Woven Abstractions opens at Bienvenu Steinberg & C Gallery in TriBeca, June 20

WOVEN ABSTRACTIONS
Anne Lindberg, Marela Zacarías, and Ria Bosman
June 20 - August 23, 2025

opening Friday, June 20 from 6 - 8pm
35 Walker Street
New York, NY 10013

Bienvenu Steinberg & C is pleased to present Woven Abstractions, an exhibition featuring Anne Lindberg, Marela Zacarías, and Ria Bosman. On view from June 20 to August 23, 2025, the exhibition will open with a reception on Friday, June 20, from 6 to 8 pm.

Woven Abstractions brings together three artists who reimagine abstraction through material, color, and form. With distinct media, Lindberg, Zacarías, and Bosman each create immersive works that blur the boundaries between painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Their shared sensitivity to space, surface and light invites a reflection on rhythm, structure, and the quiet power of the handmade.

Anne Lindberg (b. 1962, USA) is a New York-based artist whose drawings and thread installations explore the sensory and emotional resonance of space, light, and movement. Known for her “drawings in space,” Lindberg uses thousands of chromatic cotton threads stretched in varying densities to form luminous, site-specific works that engage both architecture and the body. Lindberg draws in three dimensions, translating gesture into scale and form. Lindberg’s work is held in major U.S. collections including the Nevada Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Akron Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, and The Rachofsky Collection, among many others. She is currently working on a monumental site-specific commission for the Des Moines International Airport, set to be complete in 2026. She earned her B.F.A. from Miami University and M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. Lindberg lives and works in Ancramdale, NY.  

Marela Zacarías (b. 1978, Mexico) is known for her large-scale installation work of hand-painted sculptures. Constructed from wood, wire mesh, and plaster, her undulating wall-mounted forms are painted with geometric patterns drawn from global textiles, architecture, and social histories. Evolving from a background in mural painting, Zacarías’ work extends into space with a strong architectural dialogue, reflecting her interest in movement, materiality, and the layered narratives of place. Her work is held in major collections in the U.S. and internationally, including NYU Langone, Washington State's Art Collection, and Seattle Tacoma International Airport Permanent Art Collection. She holds a B.A. from Kenyon College, Ohio, and an M.F.A. from Hunter College, NY, as well as an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Kenyon College. Zacarías lives and works between Brooklyn, NY, and Mexico City, MX.

Ria Bosman (b. 1956, Belgium) is a Ghent-based artist whose minimalist textile work investigates the relationship between color, geometry, and texture. Bosman works with hand-painted strips of natural fiber, creating abstract compositions that investigate color, line, and material presence. With a background in dyeing and weaving, her practice blends technical precision with intuitive, contemplative decision-making. Rooted in a deep sensitivity to tone and form, Bosman’s work evokes a quiet spiritual resonance, aiming to create a space for stillness, balance, and emotional reflection. Bosman studied Monumental Art at the Higher Institute for Visual Arts, Sint-Lucas, Ghent. She continued her arts education in 1983, studying Artificial Weaving at the Institute for Textile Henry Story, Ghent. She is widely exhibited in Belgium and has been awarded the Provincial Award East-Flanders for Textile and Weaving Art from the Museum for Decorative Art, Ghent, BE. Her work is represented in private & public collections worldwide, including the S.M.A.K. Museum of Contemporary Art Ghent & the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection, Miami (US).

Please email contact@bsandcgallery.com for more information

waves within at Haw Contemporary thru May 17, 2025

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—

Emily Dickinson
The Brain is Deeper than the Sea #632

 Laced with concepts reflected in Emily Dickinson’s poem The Brain is Deeper than the Sea #632, Anne Lindberg’s new body of work for waves within is made with fine threads pulled taut through space, graphite and colored pencils drawn across pliant mat board and chips of indigo-dyed paper assembled in wobbly grids. Dickinson posits that the mind's ability to imagine and observe is as limitless as the vast sky and sea, and indeed the heavens themselves. Using reference to the weather, clouds and waves, Lindberg learns from Dickinson as she underscores the intertwined state of mind and body in context with the wonder of landscape.

Regardless of media and scale, in each of Lindberg’s new works, there is a strong sense of the handmade. Materiality and process are offered openly; the work asks you to come closer. The indexical mark, the gesture made, the material itself all become psychological and emotional spaces in the process of making. Large and small drawings render what seem to be the wanderings of the mind, vistas on the verge of disappearing, or forms emerging from the unknown. Every line, every slight wiggle, every thread, every staple feels deeply human, yet there is a quiet precision in the overriding poetry of the work. Each work probes a full range of psychological landscapes, from awe to control, elation to retreat, necessity to abandon.

All of Lindberg’s work, whether works on paper or sculpture, is an investigation of the power of color to carry meaning. Colors, and adjacencies of color, simultaneously hold emotional undercurrents, and suggest light and landscape conditions. Slight changes in value and chroma occur because of color choices and combinations, but also from shifts in pressure as the hand and arm glide pencils across creamy white mat board. In a room-scaled immersive installation, thousands of taut threads form a luminous indigo blue gradient that lifts upward to allow viewers to be fully under and within the work. Lindberg wants you to be “absorbed as sponges,” to take Dickinson’s cue.

waves within places color and the handmade at the forefront of meaning where it has the power to summon forth visceral responses to the profound and disquieting present in which we all live.

waves within, 2025, thread and staples, 90 H x 114 W x 312 D inches, photography by Derek Porter

stratocumulus, 2025, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 60 x 70 inches, photography by the artist

shifting thoughts 04, 2025, dyed paper collage, 15 x 19.5 inches, photography by the artist

Of all colors catalog, with essay by Julie Lasky, is available for purchase online

Of all colors catalog, with essay by Julie Lasky, is available for purchase at SECRIST | BEACH.

installation view - Of all colors at SECRIST | BEACH, photography by Nathan Kaey

Between (in snow) video is released - temporary installation, February 2024

I am pleased to release a video of Between, 2024. This temporary 15-day installation was also featured in Upstate Diary, No. 19 Fall / Winter with an article by Laura van Straaten and photographs by Carlton Davis.

All images in this video are by Derek Porter. The video was edited by Michael Sacca.

Of all colors opens at Secrist | Beach in Chicago, Friday September 20

ANNE LINDBERG
Of all colors

20 September - 16 November 2024

“Of all colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range…. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.” - William Gass

We are pleased to announce Anne Lindberg: Of all colors taking place at SECRIST | BEACH this fall. Of all colors marks New York-based artist Anne Lindberg’s fourth solo show with SECRIST | BEACH and will be presented concurrently with MANIFEST, a survey of artworks and inspired studies/drawings by artists and architects exploring themes of light, color and space.

