Saskatoon’s Remai Modern gallery strives to exhibit Rising Sun. The 1985 tapestry by Finnish-Canadian artist Kaija Sanelma Harris is nearly four meters high and 20 meters wide, designed to hang in the lobby of a huge bank. It was woven into 24 panels, and the Remai’s had to build false walls in two corners of a large gallery so that the tapestry, an abstract Canadian landscape, could flow around the room.

The work was designed for the modernist towers of Toronto’s TD Center, but in 1990 the bank and developer Cadillac Fairview wanted to freshen up the art on display. Cadillac Fairview donated the tapestry to the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, which has only exhibited it in its entirety once, in 2023-2024. The Remai borrowed Rising Sun for an ongoing retrospective devoted to Harris, who died in 2022. She was once a major Canadian artist and a leader in the Prairie craft community, but her innovative weaving had been forgotten when textile wall hangings, so popular in the 1960s and 1970, fell out of favor.

The installation of Rising Sun marks an important revival: in the world of museums, textiles are in vogue, sought after by curators seeking to rediscover the artists, mainly women, who made them.

“At a time when everyone was interested in big monumental painting and people weren’t really thinking about gender equality in the arts, these works were pushed aside,” said Remai curator, Michelle Jacques. “Now that we realize that we have a responsibility to all our art histories, we will rediscover these things with a more open eye.”

Art museums are seeking to rebalance collections dominated by male works, providing the initial impetus for this renaissance. Textiles, historically and today, are made primarily by women – and therefore have often been relegated to the realm of crafts rather than fine art.

Harris designed large collectible tapestries whose role was aesthetic, but she also made money weaving blankets, shawls, and placemats. Women’s functional work in textiles dates back centuries, but the names of weavers, seamstresses and quilters are often lost to time. The Royal Ontario Museum is currently exhibiting some quilts made by Canadian settlers in the 19th century.

Sometimes the creators are known – because their descendants donated their works to the ROM – but sometimes curators can only guess who made a quilt. One piece in the collection, made in Ontario around 1880, features 8,000 distinct triangles of fabric, leading the ROM to speculate that many hands produced this complex grid of changing patterns.

Although quilts, often made by the bride, were an opportunity to show off her skills, they were assembled from scraps of discarded clothing and can sometimes be dated by the fabrics that appear on them. Combining frugality and beauty, they reflect a reuse-recycle philosophy with contemporary charm.

A household might have hung a quilt over the back of a sofa to impress guests, but the pieces were above all practical, designed to keep the bed warm. It was in the mid-20th century that textiles found their non-functional role, in the canon of modernist art.

An exhibition about to open at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa will cover this area, combining paintings, sculptures and photographs with weaving, basketry and fashion. Curator Lynne Cooke, who organized the exhibition for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, says woven textiles were as important a medium as painting or sculpture in the years after World War II.

For example, she compares the fiber works of the American Lenore Tawney with the grid paintings of the Canadian-American abstractionist Agnes Martin. She points out that the American weaver Sheila Hicks, late recognized as a major contemporary artist, studied with the great modernist professor Josef Albers at Yale, alongside the German-American sculptor Eva Hesse: A woman chose fiber as her medium; the other made of plastic and fiberglass.

“The history of modernism cannot be written without reference to the history of textiles,” Cooke said.

These artists appreciated the materiality of textiles and could use them to create abstract forms as effectively as any painter or sculptor could with their medium. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, second-wave feminists used textiles for different reasons, seeking to revive or elevate traditional domestic crafts. Canadian artist Joyce Wieland was a pioneer of this movement, introducing quilting into her work in the 1960s.

“She embraced women’s work that had been neglected,” said Anne Grace, a curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where a Wieland retrospective opens in February. Grace highlights certain aspects of quilting that appealed to Wieland because they circumvented the art market and the cult of the solitary male genius: Historically, quilting involved no payment or profit and was often done communally. Wieland, who had started quilting to help her sister, had scrupulously acknowledged her own helpers when she displayed her work as art.

The distinction between art and craft is Western; The Woven Stories exhibition presents Japanese basketry – itself a form of weaving – from a society that transforms its best artisans into important cultural figures. Thus, the renewed interest is also driven by the desire to expand the canon beyond the West.

