Mary Zicafoose

Mary Zicafoose is an American textile artist, weaver, and teacher who specializes in ikat, an ancient technique in which threads are wrapped, tied and resist-dyed before weaving. Zicafoose is the author of Ikat: The Essential Handbook to Weaving Resist-Dyed Cloth. Zicafoose studied photography During this time, she worked in clay She credits the "generosity, patience, and honed skills" of members of the Handweavers Guild of Lincoln, Nebraska, in helping her to learn her craft. Zicafoose has also traveled internationally and studied the traditions of ikat work in different countries.

Many of her early works were rugs. In 1984 she began working with a loom. Later she began using a Macomber loom. As of 2004, her two working looms were a Macomber and a Cranbrook.

Zicafoose is known for making extremely large pieces of weft-face ikat, which can be many feet in length. A piece woven of silk thread might require 80,000 ikat ties, each of which must be wrapped, tied, and then untied again after dyeing.

She began The Blueprint Series during a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, in 2008. Zicafoose considered fingerprints as universal indicators of personal identity. She wove an edition of seven Blue Print tapestries. The final Blue Print #7 presents two fingerprints next to each other across three panels. The triptych used 68,000 ikat ties and took three months to wrap. Zicafoose made three versions of this triptych, two using silk and another using wool.

Her paired pieces Hope & Healing, each larger than , used 1,000 skeins of yarn and took nearly a year to create. They hang together in the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center of the University of Nebraska Medical Center. The pieces include the words for hope and healing in 16 different languages.

Zicafoose describes cloth as "a manuscript, a woven surface encoded with visual symbols". She often creates series of tapestries, carpets, and prints which explore aspects of a theme. Her collections include Ancient Texts, Blue Prints, Grasslands, Mountain for the Buddha, New Dreams, Sun Signs, Fault Lines, and The Blueprint Series.

The artist sees her work as a process of creation as well as a transmission of cultural record to future generations: #8 (2010), curated by Rebecca Stevens; and #9 (2013), juried by Lee Talbot.

As part of the United States Art in Embassies Program, her works are included in the permanent and lending collections of at least 16 embassies, particularly those whose countries have strong weaving traditions. These include Baku, Azerbaijan, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Yemen.

Zicafoose also produces collagraphic monoprints of works.

Teaching and writing

Zicafoose speaks and teaches extensively, at venues including the de Young Museum, the Penland School of Craft, and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, as well as at conferences and workshops. She is described as a "generous teacher" who encourages her students to "trust the process".

Zicafoose is the author of Ikat: The Essential Handbook to Weaving Resist-Dyed Cloth (2020), in which she both technical and cultural knowledge. The illustrated book provides detailed instruction in techniques and appropriate tools for warp, weft, and double ikat. The projects are organized to sequentially to build upon each other, with technical instructions interspersed with essays on the cultural context of ikat fabric as it is made in Guatemala, Indonesia, India, Mexico and Uzbekistan.

Community Zicafoose has served on the boards of GoodWeave, an international organization combating the exploitation of child workers; the Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln; and the Union for Contemporary Art in North Omaha, Nebraska, among others. She has also been co-director of the American Tapestry Alliance.