For Of all colors, Anne Lindberg will create a sweeping horizontal sculpture made with thousands of lengths of fine cotton thread pulled taut from wall to wall under the gallery’s bow truss skylights. With a gap at the artist’s eye level, the form will deepen in dark blue hues and gradually fade to white or almost white. Flashes of hot color will appear to float within the gradient of blue. In addition, 13 new drawings made with graphite and colored pencil on mat board will pick up elements compositionally and chromatically from within the thread installation. Ranging in scale and number of panels, Lindberg’s drawings explore the luminous possibilities of hue. Intermittent bold bands of contrasting color shift imply a layered space while referencing changes in light that come with time of day, viewpoint and atmosphere.

Lindberg has long activated architecture with her site-responsive thread installations. Her work is first experienced by the body, with intellect and analysis coming later. For Lindberg, space is a vital material, and just as important and rich with possibilities as thread, paper and pencils. Creating her architecturally scaled sculptures with thread is akin to working in the air, with the air and of the air to build a constantly changing experience. As she “stitches” the architecture, the airborne mass of delicate threads become filters for chromatic light, striking a voluminous pose with visceral results.

Blue, and the concept of blue, has a beguiling history, cultural significance, phenomenological radiance and scientific profundity. From artists to philosophers, scientists and astronauts, blue is by unequal measures intangible, mysterious and indeterminate. Scarce in nature, blue eludes perception emotionally and physically but is also everywhere - making it a symbol for the ideal - verging on the utopian. Whatever this color evokes in an individual, one of the most powerful elements is its ability to create meaning-making which, by definition, designates the way in which people interpret the world around them.

 Anne Lindberg has been exploring the color blue for much of her artistic career. As a young artist, she traveled to Kyoto several times to work with traditional indigo dyers where she became fascinated with indigo’s unique ability to generate beautiful slow gradations from deep blues to hints of the lightest blues. It was Lindberg’s early experience watching cloth being lifted out of an indigo dye pot and its exposure to oxygen changing the yellow-ish green color of the fermented liquid dye into deeper and deeper shades of blue with each successive dip that formed the underpinnings of her lifelong interest in color. In recent years, Lindberg has been considering the semiotics of color, or how color can be used as a signifier for meanings associated with socio-emotional, cultural, environmental and political significance.

 Searching for ways to visualize the mysteries of visual and spatial experience is a compelling way of working especially in times of social, environmental, and economic change. Color, particularly blue, has an inherent intrigue in human vision; it exists beyond our grasp as it holds constant conversation with adjacent colors in both time and space. Imagining a world without color, and particularly blue, underlines its significance in the whole of human experience.

Anne Lindberg, altostratus, 2024, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 45 x 96 inches in two panels

Prendre le Soleil (Taking the Sun) opens at Hangar Y in Paris - December 16, 2024 - April 17, 2024

Prendre le Soleil (Taking the Sun)
December 16, 2023 - April 21, 2024

From Tacita Dean's green ray, to the multiple digital suns collected on Flickr by Penelope Umbrico, through the photographs of sunspots by astronomer Jules Janssen, the new exhibition at Hangar Y offers a luminous and sensitive journey through the works of modern and contemporary artists and scientific and vernacular images.

Our sun is so familiar and everyday that we sometimes forget it. Moreover, it is no longer just its light that punctuates and invades our lives, as certain artists point out, but rather the electric light of lamps and screens. Falsely associated with global warming, the Sun is sometimes unloved and feared. Its heat reminds us of the sublime mystery of its burning consistency. The sun's burns, its blows, its traces and its effects activate the imagination of artists, just like its ambivalences, without which life on Earth would not exist: the sun heats but sets on fire; it illuminates while dazzling…

This contradiction inherent in this star recalls the famous maxim of François de La Rochefoucauld: “The sun nor death cannot look at each other fixedly”. The abstract and vibrant photographs of a whole young generation of photographers, fascinated by the effect of the sun's rays on sensitive surfaces, “draw” with the star and reconnect with the experiments of the inventors of photography and cinema. A sensitive exploration of the sun through the eyes of artists.

It is with humor that some artists seize the motif of the sunset which they divert while others observe with delight the sublime moment of eternity when the moon “rises” and the sun disappears. Night falls slowly, and the darkness grows. Plunged into darkness, the sun is still there, but not exactly here. At the origin of numerous cults, the divine and mystical power of the Sun is a rich source of inspiration for artists who question our need for transcendence.

The works of nearly 40 artists, French and international, are presented in the exhibition:

Guillaume Aubry
Mustapha Azeroual
Abdelkader Benchamma
Jean Claracq
Caroline Corbasson
Rapha.l Dallaporta
Tacita Dean
Disnovation.org
Rachel Duckhouse
Samuel Fosso
Léon Foucault
Fragmentin
Erwan Frotin
Marina Gadonneix
Noémie Goudal
Laurent Grasso
Jules Janssen
Anne Lindberg
Colectivo Los Ingrad.vos
Thomas Mailaender
Massao Mascaro
Peter Miller
Desire Moheb-Zandi
Morris
Martin Parr
Joan Rabascall
Sébastien Reuzé
Simon Roberts
Dagoberto Rodriguez
Charles Ross
Camille Sauvageot
SMITH
Stéphanie Solinas
Sun Ra & his Arkestra
Clara de Tezanos
Laure Tiberghien
Étienne Léopold Trouvelot
Penelope Umbrico
Gwenola Wagon

imaginary i opens at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art - November 10, 2023 - April 7, 2024

imaginary i
November 10, 2023 - April 7, 2024
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Madison, WI

imaginary i compares how artists and mathematicians utilize constructs of the imaginary, or complex numbers, to envision the future and reclaim, retrace, and reveal past patterns. When examining MMoCA’s collecting patterns, there emerges a history of acquisitions that dovetails with explorations of science and math.

Together, art, math, and science explore and seek out unknown worlds and concepts projecting future and undiscovered realities. Artists utilizing mathematical iterative processes, such as Charles Gaines, those exploring modeling the infinite, such as Bruce Conner, and Erika Blumenfeld, who reflects the scientific realm, reveal new ways of looking that open dialogues on potentialities.

Pairing works from the MMoCA collection with contemporary artists engaged in similar pursuits, the exhibition postulates that science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM), have coalesced within the collection for the last half-century. Further research into the history of donors and the relationship with the University of Wisconsin-Madison infers an inherent interest in seeking out the mathematical and scientific in art. For example, renowned mathematician and professor at UW-Madison Rudolph Langer provided the founding gift of artwork that established MMoCA’s collection.

