Reiko Sudo’s Japanese textile art on view at Messiah College
November 17th, 2008
GRANTHAM, Pa. (Nov. 17, 2008) — Since the 1980s, Japan has been at the forefront of textile innovation combining ancient traditional craft and legacy with ultramodern technology to create commercially viable and enchanting works of fabric art. On view Dec. 5-18 and again Jan. 7-28, the Aughinbaugh Art Gallery at Messiah College will display 20 of these dazzling textiles in the exhibition “Re-Weaving Tradition,” Japanese Textiles from artist Reiko Sudo of the Japanese company Nuno. All displays, on view during normal gallery hours, are free and open to the public. The Aughinbaugh Art Gallery is located on the lower level of Climenhaga Fine Arts Center on the college’s Grantham campus.
About Reiko Sudo
Nuno, the Japanese word for fabric, is centered around the idea of being inspired by encounters with the everyday world. Sudo and the other artists at Nuno create masterpieces with simple materials such as feathers, nails, paper and copper. She also uses natural fibers, ordinary objects and unique materials and weaves them with innovative and modern techniques to create astonishing fabrics. The fabrics are not mass-produced commercial products, being closer to traditional hand-looming in their quality, but are industrially milled which keeps prices affordable.
Highlights of this exhibition include a pleated and folded fabric inspired by the ancient Japanese art of origami; a fabric made of fine slivers, or “slit yarns,” of washi handmade paper woven between layers of silk; and a “Red Cloth” which combines cotton and copper to create textural qualities through the interplay between the hard metal and the softer more organic materials.
Sudo’s and Nuno’s fabrics are represented in the collections of major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and museums around the world.
About Aughinbaugh Art Gallery
Located on the lower level of the Climenhaga Fine Arts Center on Messiah College’s Grantham campus, the M. Louise Aughinbaugh Art Gallery exhibits the work of internationally recognized artists from around the world, as well as faculty and students. Gallery programming supplements campus classroom instruction by bringing practicing artists to campus to demonstrate techniques in classes and by organizing special evening lectures and afternoon gallery talks. The gallery also functions as a hands-on teaching laboratory for students in the college’s course on museum studies. Aughinbaugh Art Gallery is open Mondays through Thursdays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; on Fridays from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and on Saturdays and Sundays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
About Messiah College
Messiah College, a private Christian college of the liberal and applied arts and sciences, enrolls 2,800 undergraduate students in more than 60 majors. Established in 1909, the primary campus is located in Grantham, Pa., near the state capital of Harrisburg. A satellite campus affiliated with Temple University is located in Philadelphia.
