wrote in 1965. Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction reveals the links between this art form and abstraction. Incorporating basketry, apparel, and more than a century of other textile works that challenge accepted divisions between fine art and craft, this exhibition broadens the story of abstraction, suggesting that not only ideas but materials—like woven, knotted, and braided fabric—are crucial to its understanding and success.

Spanning early-20th-century works by Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Hoch, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, whose textile practices parallel their painting and drawing, mid-century works by Albers and Ed Rossbach, and contemporary works by Rosemarie Trockel, Andrea Zittel, and Igshaan Adams, this exhibition brings together more than 150 diverse, interdisciplinary objects. Highlighting issues of labor and identity that are intertwined with modern textile production, Woven Histories argues that weaving and textiles are the quintessential link between lived experience and art.