Complemented by humanities-based programming, collaboration with K-12 educators, and onsite activities for families in the Learning and Activity Centers, the exhibition will utilize data visualization techniques to develop conversations around the vital role of the arts and humanities in conjunction with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Artists
Alice Aycock
Maxime Banks
Erika Blumenfeld
John Cage
Bruce Conner
Richard Diebenkorn
William Dole
Olafur Eliasson
Charles Gaines
Michelle Grabner
Mary Heilmann
Al Held
Dame Barbara Hepworth
John Hughes
Richard Hunt
Rockne Krebs
Annette Lawrence
Anne Lindberg
Truman Lowe
Alan J. Shields
Eric Staller

Of Waves opens at SEPTEMBER gallery - October 28 - December 17, 2023

 Jane Bustin
 Anne Lindberg
Of Waves
SEPTEMBER gallery
4 Hudson Street #3
Kinderhook, NY 12106
Jane Bustin and Anne Lindberg
October 28 - December 17, 2023

Here are things we can hold in our hands - a book, a page, a pencil - and things we cannot hold - a moment, a memory, a breath. We can gather the things themselves, touch them, see their evidence of time in salt stains and lost threads. We can hold an image of a sunset between thin lines and bright blues. Sometimes though it’s the spaces between absence and articulation - a lighter touch, an unmarked surface, a soft reflection - that opens us outwards. We can catch, sort and place, but it’s the thing we can’t contain, the spilling over, that leads us to a kind of surrender. And this is when we finally hush, and just float here.

We are thrilled to present a two person exhibition, Of Waves, with London based Jane Bustin, and Hudson Valley based Anne Lindberg. Each artist will have a room of their own, Bustin in the South gallery and Lindberg in the North gallery, with their works meeting in the center.

Both artists are working with the parameters of their own bodies, that is, Bustin works in parts that are scaled to hand-held proportions, while Lindberg works in a size that is an extension of arms reach. Light plays an important role, either suggesting an internal glow or literally reflecting from a surface. Both pull from written language, and specifically for this show, they draw inspiration from Virginia Woolf. Thinking about her novel, The Waves, Lindberg and Bustin make choices of palette, line and material. Their practices mirror the contemplative interiority of a poet, here finding form through a tenderly woven visual language.

Lindberg works with pencil, beginning with graphite and methodically layering with varying pressure of line. Her process contains instructions: draw straight lines side to side with the support of a ruler, graphite first, color on top. However, her process is also searching as she makes choices, changes pencils and colors or adjusts pressure along the way. For this body of work, Lindberg draws with a horizontal gesture, suggesting an expanse with orbs that hover, perhaps the rising sun or ripples of cloth, perhaps an apparition in fog. Along with her works on paper, Lindberg is presenting an installation made with blue, gray and white thread that itself becomes a horizon as the viewer gazes over the hovering form stretching between two walls.

Bustin is working with a carefully selected combination of materials - aluminum, copper, cloth and paper, each its own panel, positioned together in a grid of four. The cut sail cloth has been stained and worn by the English sea, creating indigo edges and loose threads. The paper has been culled from old books, their edges stained by time and sun, each page dipped in tea. The copper and aluminum reflect light, the context of a room, passing subjects. For this series of works, Bustin has spent hours at the British Library pouring through letters written between Virginia Woolf and her friends and lovers. Each grouping of four panels has been created as a poetic embodiment of their exchange, their relationship as conveyed through private letters, linked sentiments.

The repetition of line, materials, and form in both artists' works speak to one another, sharing language, forming overlap and connection. Ephemerality and temporality are reverberating throughlines. The constant here, like Woolf’s belief in the movement of language, is change.

Jane Bustin, born 1964, London, studied at Portsmouth University and lives and works in London, her practice spans three decades of single works in painting and ceramic as well as installation, text, film and performance. The paintings are made as sequential, monochrome abstract works, executed in a variety of mediums and surfaces. They explore the metaphysical potential for painting to 'make visual' philosophical concepts found primarily in modernist literature, feminism, theology as well as music and dance. The work is usually project based and can incorporate paintings, ceramic objects, text and live performance. The works influences come from 14th century frescos, 17th century painting, Belle epoque iconography, modernist literature, Nineteenth century poetry, women artists, 70’s feminist movement, Japanese ceramics, fabrics, books, hardware stores , neon signs, cosmetics, sweet wrappers...Bustin’s work has been exhibited widely nationally including Kettles Yard Cambridge, Southampton Gallery, Ferens Museum Hull, Camden Arts Centre London, Whitechapel Gallery London, Walker Gallery Manchester, Jerwood space London, Drawing Room London, Mostyn Gallery Llandudno, Djanogly and internationally with solo shows in Berlin, Latvia, New York, Paris, Sydney and Auckland. Bustin has work in public collections, including: The Rothko Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Ferens Museum and Yale Centre. She is represented by Copperfield, London, Jane lombard New York and Fox Jensen Sydney and FoxJensen McCory Auckland.

Anne Lindberg born 1962, Iowa City, IA, is multi-disciplinary artist who works within broad definitions of drawing and textile in two and three dimensions. Lindberg’s project passage is currently on view at the newly renovated and expanded Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts until 2026. Her immersive architecturally scaled project, Anne Lindberg: what is the color of divine light?, at The Textile Museum at George Washington University Museums (until late December 2023) examines unnamed, unseen, and indeterminate definitions of the divine through color with a broad 55-foot wide installation made with fine chromatic thread. In mid-November 2023, Lindberg will build a site-specific work at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, WI for a group exhibition that looks at the relationship between art and mathematics called imaginary i, curated by Christina Brungardt. At Hangar Y in Paris, France in December 2023, Anne will present a luminous installation for a group exhibition called Seizing the Sun, up thru April 2024. Fourteen of Lindberg’s of the river drawings were recently purchased by the US Department of State for the U.S. Consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A five-story glass wall, commissioned for the new women’s health center at NYU Langone Health in New York, NY was completed in 2023. Lindberg’s first monograph was released in late 2022 by Durer Editions (Dublin, Ireland). Lindberg’s work is held in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Detroit Institute of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rachofsky Collection, Collection of Christy and Bill Gautreaux, Spencer Museum of Art, NYSE Chicago, Federal Reserve Bank Kansas City, Niwako Kimono Company, GSA Richard Bolling Federal Building, among many others. Lindberg is recipient of awards including a 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, two ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Grants, a Lighton International Artists Exchange grant, the Art Omi International Artists Residency, an American Institute of Architects Allied Arts and Crafts award, and a Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She holds a BFA from Miami University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her studio is in Ancramdale, New York.

