Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction reveals the links between the textile 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. Woven Histories suggests that not only ideas but materials are crucial to its understanding and success.

“Threads were among the earliest transmitters of meaning,” the artist Anni Albers wrote in 1965. Spanning early-20th-century, mid-century and contemporary works, 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: Textiles and Modern Abstraction argues that weaving and textiles are the quintessential link between lived experience and art.