You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry is at once a celebration of the genre and a categorical collapse, offering extended engagement with tapestry while magnifying how its contemporary practitioners are challenging the material, ideological, and narrative conventions of the age-old medium. Across works by thirty artists, the exhibition suggests tapestry as an active inflection point for unresolved inquiries into the human condition, including notions of authenticity, durational effort in the face of technological efficiency, and depictions of vastness and omniscience in physical form. The tapestries here move beyond the rigid ethnographic categorizations that have often guided the presentation of textile in institutional settings, instead reflecting circulations of people, materials, plants, and trade colors, both native and not, and identities that are temporary and contentious, or even unverifiable.

Taking its title from a letter written by Kafka, in which he imagines his father’s presence woven across a map of the world, “You Stretched Diagonally Across It” depends, like the pieces that compel it, on exceeding fixed latitudes and boundaries – between art and craft, perception and tactility, and tradition and improvisation – even to the point of unraveling. A tapestry, as posited by guest curator Su Wu, is an object in which the image and its substrate are co-arising, in a medium that often makes of gesture a devotion. In our screen-mediated contemporary moment, the exhibition offers tapestry as uniquely situated to reconsider material and temporal significance – whether it matters what our myths are made of – and the relationship between surfaces and the structures that comprise them.