Jane Bustin, 2023, 8. Virginia daughter wife writer, paper, crushed oyster shell, watercolour 38 x 48 cm

StirWorld publishes "Line and colour transcend language" by Dilpreet Bhullar, Feb 19, 2023

Line and Colour Transcend Language
by Dilpreet Bhullar

The rows of well-defined lines in the artwork are an invitation to take a look closer at them to gauge the intensity of luminosity and deftly crafted density. In this fashion, the viewers are initiated to play along with the field of light assembled in front of them. The seamless connection between colour, form, intensity and direction of a line, as a way to reorient the trained eye towards what is often overlooked, occupies the art practice of New York-based = multimedia artist Anne Lindberg. The line(s) as a geometrical shape, central to her works, is formed in drawings as well as textile installations. Practice as a response to the two and three dimensions, conceptualized to question the flow of time, opens a possibility to anchor an experiential effect for the viewers.

To pause and reflect on silence, movement and distance around the site-responsive installations, against the strident need to distort the perception of what is given in the works of Lindberg, are achieved subtly. Playing with perception allows the viewers of her work to create their environments to have personal experiences with the drawings. In an interview with STIR, she cites a few works to support this observation, “One drawing, Apparition Eclipse, is a vertically oriented 8.5-foot-tall by 5-foot-wide drawing. From a distance, it is subtle in effect but as you approach and stand just a few feet away it becomes encompassing to what I hope is an emotional and physiological level. Towering above the viewer, the graphite and coloured pencil generate one subtle emotion after another, again and again with the repetition of vertical lines. Colour, the density/non-density of the lines and their simple proximity to each other create a unique context for each viewer.”

The pursuit to have an interaction with the space is not limited to the artworks but it is an extension of Lindberg’s daily engagement in a studio, and conversation with peers and community. Moreover, the long walks, undertaken by the artist, offer her the time to consume herself in the period of contemplation around transformation and adaptability. In doing so Lindberg perpetuates a ritual: diligently performed by writers including William Wordsworth, Helen Mirra, Rebecca Solnit, and Virginia Woolf. The quotidian exercise pinned by the delicate human condition informs the creative practice of the visual artist. In other words, each line or colour in the art is a physical answer to these tactile moments. The abstract nature of the work for Lindberg at a base level is a synonym for intangibility. The only way to pull meaning from looking at something that appears abstract is to bring your own oneness to bear. “An immersive experience is a tool that I can provide to help shape the possibility for context. I hope that a visceral moment can, through immersion, provide a moment that is tangible enough to provide a kind of clarification,” elucidates Lindberg.

In her recent exhibition Afterimage along with Chicago-based painter Olivia Schreiner at Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, she is showcasing a series Afterimage. It is an image that appears in the eyes after a period of time of being exposed to another image. Following her artistic oeuvre, this physical response is the manifestation of a visceral reaction. She mentions, “What I am exploring is the use of colour, and combinations of colour, to ask how what we perceive through placing certain colours together alters our understanding of what the eye and the mind “see”. For example, putting the colours blue and yellow together creates what is called a “simultaneous contrast” which alters our perception of what colour is. The relationship between colours is more than composition, it can be a deeply felt experience.”

A curious mind is keen to know how she makes a selection of colours for her works. She has been studying the writings of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel and Mary Gartside and the experiments of Joseph Albers for her current presentation at the exhibition. Through this, an underlying theory called “colour complementariness” has emerged. Elaborating this Lindberg says, “This essentially means that colours can imply a shift in time and space through their relationship with each other. The colours chosen for the drawings in this exhibition can mean many things on an abstract level but it’s their essence that most interests me. Each colour’s characteristic is its own, but in tandem or, in relation to another, can mean many more things. What exactly that is I can only imply.”

When witnessed within the framework of art history, the combination of lines and colours has been the ardent subject of the painters of the early twentieth century. In the time tormented by the World War, the questions around the imperious power of the divine were evoked. Casting the dark shadows over everything under the sun, the artists played with the ideal form of line – a metaphor for light – concurrently talked about concerns around spirituality. The book Concerning the Spiritual in Art by the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky was published with a similar intent. Another upcoming immersive installation by Lindberg What Colors is Divine light presses upon the notion of interrelation between individual and community, at large. By having “light” integral to the work, the American artist attempts to draw upon the presence of divine light in every sectarian philosophy.

Lindberg is optimistic that the viewers would find themselves with a sense of exploration, and a wider and deeper understanding of how colour can create an emotional and non-verbal state of being. Nevertheless, she remains careful to indicate, “This does not have to mean to be emotionally sad or harmonious; it can also bring about a feeling of turbulence, wonder or urgency. One of the questions I asked myself recently is ‘Why is colour so powerful?’ It transcends language and slows time and, more importantly, asks nothing of us.”  

Anne Lindberg, apparition eclipse, 2021, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 104 x 59 inches

Anne Lindberg, spectrum, 2022, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 40 x 50 inches

Anne Lindberg, roots of how we measure 13, 2022, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 40 x 50 inches

passage opens at newly re-imagined Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, April 22, 2023

Anne Lindberg: passage

Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR
April 22, 2023 - Spring 2026

A luminous cloud of color floats above Museum visitors, creating an unexpected art experience as they walk through the galleries. This exhibition is a newly commissioned work by Anne Lindberg, an artist based in upstate New York.

Lindberg makes site-specific installations—sculptures that respond directly to the architecture of the surrounding space. Her work, which is created for AMFA, will draw visitors’ attention to the thoughtful details of the new Studio Gang-designed building. Exhibiting art in an unusual location—a corridor—will activate the space for visitors. With the help of assistants, Lindberg pulls colorful cotton thread taut between walls and staples it into place, repeating the process over and over.

“The piece begins as a whisper and gains mass as time goes on,” she explains. “It’s performative.” Although her installations are volumetric, Lindberg considers them to be drawings—they create lines in space. One wall will feature a large vertical drawing on mat board with dozens of brightly colored, thin, horizontal lines created by the artist with the help of a parallel bar. The drawing, grene, has been acquired for the AMFA Foundation Collection.

AMFA selected Lindberg as an inaugural installation artist because of her unique attention to architecture and relationship to drawing, a strength of the AMFA Foundation Collection.

The artist designed this installation specifically for the narrow corridor gallery. Lindberg notes, “passage is a narrow-compressed form that floats overhead and is located within a slender pinch point between large exhibition spaces in the Museum. The overall form shifts direction mid-way along its horizontal length to create a gap or pause, a peek through its vertical depth.” The work is also unusual in that visitors will walk below it, creating an immersive experience.

