In Françoise Grossen, A Hint that Macrame Holds the Secret to Post-Sixties Art

THE DAILY PIC (#1710): Macrame is the secret. Until we understand what knotted hangings have meant – as high art, as craft and as popular culture—we won’t really understand the roots of our art in the 1960s. How many people know that MoMA—maligned as the home of teleological modern abstraction—actually had a show of such hangings in 1970?

I learned that fact on a recent visit to the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, in its micro-survey of pioneering textile artist Françoise Grossen. I felt like her show held the key to a forgotten part of our history. Now all I have to do is find the lock that key fits. (Above, a detail from Grossen’s Contact III (1977), photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com, courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe; below, the entire piece in a photo by Butcher Walsh, courtesy the Museum of Arts and Design)

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