The Art Gallery of Ontario is currently exhibiting large-scale wall hangings by Filipino artist Pacita Abad, who died in 2004. A world traveler, she lived in the United States for a time, but was not previously identified only as an Asian artist: The exhibition is the first major retrospective in North America and marks a first (posthumously) in Canada.

Abad had developed his own version of trapuntoa technique of embroidery on a painted surface, by sewing and stuffing its canvases by hand. Colorful draperies reach to double-height ceilings and every square inch is covered. The images include abstract patterns, portraits of immigrant workers in the United States, exotic underwater scenes and even a risky satire of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. AGO curator Renée van der avoird associates Abad’s maximalist style with the Global South.

“The work is incredibly powerful in terms of scale and composition. It resonates strongly today because of its feminist and anti-colonial aspects. She has always been political,” she said. “It’s exciting to see a woman of color taking up space as an act of defiance.”

Once this wave of focused exhibitions passes, museums may be more likely to exhibit textiles alongside collections of painting and sculpture, as the example of Woven Histories suggests. Paradoxically, it is the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto that has taken a big step in this direction: its current exhibition, Beyond the Vanishing Maya, presents Mayan art in multiple media. To demonstrate how contemporary Mayan artists are influenced by traditional forms, guest curator Diego Ventura Puac-Coyoy paired his family’s collection of local paintings dating from the 1980s to the present, with the museum’s textiles dating from the mid-20th century. as well as some loans, including ancient Mayan ceramics from the Gardiner Museum.

“The museum’s priority right now is to work with communities that have a direct connection to our collection: we have more than 500 pieces of Guatemalan textiles,” said chief curator Armando Perla, explaining that the indigenous community of Puac -Coyoy in Chichicastenango, about 150 kilometers northwest of Guatemala City, wanted recent art to be seen.

The exhibition includes many works by both men and women – in Mayan culture only men used looms and, once painting was introduced by Spanish colonizers, this was forbidden to women – and some works by queer artists. Juan Jose Guillen creates an elaborate altar for a local saint that includes crochet work from his mother, positioning the tradition of covering crosses with cruciform robes as a form of drag.

Yet textiles and fiber arts remain strongly associated with women. When Workman Arts, Toronto’s multidisciplinary group dedicated to mental health issues, offered a weaving class to members working in other media, the candidates were all women. They found their workshops meditative and constructive, said curator Fatma Hendawy: unlike the abstract work of modernist weavers, she believes there is a strong connection between textile work and narrative. The sewing circle or quilting bee was where women exchanged stories and gossip. Today, Hendawy believes that the common thread of storytelling is tightly woven into any textile we admire. “A century ago we saw a perfectly woven Persian or Turkish rug and were simply amazed by a perfect product. Now it is no longer just an aesthetic object; we are aware of the process behind this. Now we want the stories.

Textile exhibitions in Canada

Right now

Kaija Sanelma Harris: Warp & Weft, a retrospective dedicated to the Finnish-Canadian weaver, continues at Remai Modern in Saskatoon until March 9. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Saskatchewan Craft Council, part of which is on display in the council’s main floor gallery until March 9. February 8.

Quilts: Made in Canada, an exhibition of historic and contemporary quilts, is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto until November 17, with plans for a national tour to follow.

Pacita Abad, the Filipino artist’s first major North American retrospective, continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto until January 19.

Beyond the Vanishing Maya: Voices of a Land in Resistance, a multimedia exhibition of historical and contemporary Maya art, continues at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto until March 28.

Opening soon

The Looms We Resemble, an exhibition of works by contemporary Toronto artists integrating weaving into their usual media, runs from November 3 to December 9 as part of Rendezvous with Madness, a mental health festival at Workman Arts. At Youngplace Hallway Galleries, 180 Shaw St., Toronto.

Woven Stories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, which explores the connection between weaving and other media, opens at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa on November 8 and runs until March 2.

Joyce Wieland: Heart On, a retrospective of the work of the Canadian multimedia artist from the 1960s and 1980s, renowned for her quilts, is presented at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from February 8 to May 4, before being opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in June. 21.