In addition to drawing, Lindberg’s practice is rooted in fiber art. With the artist’s time-intensive handiwork, choice of thread as a medium, and focus on material qualities, she continues to expand upon a centuries-old tradition. Lindberg earned an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which boasts a fiber program that challenges the divisions between art, craft, and design. Before earning her graduate degree, she worked as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, making diagrams and counting threads of textiles from West Africa.

Lindberg chose her color palette for passage with AMFA’s grounds and MacArthur Park location in mind. “I selected green, green blue (with some yellow) for the primary chromatic dynamic to suggest a connection to the landscape surrounding the Museum,” the artist explained. “The outside comes inside, a kind of inversion into the very center of the Museum.”

She is interested in the way that colors affect viewers’ bodies and minds, how they can create physiological responses of calm or relaxation. “Green is a color that symbolizes nature, good health, growth, renewal, and a call to action – all positive associations that hopefully give the work an uplifting character.” As light streams through the thread in passage, it will bathe viewers in a green and yellow glow.

Anne Lindberg: passage is presented by Terri and Chuck Erwin with additional support from the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. Theresa Bembnister is the curator of the project.

The Washington Post, "At the Textile Museum, the divine takes many forms" by Vanessa Larson, March 28, 2023

Installation view of “Prayer and Transcendence” at the George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum. (Cara Taylor / George Washington University)

“Oriental rugs,” as they are often called, have been appreciated for centuries for their beauty and artistry. Some serve a purpose that’s more than mere decoration for a floor or wall, however. “Prayer and Transcendence,” an exhibition at the George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum, focuses on Islamic prayer carpets, showing how they share specific iconography that forms a common visual language across Muslim cultures, while also allowing for a diversity of styles and interpretations.

“[Carpets] are beautiful objects, but they have meanings,” says curator Sumru Belger Krody. “And if you’re not from that culture or religion, it’s harder to read them. This exhibition tells you how to read that meaning.”

The exhibition is a feast for the eyes, showcasing 20 carpets dating from the 16th to 19th centuries and spanning lands from modern-day Turkey and Iran through the Caucasus and Central Asia and into the Indian subcontinent. More than half are Textile Museum holdings, with the remainder on loan from four other collections.

The central element of Islamic prayer carpets is their directionality: Each features an archway around which the rest of the design is composed. When laid on the ground with the arch oriented in the direction of Mecca, the textile physically delineates an area for prayer. The rugs may also be hung on walls to denote a space for worship.

Torah ark curtain (early 17th century) from the Ottoman Empire in Cairo. (George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum/Acquired by George Hewitt Myers in 1915)

A prayer carpet (1890-1910) from the Caucasus. (Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum/Gift of Elizabeth Gowing, Harborne W. Stuart, Peggy Coolidge, and the estate of W.I. Stuart in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby H. Stuart Jr.)

Among the most gorgeous works on display are those with imagery of gardens, representing paradise. A stunning piece from 18th-century Kashmir is a riot of colors and patterns, featuring a scalloped, curved archway flanked by cypress trees with a millefleurs field of assorted flowers in the center, all surrounded by a more stylized floral border pattern. It was also made with especially rich materials: a combination of silk, cotton, and pashmina wool.

“In the Quran, paradise is described in several sections as this big, luscious garden with flowers, greenery, waters. … If you live a pious life, you can enter,” Krody says. “These carpets kind of in miniature give you a glimpse of what [the afterlife] may be if you do the right thing.”

On the walls, lines from the Quran and photos of mosques in countries from which the rugs originate help add religious and cultural context.

The carpets range from an exquisite piece dating to 16th-century Iran that was made with silk, wool and metallic-wrapped thread by weavers employed by the Safavid shah’s court to simpler rugs created by rural women for household use. One particularly vibrant example from the Caucasus has a pattern of stylized, almost hexagonal paisleys in an array of colors.

A late-18th-century saf (multi-arch prayer carpet) from Warangal in India’s Deccan Plateau. (George Washington University Museum and Textile Museum/Acquired by George Hewitt Myers in 1950)

“The designs are created for [court] use, but then kind of go down the echelons and reach the masses, being imitated in various different ways,” Krody explains. Although styles reflect local preferences, they were also influenced by available materials: Rural artisans usually worked with wool that wasn’t nearly as fine as the silk often used by court weavers, leading to designs that were more geometric and considerably less intricate.

Lamps, clearly modeled on the types of lights that traditionally hang in mosques, are another important motif, symbolizing divine light. Here the museum provides a fascinating counterpoint to the prayer rugs through the inclusion of two carpets woven in the Ottoman Empire and used, rather atypically, in synagogues as parochets, or Torah ark covers, showing the degree of mutual influence between the empire’s Muslim and Jewish communities.

One of the ark covers hangs next to an Ottoman prayer carpet with such similar design and iconography — a central archway with a lamp or flowers hanging from it; concentric patterned floral borders — that it would be easy to interchange them were it not for the Hebrew inscription at the top of the parochet.

Installation view of Anne Lindberg’s “What Color Is Divine Light?” (Derek Porter)

Just upstairs from the carpets, a site-specific installation by contemporary American artist Anne Lindberg, “What Color Is Divine Light?,” continues the theme.

Lindberg’s luminous work evokes a sense of wonder. At first glance, it seems like an illusion created from something intangible, such as beams of light. In fact, it was made with thousands of fine cotton threads on a color spectrum between yellow and blue, stretched tautly between two lavender walls and lit so that the work appears almost psychedelic, vibrating from close-up.

The installation aims to create what scientists call “impossible colors” — imperceptible to the eye and brain — between the hues of the threads. In grappling with the impossibility of depicting the divine in physical form, the artist is responding to an unanswerable question posed in an eponymous 1971 essay by art historian Patrik Reutersward.

“What Color Is Divine Light?” invites contemplation; the museum is also holding several interfaith and performance programs and encouraging quiet reflection in the space. On a recent Saturday, several Muslim women attending an Islamic calligraphy workshop held in conjunction with the carpet exhibition rolled out yoga mats that were on hand and performed afternoon prayers.

Not only visually stimulating, the juxtaposition of Lindberg’s installation with the Islamic prayer carpets, along with the Torah ark covers, makes a wonderful case for the idea that the divine can be found in many forms.

Installation view of Anne Lindberg’s “What Color Is Divine Light?” (Cara Taylor / George Washington University)

Installation view of Anne Lindberg’s “What Color Is Divine Light?” (Derek Porter)

What color is divine light? opens at The Textile Museum in Washington, DC February 4, 2023

What color is divine light?
The Textile Museum
701 21st St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20052

Museum Hours:
Tuesday thru Saturday: 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

February 4 - July 1, 2023

Contemporary artist Anne Lindberg’s immersive installation transforms light and thread into a site for contemplation and reflection on connections with ourselves, communities and individual conceptions of the divine. A series of programs within the gallery will bring community members together for shared experiences designed to foster understanding and transcendence.

