Lenore Tawney

Lenore Tawney (born Leonora Agnes Gallagher; May 10, 1907 – September 24, 2007) was an American artist working in fiber art, collage, assemblage, and drawing. She is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive. Tawney was born and raised in an Irish-American family in Lorain, Ohio near Cleveland and later moved to Chicago to start her career. In the 1970s Tawney focused increasingly on her spirituality, In 1927, she left home at age 20 to move to Chicago, where she worked as a proofreader for a publisher of court opinions. Tawney's introduction to the tenets of the German Bauhaus school and the artistic avant-garde began in 1946 when she attended László Moholy-Nagy's Chicago Institute of Design. Soon after, she began experimenting with new fiber techniques and color palettes in her weaving and creating her own designs. While working on this series, Tawney's color palette transitioned to blacks, whites, and neutrals.

Tawney made assemblages in a variety of forms from sculptures to box constructions, and chests. The artist was commissioned to create a piece for the Federal Building in Santa Rosa, California. There was currently a drought in California and Tawney was inspired to make a cloud. The cloud was made of a canvas support that had thousands of linen threads tied and cascading down into space. The canvas was then attached to a grid structure above. She created the foundation with the goals of making the visual arts more accessible and to create opportunities for emerging artists. "The first hundred years", she said with a smile on her hundredth birthday, "were the hardest." thumb

Legacy Tawney's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou. Her work was also included in the exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2019 through 2022. Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Public collections Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York, NY Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT

Public commissions 1957, North Shore Shopping Center, Marshall Fields and Company, Chicago, IL. Nativity in Nature, 1960, Chapel of the Inter-Church Center, New York, NY. Ark Veil, 1963, Congregation Solel, Highlands Park, IL. Cloud Series IV, 1978, Santa Rosa Federal Building, Santa Rosa, CA. Cloud Series VI, 1981, Frank J. Lausche State Office Building, Cleveland, OH. Cloud Series VII, 1983, Western Connecticut State University, Danbury, CT.