D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc. is pleased to announce Abstraction in Fiber and Paint, 1976-1989, focused on seven women rethinking fine art and craft. This exhibition of twenty works looks at both painters who use or reference fabric and fiber artists who work in painterly ways. This exhibition is anchored by Miriam Schapiro, a leader of Feminist Art and the Pattern & Decoration group (P&D). Abstraction is used as a universal language and a means to explore color by these artists. In the 1970s, bringing craft into fine art was a feminist statement to acknowledge centuries of anonymous women’s work. Our seven artists looked back and forward in time, embracing craft and nature while using computers or algorithms to achieve their vision. They embraced the plurality of materials and content seen in contemporary art today.   Painters Miriam Schapiro, Gloria Klein, and Dee Shapiro were all identified with the Pattern and Decoration (P&D) group. They contributed to the feminist art publication Heresies and were included in Pattern Painting at PS 1 (now part of MoMA) in 1977. Fiber artists Cynthia Schira, Sherri Smith, Kris Dey, and Diane Itter used paint and color when the prevailing style used neutral, coarse fibers. Smith was in MoMA’s first fiber art exhibition Wall Hangings in 1969 and Dey was included in the follow-up Wall Hangings: The New Classicism in 1977. Our fiber artists were all in The Art Fabric: Mainstream, a 1981 exhibition and catalogue by Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen. It identified 125 international artists key to fiber art and opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art then traveled to nine other museums.    This exhibition is our first to include artists of the 1980s. It continues our aim to identify moments when new materials or techniques advance art forward. The fiber art in this exhibition is a natural follow-up to the stained and Op paintings in the 1960s that resulted from the hard edge or flow achieved with new acrylic paints.   The gallery has shown the influence of Bauhaus artist Josef Albers’ color theory on generations of artists. In this exhibition, we note the importance of Anni Albers and her 1965 book on weaving which introduced a new generation to her Black Mountain College teachings. Anni Albers encouraged her students to experiment with the interaction between medium and process that leads to form. This set up textile work to develop into its own art form in the 1960s called fiber art.   There are crosscurrents between our fiber artists and the P&D post-modern painters. They all looked globally and historically for decorative patterns to use in their art, especially pre-industrial textiles of Africa, Asia, Indonesia, and the Americas, particularly Peruvian textiles and American quilts.    Current exhibitions that confirm our interest in this period include Subversive, Skilled, Sublime: Fiber Art by Women (Smithsonian American Art Museum, May 31, 2024 – January 5, 2025, will include Cynthia Schira); Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 17 - July 28, 2024); and Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 5 - June 16, 2024). With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (MOCA, Los Angeles, 2019-2020 and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, 2021) included Diane Itter, Gloria Klein, Miriam Schapiro, and Dee Shapiro.