Across many religions, light is used as a symbol of divine presence on Earth. Inspired by an eponymous 1971 essay, Anne Lindberg is transforming the museum’s third-floor gallery into a site-specific installation that will explore the question, “What color is divine light?”

Scientists have determined that between complementary colors exist colors the eye and brain cannot perceive, called “impossible” colors. “It’s the intangible, the imaginary, the mysterious, unnamed space between… although our eyes/brains can’t actually see the colors between, we feel them, we sense them,” states Lindberg. “The divine, like these colors, is unnamable, untouchable, intangible.”

Set against lavender walls, what color is divine light? will contain thousands of fine chromatic threads in complementary yellow and blue colors – creating a cloud of color that evokes light itself. Lindberg’s installation invites visitors to gather and reflect: If divinity could be experienced as a physical presence, what might it look like? Sound like? Feel like? What color is divine light?

Anne Lindberg: what color is divine light? is accompanied by a gallery guide.

About the Artist
Anne Lindberg (American, b. 1962) is a multimedia artist whose work centers on immersive installations and drawings that tap a non-verbal physiological landscape of body and space, provoking emotional, visceral and perceptual responses. Lindberg is the recipient of multiple awards, fellowships and grants, including a Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited widely and is held in collections across the United States. Lindberg received a B.F.A. from Miami University and a M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Acknowledgements
Support for this exhibition and related programming is provided by the Fund for Contemporary Textile Art, the Cynthia and Alton Boyer Fund for Education, the Estate of Jack Lenor Larson and the Contemporary Textiles Endowment.

Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, grand opening April 2023

Anne Lindberg: passage

April 22, 2023 - Spring 2026

A luminous cloud of color floats above Museum visitors, creating an unexpected art experience as they walk through the galleries. This exhibition is a newly commissioned work by Anne Lindberg, an artist based in upstate New York.

Lindberg makes site-specific installations—sculptures that respond directly to the architecture of the surrounding space. Her work, which is created for AMFA, will draw visitors’ attention to the thoughtful details of the new Studio Gang-designed building. Exhibiting art in an unusual location—a corridor—will activate the space for visitors. With the help of assistants, Lindberg pulls colorful cotton thread taut between walls and staples it into place, repeating the process over and over.

“The piece begins as a whisper and gains mass as time goes on,” she explains. “It’s performative.” Although her installations are volumetric, Lindberg considers them to be drawings—they create lines in space. One wall will feature a large vertical drawing on mat board with dozens of brightly colored, thin, horizontal lines created by the artist with the help of a parallel bar. The drawing, grene, has been acquired for the AMFA Foundation Collection.

AMFA selected Lindberg as an inaugural installation artist because of her unique attention to architecture and relationship to drawing, a strength of the AMFA Foundation Collection.

The artist designed this installation specifically for the narrow corridor gallery. Lindberg notes, “passage is a narrow-compressed form that floats overhead and is located within a slender pinch point between large exhibition spaces in the Museum. The overall form shifts direction mid-way along its horizontal length to create a gap or pause, a peek through its vertical depth.” The work is also unusual in that visitors will walk below it, creating an immersive experience.

In addition to drawing, Lindberg’s practice is rooted in fiber art. With the artist’s time-intensive handiwork, choice of thread as a medium, and focus on material qualities, she continues to expand upon a centuries-old tradition. Lindberg earned an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which boasts a fiber program that challenges the divisions between art, craft, and design. Before earning her graduate degree, she worked as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, making diagrams and counting threads in textiles from West Africa.

Lindberg chose her color palette for passage with AMFA’s grounds and MacArthur Park location in mind. “I selected green, green blue (with some yellow) for the primary chromatic dynamic to suggest a connection to the landscape surrounding the Museum,” the artist explained. “The outside comes inside, a kind of inversion into the very center of the Museum.”

She is interested in the way that colors affect viewers’ bodies and minds, how they can create physiological responses of calm or relaxation. “Green is a color that symbolizes nature, good health, growth, renewal, and a call to action – all positive associations that hopefully give the work an uplifting character.” As light streams through the thread in passage, it will bathe viewers in a green and yellow glow.

About Anne Lindberg

Anne Lindberg’s recent exhibitions include Everson Museum of Art, Figge Art Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Thomas Cole Historic Site, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Manitoga The Russel Wright Design Center, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, SEPTEMBER Gallery, University of Minnesota Regis Center for the Arts, River Valley Arts Collective at the Thornwillow Press, Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, The Landing, Haw Contemporary, Pamela Salisbury Gallery and Carrie Secrist Gallery among others.

Her work has also been in solo and group exhibitions at such places as The Drawing Center, New York; Tegnerforbundet, Norway; SESC Bom Retiro, Sao Paulo; Mattress Factory; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh; U.S. Embassy Yangon Myanmar; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Akron Art Museum; Cranbrook Art Museum; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Laumeier Sculpture Park; The Warehouse Dallas; Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna; September Gallery; Josee Bienvenu Gallery and the Omi International Art Center, among others.

Her work is held in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Everson Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rachofsky Collection, Collection of Christy and Bill Gautreaux, Spencer Museum of Art, Federal Reserve Bank Kansas City, Niwako Kimono Company, GSA Richard Bolling Federal Building, among many others. She recently completed a five-story glass wall drawing commission at NYU Langone Health in New York, and 14 of her drawings are now in the collection of the U.S. Consulate General in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Lindberg is recipient of awards including a 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, a Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, two ArtsKC Fund Inspiration Grants, a Lighton International Artists Exchange grant, the Art Omi International Artists Residency, an American Institute of Architects Allied Arts and Crafts award, and a Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She holds a BFA from Miami University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her studio is in Ancramdale, New York.

Anne Lindberg, grene, 2022, graphite and colored pencil on mat board, 104 x 59 inches, photography by the artist, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation Collection

Anne Lindberg: think like the river with poet Ginny Threefoot at Figge Art Museum, thru September 4, 2022

Anne Lindberg: think like the river with poet Ginny Threefoot

Figge Art Museum
225 West Second Street
Davenport, Iowa
11 June - September 4, 2022

Though traditionally defined as works on paper, in recent decades drawing has become a field that uses a broad spectrum of formats. Anne Lindberg’s work embraces this freedom. While she does make drawings on paper, she also works three-dimensionally and understands her room-scaled installations as immersive drawings in space. This summer she will create an ephemeral tonal landscape of color and light by casting thousands of threads across the span of the Figge’s fourth floor gallery. She has invited poet Ginny Threefoot to collaborate on this conceptually rich project centered on the subject of water, conceived with an awareness of the museum’s location along the Mississippi River. 

