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

WOVEN ABSTRACTIONS
Anne Lindberg, Marela Zacarías, and Ria Bosman
June 20 - July 19, 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 July 19, 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

Thread by Thread: Anne Lindberg and Piper Shepard at the Academy Art Museum, The Talbot Spy by Val Cavalheri, May 28, 2025

Thread by Thread: Anne Lindberg and Piper Shepard at the Academy

May 28, 2025 by Val Cavalheri

It started in 1986 in a tight-knit fiber cohort at Cranbrook Academy of Art. That’s where Anne Lindberg and Piper Shepard first met—two young artists drawn to textile, space, and the possibilities of working with their hands. Nearly forty years later, they’re showing side-by-side at the Academy Art Museum (AAM) in Easton. Their solo exhibitions, seen and unseen by Lindberg and Fields, Voids, and Translations: Works on Paper and Textiles by Shepard, occupy separate spaces but feel in conversation—with each other, with the building, and with those stopping by to look.

“When I came to the museum last fall,” said Lindberg, “I was encouraged to make the project in a fairly narrow, two-story space at the north end of the museum. And so it became quickly apparent to me that if I built something in that space, you would see part of it on the first floor, and you would need to go to the second floor to see the rest of it. So quite literally, it’s seen and unseen.”

seen, 2025 graphite, Flashe, acrylic and colored pencil on mat board 60 x 70 inches by Anne Lindberg

Her installation consists of thousands of fine chromatic threads stretched from wall to wall, forming a diaphanous field of color. From a distance, it looks like light or film. “Lots of questions come about,” she said. “Is this light? Is this paint? What is it? And eventually, you do discover what it is and what it might mean to you.”

The same rhythm lives in Lindberg’s graphite drawings. “There are thousands of lines tightly stacked together,” she said. “My arm is moving from one side of the board to the other. So it’s almost as if each of those lines is a breath. They often take me more than one breath, but they’re an expression. And then I lift the pencil, return to the start point again, and carry on with another one.” She describes it as rhythmic, paced, and slow. “We’re also aware when we breathe—of a big breath or a short breath. So the metaphor of the breath makes a lot of sense to me.”

Like Shepard, Lindberg is interested in how a viewer first encounters the work with their body. “The drawings and thread installations greet you through your gut first, your physiology. And then maybe later you start asking analytical questions—what am I looking at?”

That physical, sensory entry point is something both artists lean into, even if their methods differ.  For Shepard, it begins with familiar material. “There’s something so accessible about textile,” Shepard said. “We all know it so well—we wear it every day. So that ubiquity, that accessibility, allows me to connect with the audience.”

Shepherd’s panels—some as tall as a doorway—are hand-cut with surgical precision. “It’s a subtractive process,” she said. “Yet at the same time, I’m making a work that becomes present through what’s taken away.” Cutouts become lace, and lace becomes architecture. “I’m working with the kind of in-between space of light and shadow, of presence and absence, of the haptic and the optic.”

Once the form is complete, she adds a layer of graphite. “I start with drawing in order to create the imagery or the pattern that I’m making,” she said. “Then, by layering it with graphite, it’s the suspended drawing in space you’re experiencing.”

Thicket, 2023, 13’ x 10’, handout muslin, gesso, graphite, aluminum armature by Piper Shepard

Although both artists were trained in fiber, they have since moved beyond their traditions. “We’re making work with textile materials or in textile ways,” said Lindberg, “but not in traditional ways.” She sees this exhibit as part of a larger shift: “The place of textiles in contemporary art has changed, certainly in the time that we’ve made work. We’ve watched that change, and that’s been rewarding and exciting.”Their shared history makes the exhibit feel like more than just a pairing. “We’ve been in conversation since graduate school,” Shepard said. “Even if we weren’t in the same place, we’ve always been talking. There’s just a long-standing dialogue between our work.”

Besides the dialogue, they’ve also collaborated formally in the past—at the Kansas City Art Institute, where they both taught in the ’90s, and later on exhibitions that combined Shepard’s textile printing with Lindberg’s printmaking. One early piece involved a sculptural base and three large textiles. “The middle one we worked on together,” said Lindberg. “Piper made one, I made one, and the third we made together.” In another collaboration, they used cameras to photograph landscapes, then each transformed the imagery into large-scale environmental work—Shepard through silk screen printing and Lindberg through carved wood.

Even now, they still approach space the same way. “How do we want people to experience the work?” Shepard said. “How do they move through it? How does the architecture shape their experience?” That kind of thinking, she added, “has been a part of our conversation since 1986.”

It’s also a part of their lineage. Their mentor at Cranbrook, Gerhardt Knodel, urged them to think about textiles on a larger scale. “He understood that textiles can have an impact at scale,” Lindberg said. “They don’t have to be intimate. They can be architectural.” She referenced historical examples like the “wild man tapestries” that stretched across castle walls. “He showed us those and said, ‘You can work this way.’”

That respect for size and for the women in the field who shaped it continues to ground both artists. “We had really strong women role models,” said Shepard. “Olga de Amaral, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Joyce Scott, Anni Albers—people who believed in textile as a serious form. I’m forever grateful.”

For Shepard, Anni Albers remains a constant touchstone. “She was the first textile artist to have a solo show at MoMA,” she said. “She wrote an essay in 1957—The Pliable Plane—and it’s still one of the most important texts for anyone thinking about textile and architecture,” Lindberg added that even the campus of Cranbrook was steeped in that legacy. “It was designed by Eliel Saarinen,” she said. “And his wife, Loja, was a weaver. Her work is everywhere—on the walls, under the windows, in the chapel. We were encouraged to sit under it, touch it, and be around it. It was part of our education.”

Their exhibitions in Easton may be solo shows, but the friendship is threaded through both. “We don’t see each other as often these days,” said Lindberg, who lives in the Hudson Valley. Shepard is based in Baltimore. But their work remains in conversation—on the walls, in the air, and across the space between.

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Lindberg: seen and unseen runs through Fall 2026
Shepard: Fields, Voids, and Translations runs through October 12, 2025
Academy Art Museum

Both exhibitions are located at the Academy Art Museum, 106 South Street, Easton, Maryland. For more information, visit academyartmuseum.org.

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.

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.