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  • REVISIONS Amy Berk: Recoverings, Feb-Aug, 2007 Curators Panel

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    Artist Amy Berk rearranged, hand-sewed, and stretched a number of tablecloths and napkins. The stains now look like found drawings. The installation at the Magnes is a response to textiles in the museum's collection.

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    Artist Amy Berk rearranged, hand-sewed, and stretched a number of tablecloths and napkins. The stains now look like found drawings. The installation at the Magnes is a response to textiles in the museum's collection.

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    105 views1 page

    REVISIONS Amy Berk: Recoverings, Feb-Aug, 2007 Curators Panel

    Uploaded by

    magnesmuseum
    Artist Amy Berk rearranged, hand-sewed, and stretched a number of tablecloths and napkins. The stains now look like found drawings. The installation at the Magnes is a response to textiles in the museum's collection.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    Amy Berk inherited several trunks with neatly ironed and folded

    table linens that belonged to her grandmother, a successful Jewish


    immigrant in Brooklyn. Berk’s family lore holds sacred the decades
    of the 1950s and 60s, when the grandmother’s table was a festive
    gathering place for the family and its many guests. In Recoverings,
    Berk rearranged, hand-sewed, and stretched a number of table-
    cloths and napkins to create subtle “canvases,” whose shimmer,
    texture, and newly formed patterns transform the simple textiles—
    usually background for a table service—into subjects of aesthetic
    reflection. The stains now look like found drawings. Starting as
    utilitarian, horizontally oriented objects, the tablecloths have now
    assumed an upright, vertical position on the museum wall.

    Berk’s installation at the Magnes is a response to ceremonial and


    decorative textiles in the museum’s collection, including a Torah
    binder and a festival Kiddush cloth. They are fascinating examples
    of Jewish folk art, bearing elaborate painting and embroidery. But
    the stains they carry equally fascinate: the precise marks of folk
    artists’ hands and involuntary marks created by the people who
    used them are forever entangled, preserved, absorbed by the fabric.
    Amy Berk’s Recoverings come from the tradition where art-making
    is inseparable from living, where the line between sacred and
    profane is threadbare.

    Alla Efimova
    Chief Curator

    REVISIONS is a series of exhibitions at the Magnes in which artists, curators, and scholars are
    invited to create experimental installations inspired by the museum’s permanent collections.

    REVISIONS Amy Berk: Recoverings is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment
    for the Arts, as part of the Challenge America: Reaching Every Community program, with
    matching funds from an anonymous donor.

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