The chromatic thread installation will occupy the central open space of the gallery, rising and falling in its distance from the floor, thus encouraging visitors to walk around and under the work. It will be accompanied by a multi-panel 25-foot-wide drawing at one end of the gallery and Threefoot’s poetry on the other. The drawing and the text will guide and mirror each other as they converse across the space. 

References to water and the river became a focus for Lindberg when she read Threefoot’s poem “think like the river,” a piece that entertains a possibility of union with the natural world. Across cultures, the river is a metaphor for the constancy of change and uncertainty in both nature and the human condition. Ideas of water lines, currents, flow, and immersion provide points of departure for this dialogue between art and poetry. 

Anne Lindberg: think like the river will invite an interactive bodily experience for museum visitors as they traverse the gallery space. Lindberg’s use of tactile materials and indexical handmade marks have a visceral effect. The confluence of visual art and language will stimulate a fluid dialogue of ideas about the inner and outer worlds of mind and landscape.

Cosmic Geometries at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space in the NEW YORK TIMES

https://www.nytimes.com/article/new-york-art-galleries.html

February 11, 2022

“The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint was as much a pioneer of abstraction as a mystic. So, in 2020, when the artists Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder formed a collective devoted to artwork by women, nonbinary, and trans people interested in spirituality, they named it after her.

Hilma’s Ghost’s first big project was creating a set of tarot cards. Now the duo has curated Cosmic Geometries, which expands on the deck, by continuing its exploration of connections between abstraction and mysticism. Aided by Sarah Potter, a witch, Ray and Tegeder used tarot as a guide for laying out the show. For each of the 25 artists, they pulled a card that’s displayed alongside the work.

Even if, like me, you don’t know much about tarot, you can appreciate its apparent curatorial powers. “March ’94” (1994), a bold and radiant canvas by Biren De, hangs next to Jackie Tileston’s   painting “14. Muon Seance Aftermath” (2021), which evokes unseen forces in a quieter, more hermetic way. With their playful dances of color and shape, Marilyn Lerner’s “Queen Bee” (2020) and Rico Gatson’s “Untitled (Double Sun/Sonhouse)” (2021) look like a ready-made pair. Barbara Takenaga’s transcendent painting “Floater (Revised)” (2013—15) is unique, yet I felt echoes of it in the vibratory rhinestones of Evie Falci’s “Thalia” (2016).

It’s exhilarating to see a knockout exhibition that celebrates abstraction’s spiritual searching. These works are rooted in culture and form, but reminders, too, that when it comes to art, we’re often seeking something deeper. “

by JILLIAN STEINHAUER

_______________________________________________________________________________________

https://www.projectspace-efanyc.org

EFA Project Space presents Cosmic Geometries, organized by Hilma’s Ghost, a feminist collective project by Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder, and featuring a diverse, intergenerational group of artists, with work by: Natessa Amin, Yevgeniya Baras, Lisa Beck, Biren De, Grace DeGennaro, Evie Falci, Anoka Faruqee & David Driscoll, Rico Gatson, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Xylor Jane, Valerie Jaudon, Laleh Khorramian, Julia Kunin, Marilyn Lerner, Anne Lindberg, Mahirwan Mamtani, Carrie Moyer, Stephen Mueller, Sky Pape, Dorothea Rockburne, A.V. Ryan, Laurel Sparks, Barbara Takenaga, Jackie Tileston and Johanna Unzueta. 

Cosmic Geometries is a group exhibition of intergenerational and intersectional artists that examines the spiritual and aesthetic functions of abstract painting and geometry in art. The artists deploy a range of painterly devices to create cosmic and transcendental visions that combine esoteric world traditions with the language of Modernism. Their motifs are inspired by sources as divergent as Islamic architecture, Buddhist mandalas, Hindu yantras, medieval Christian stained-glass windows, and quantum mechanics, rendering formal devices that range from tessellations, optical illusions, to elaborate ornamentation techniques. These artists primarily work with the language of painting, but also draw from languages and materials adapted from sculpture, installation, craft, textiles, and ceramics. Within these works lies a rich sensibility for color, shape, and compositional elements, which reveal the daring sensibilities that artists are bringing to the historically overlooked arena of the spiritual in art. These artists' practices build upon palimpsest legacies of alternative power structures that are constantly being erased.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This is Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland and gathering place for many Indigenous nations and beings. When the unceded earth breathes again, there will be Indigenous lives here, as there are now and have always been. It will still be Lenapehoking. We learn from the bedrock and commit to uplifting, honoring, and listening to those who are seen and unseen, present and future.

Anne Lindberg: think like the river / with poet Ginny Threefoot, opening June 2022

https://figgeartmuseum.org/art/exhibitions/view/anne-lindberg-think-like-the-river-with-poet-ginny-threefoot/224
opening June 11 - September 4, 2022

Anne Lindberg: think like the river / with poet Ginny Threefoot

Though traditionally defined as works on paper, in recent decades drawing has become a field that uses a broad spectrum of formats. Anne Lindberg’s work embraces this freedom. While she does make drawings on paper, she also works three-dimensionally and understands her room-scaled installations as immersive drawings in space. This summer she will create an ephemeral tonal landscape of color and light by casting thousands of threads across the span of the Figge’s fourth floor gallery. She has invited poet Ginny Threefoot to collaborate on this conceptually rich project centered on the subject of water, conceived with an awareness of the museum’s location along the Mississippi River. 

The chromatic thread installation will occupy the central open space of the gallery, rising and falling in its distance from the floor, thus encouraging visitors to walk around and under the work. It will be accompanied by a multi-panel 25-foot-wide drawing at one end of the gallery and Threefoot’s poetry on the other. The drawing and the text will guide and mirror each other as they converse across the space. 

References to water and the river became a focus for Lindberg when she read Threefoot’s poem “think like the river,” a piece that entertains a possibility of union with the natural world. Across cultures, the river is a metaphor for the constancy of change and uncertainty in both nature and the human condition. Ideas of water lines, currents, flow, and immersion provide points of departure for this dialogue between art and poetry. 

Anne Lindberg: think like the river will invite an interactive bodily experience for museum visitors as they traverse the gallery space. Lindberg’s use of tactile materials and indexical handmade marks have a visceral effect. The confluence of visual art and language will stimulate a fluid dialogue of ideas about the inner and outer worlds of mind and landscape.

