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kindly on ideas of beauty. “Gertrude Stein said
that to call a work of art beautiful means that
it is dead,” wrote philosopher and critic Susan
Sontag (1933-2004), explaining that “beautiful
has come to mean ‘merely’ beautiful: there is no
more vapid or philistine compliment.”5 Sontag’s
own definition of the word described “a glad-
ness of the senses,” seemingly something felt as
much as understood.6
This embodied understanding of beauty con-
nects to craft, another kind of knowledge that
lives within the body as much as in the intellect.
Kay Sekimachi’s linen Study for Crossed-Warp
Effect,1980s (pp. 98-99) encapsulates this idea.
Now 99 years old, this groundbreaking fiber artist
rose to prominence in the post-World War II era,
informed by her early encounters with Bauhaus
weaving approaches. Her work has often focused
on the double weave’s possibilities pushing it into
new territories of innovation. This woven study is
a window into the artist’s elegant mind and her
command of the loom. It is a four-layer continu-
ous-weft weave and crossed warp structure made
on an eight-harness loom—a plan for Sekimachi’s
able hands to miraculously weave four layers of
fabric at once. Intertwining color and volume with
exquisite precision, the artist’s early training has
led to a lifetime of quietly radical invention.
A different set of talents inform Neha Puri Dhir
whose in-depth understanding of stitch-resist
Shibori has resulted in Luster of Time, 2023 (pp.
30-31). Puri Dhir’s achievement in balance—ma-
terial, color, surface—is made possible by her
craft: stitching the handwoven silk, applying
dyes and discharge, and finally, realizing the final
textile. Like humans, textiles hold memory. Folds
and perforations left by the process become
rhythmic patterns that radiate from the deepest
blue indigo into emeralds and golds suggesting
both the wisdom earned with age and a cosmic
dimension of deep time.
Born in Australia, raised in Nigeria, and now work-
ing in the United States, today Nnenna Okore
uses bioplastics as a primary material in her work.
However, her present ideas around material trans-
formation took root in earlier works like White
Cowries, 2010 (pp. 84-85) and Vogue, 2009 (pp.
82-83). Okore spent a year as an apprentice in El
Anatsui’s studio in Nigeria, an artist who trans-
forms thousands of throwaway metal bottle caps,
tops, and fragments into dazzling tapestries that
simultaneously confront the effects of the transat-
lantic slave trade and affirm the majesty of West
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