Volume Gallery is delighted to share that Christy Matson’s solo exhibition, Currents 38: Christy Matson, will be on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum from February 25 to July 17, 2022.

Currents 38: Christy Matson presents woven works of art that pair new technologies with centuries-old craft knowledge to create distinctive, painterly compositions. On view in the Museum’s Bradley Family Gallery, the exhibition features more than 40 woven objects by the Los Angeles-based artist who has helped reshape the traditional medium of weaving into a contemporary art form.

Though Matson (b. 1979) works with textiles, the artist views herself as a painter. Using a digital jacquard loom and her knowledge of historic weaving techniques, Matson creates woven pictures that are rooted in minimalism, abstraction, and decoration and are intended to hang on the wall. She also utilizes these weaving structures and techniques to explore memory; the gendered history of textile production, long considered a feminized form of labor; and issues around sustainability. Her work honors the traditional medium while reflecting the strong, recent embrace of fiber by contemporary artists. More about the exhibition here.

On March 5th, Chicago’s Volume Gallery will open a solo show dedicated to pioneering Swiss-American textile artist Françoise Grossen. Since the 1960s, Grossen has been experimenting with textile techniques and industrial materials to create large-scale installations. Her work can be found in international collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Museum of Arts and Design, Museum Bellerive, Renwick Gallery Smithsonian Institution, and the State Hermitage Museum, among many others. This don’t-miss show runs through April 23rd. View Design Miami’s roundup of design world news here.

After a year-long hiatus, Frieze Los Angeles opened on Thursday, offering the usual mix of international galleries and local spaces alongside less expected programming, such as a dedicated space for social justice. As part of a collaboration with artist Tanya Aguiñiga, ten BIPOC-led art and advocacy organizations from across the city gathered at the fair for a BIPOC Exchange, a program of performance, installation, and education that will span the run of the fair, which closes on Sunday. “Visitors will be expecting a certain kind of art, and instead find us,” Aguiñiga said in an interview.

When Aguiñiga spoke with ARTnews, she was en route to the Wilshire Garden inside the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where the BIPOC Exchange is located. The space comprises booths and an area for performances designated by a stage of flowers—which the artists believes make the space more accessible than a raised platform, she said. Trees transplanted from a nearby nursery are scattered throughout. The flowers she picked up from florists herself, temporarily transforming her car into a movable meadow. Read the full interview here.

The Los Angeles artist and activist Tanya Aguiñiga has brought together several artist-led projects across different disciplines for a special section at the fair.

Ahead of Frieze this year, the director Christine Messineo approached Tanya Aguiñiga, the Los Angeles artist and activist, about creating a project to coincide with the fair. “I had the idea to search for different Bipoc, artist-led projects across different disciplines,” Aguiñiga says. “I wanted to organise something that was really expansive in the way that we think about art, and the ways that art can address the most pressing issues in our city.”

With the support of Santa Barbara’s Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Aguiñiga created the BIPOC Exchange, a community-centric space in a garden adjacent to Frieze’s venue, the Beverly Hilton Hotel. There, for the duration of the fair, ten organisations are raising money for, and awareness of, various artistic pursuits throughout Los Angeles. For each, art might provide a means of financial support: the People’s Pottery Project, for example, puts the proceeds from selling ceramics toward job training and placements for formerly incarcerated women, trans and non-binary people. Read the full article here.

The Felix LA Art Fair returned to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel this week for its third full-scale edition, after a slimmed-down one last summer that featured mostly hometown galleries. An international selection of 60 galleries was split between ground-floor cabana suites surrounding a David Hockney–painted pool, and hotel rooms on the 11th and 12th floors, harkening back to an earlier generation of hotel fairs before the rise of the current global art fair circuit.

L.A.-based artist Tanya Aguiñiga grew up in Tijuana and San Diego, and much of her practice—in particular her ongoing project AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), which seeks to address issues related to communities along the U.S.-Mexico border—relates to the duality of border life. Her textile sculptures and wall works have their basis in traditional Mexican weaving but are also in dialogue with fiber artists like Sheila Hicks. They also incorporate the border, sometimes quite literally, as with Corazón Fronterizo (Border Heart), 2021, which includes a real fragment of the fence dividing the U.S. and Mexico woven into the piece’s rope and terracotta lattice. Read the article here.

A highlight for Frieze Los Angeles 2022 is a collaboration with Tanya Aguiñiga to present BIPOC Exchange.

This communal space, located within The Beverly Hilton Hotel, inside the Wilshire Garden, will present 10 Los Angeles-based, artist-led social impact projects including People’s Pottery Project, Tierra Del Sol, AMBOS, Las Fotos Project, Classroom of Compassion, Tequio Youth/MICOP, Contra Tiempo, GYOPO, Los Angeles Poverty Department, and Urban Voices Project.

Watch the artists talk about community empowerment ahead of Aguiñiga’s BIPOC Exchange project at Frieze Los Angeles 2022 here.

After a two-year hiatus, Frieze Los Angeles is back. Tickets are already sold out, but even if the admission prices are beyond your price range, the art fair has opened another avenue to enjoy a taste of L.A.’s cultural riches: the BIPOC Exchange.

Set up in a garden area inside the Beverly Hilton hotel, the BIPOC Exchange features 10 organizations handpicked by artist Tanya Aguiñiga. Her artistic practice empowering communities especially at the border made her a natural choice for the daunting task of winnowing down L.A.’s multitude of artist-led projects serving our society. Visitors can expect performances, workshops, but also items available for purchase. Profits will go towards the advocacies of the organizations.

KCET asked Aguiñiga about how she made her selection and her views on the role of art in communities. Read the full interview here.

“There are certain techniques that take an entire lifetime to learn,” says Christy Matson, who for the past two decades has been working as a fiber artist. Matson’s practice blends thousand-year-old weaving traditions with 21st-century innovation. She designs her textiles through Photoshop, then weaves them by hand on a Jacquard loom that tracks her progress on a computer. The works, she says, exist between an “analog, physical version of life and this sort of hybrid space of being online.” Read the full portrait of the artist here.

The dawn of a new year feels like the perfect opportunity to scan the design landscape for standout forms, materials, and approaches. In our new series The Edge, Design Miami/Editors spotlight contemporary objects that define our current moment.

New York designer Sam Stewart similarly specializes in creating witty and well considered objects that lend tons of personality to their surroundings. His new, uncharacteristically demure Lamellae Lamp is an understated beauty and quite the conversation piece. Produced in collaboration with expert New York tailor Victoria Yee Howe, it’s composed of intricately hand-pleated, hand-stitched raw muslin—nearly 18 yard per lamp—layered over a hidden steel structure. So simple, so elegant. The warming glow emanating from its exquisite folds has a welcoming, comforting effect. View The Edge’s selections here.