AbStranded opens at Everson Museum of Art on Saturday, September 18, 2021

https://everson.org/explore/current-exhibitions/abstranded-fiber-and-abstraction-in-contemporary-art/

AbStranded: Fiber and Abstraction in Contemporary Art

September 18, 2021 thru January 2, 2022
Curated by Elizabeth Dunbar
Artists:
Polly Apfelbaum
Paolo Arao
Sanford Biggers
Samantha Bittman
Julia Bland
Rachel B. Hayes
Elana Herzog
Anne Lindberg
Sheila Pepe
Sarah Zapata

AbStranded features ten contemporary American artists who use fiber-based materials to investigate the complex lineage of abstraction. Utilizing a diverse variety of methods, styles, and forms, these artists uncover and co-opt textile traditions and material sources in order to re-assert their validity and relevance in an increasingly global-industrial culture. A prominent use of the hand looms large—through knitting, weaving, quilting, and more—and suggests an alternative mode of communication within today’s digital society. Together, the works reveal how artists employ the language of abstraction to speak about the intertwined histories and politics of craft, race, and gender.

AbStranded is made possible through a grant from The Coby Foundation, Ltd. Additional support provided by Bonnie and Gary Grossman and Laurel Moranz and John MacAllister.

Light and Shadow at Shelter in Place Gallery - June 18-20, 2021

saffron fog
solo exhibition
part of Light and Shadow curated by Caroline Kipp, Curator of Contemporary Art at The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.
Shelter in Place Gallery
June 18-20, 2021

Sun spilling through morning mist inspired Anne Lindberg’s “saffron fog,” a light-filled installation where color is suspended in a glowing atmosphere. Made with fine pastel rubbed and brushed into the surface of the paper, these wall drawings were slowly built, pass by pass to reach their intensity and variations.

With its sense of clarity and connection to the sun, yellow has symbolized wisdom, imagination, intellect, and life-affirming hope across religions, continents, and eras.Yet yellow’s ability to grab attention can also serve as a warning; veering into hazards, mania, illness, deceit, and decay. Lindberg reflects that “throughout the pandemic, our collective responses of hope and despair, science and contradiction, seem to make yellow a fitting color for the moment.

Light and Shadow, curated by Caroline Kipp is a fundraiser for CERF+ (The Artists Safety Net). Artists included in Light and Shadow: Inga Adda, Nathaniel Bearg, Christina Bothwell, Yétúndé Olagbaju, Walker Roman, Leigh Suggs with prints by Amos Kennedy, Jr.

Christina Bothwell has generously donated her exhibition work for auction to benefit CERF+. All proceeds from this auction will be matched by an anonymous donor, and added to the COVID-19 Response Fund at CERF+, the Artists Safety Net. The auction will end on June 28th, and is being jointly organized with the James Renwick Alliance for Craft.

In life and in art, you can’t have light without the dark. In every imaginable medium, artists throughout history have explored the themes of light and dark visually, or in the content of the work itself. The radiance of light has expressed spiritual illumination, and the thirst for transcendence. Darkness, the unknowable and frightening within ourselves and the world. In Light & Shadow, the featured artworks bridge the dichotomy, and rest in that generative space between. 

Throughout the exhibition a concurrent print sale and an auction will fundraise for CERF+, to help those who need some light in the dark. CERF+ was started by artists for artists in the craft community as a grassroots mutual aid effort in 1985 and has since emerged as the leading nonprofit organization that uniquely focuses on safeguarding artists’ livelihoods nationwide. Funds raised from the print sale will be matched by an anonymous donor, and added to the COVID-19 Response Fund at CERF+, to support their continued valuable work. If the past year has taught us anything, it is that without one another, there is no light.

Lost and Proud exhibition catalog is available!

Exhibition catalogs for last summer’s Lost and Proud show with the River Valley Arts Collective are now available in print! Thanks to Nori Pao for a beautiful digital design that is now available via the LuLu bookstore.

Lost and Proud was an exhibition featuring work by Liz Collins, Katie Ford, Anne Lindberg, and Laurel Sparks that took place in Newburgh in May 2020. The exhibition was inspired by the historical great Lenore Tawney. We hoped to gather people together for a symposium. This publication became the alternative means for sharing ideas when events were not possible.

Featuring texts by Allyson Baker, Candice Madey, Jennie Goldstein, Shannon Stratton and Karen Patterson.

Thank you to the artists and writers and to the Lenore Tawney Foundation for making this possible!

#rivervalleyartscollective

"cycles of seeing" drawing intervention opens to public July 10 at Manitoga, Garrison, NY

2020 ARTIST RESIDENCY - ANNE LINDBERG

The Artist Residency program was initiated in 2014 to foster creative responses to Manitoga that invoke Russel Wright's legacy of creative experimentation and celebration of place.Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center is pleased to announce year seven with presentations of work by New York based artist Anne Lindberg and British composer Pete M. Wyer. Anne Lindberg’s luminous large-scale drawings cycles of seeing will be installed in the main House beginning July 4 while Wyer will create an immersive sound installation in the landscape this summer as part of his evocative iForest series through September 26. Both works find inspiration in and community with Nature at Manitoga as Russel Wright did from the moment he took stewardship of this sacred land.

cycles of seeing by Anne Lindberg

On view with Tour Participation through November 9, 2020 and during special programs and events. Purchase Tickets at BrownPaperTickets.com beginning June 15, 2020.

At Manitoga, Wright was keenly aware of the seasonal cycle and rhythms of nature, of the daily and often barely perceptible changes in color and light in the landscape and within the house. Nature was the inspiration for Manitoga’s design, and it framed the rituals of every day life here as woodland footpaths followed the arc of the sun and the home’s furnishings and wall panels changed with the turn of season.

In her two-part drawing series cycles of seeing, Lindberg’s palette of thousands of colored parallel lines will transition from cool to warm as summer becomes fall at Manitoga, reflecting concerns of time, sequence and causality. Lindberg’s works unfold at the pace of her step as she pulls lines across a pliant mat board, and she finds context for her work within a long tradition of other “walking artists” including William Wordsworth, Rebecca Solnit, and Virginia Woolf. “Like these artists, philosophers and writers, I use walking as time to encourage a fluid state of perceptions, to contemplate place, and to affect change and adaptation as it informs incremental, moment-to-moment decisions in the making of my work.

”To Lindberg’s list of walking artists, we might add Russel Wright who routinely walked his seventy-five acres of woodlands over many years, observing, mapping and refining Manitoga’s footpaths and trails and placing his house and studio as part of a mindful and orchestrated movement through and dialogue with nature. Lindberg’s deliberate and measured pace informs the scale of her work as Wright’s was the measure of Manitoga.