Arts & Culture Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 71) ‘ ‘ I didn’t just look at cloth as clothes — it was something Sheryl Haler : : more. Professor at Ringling College of Art and Design. fiber in the Consumer Science and Human Development Department. That was just another name for Home Economics. Later on though, when I went back to Texas Tech to teach, there was a more serious interest in textiles.” Significantly, the work of well-known women artists such as Judy Chicago, Lenore Tawney and others had begun to change entrenched prejudices. Slowly, feminists made it possible for fabric and fiber to be accepted as materials for important art. Judy Chicago’s painstakingly assembled work, The Dinner Party, 1979, featured elaborate needlework table , runners as place settings, memorializing women ranging from the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut to Americans such as Sojourner Truth and Georgia O’Keeffe. Around the same time, Tawney’s large, unconventional “sculptures” made of linen thread and other woven materials were instrumental in encouraging a revival of fabric art. Today, fabric artists are routinely included in many major exhibitions. Since coming to the Ringling College 16 years ago, Sheryl Haler has displayed her creations in Tampa, Seattle, Augusta, Louisville, and —most recently—Sarasota, at the Peter Paul Gallery on South Palm Avenue. Here, in the January 2008 group show Fabric of Our Lives, Haler presented her most recent achievement, a 76 by 54 inch wallhung, multi-fabric work titled Lady in Red. “It took me six months to make it,” Haler says. “It memorializes a recent trip to Paris with my husband, Tim Rumage, head of the Environmental Studies program at Ringling, and our eight-year-old adopted Chinese daughter, MacKenzie. The work represents an accumulation of memories, a mapping, a slice of my life.” The central portion of Lady in Red consists of a figurative silk toile fabric augmented by a number of small, female heads modeled in black or white wax and attached to the toile. Contrast is provided by a section of black and white patterned oilcloth at the top, and a dramatic red and black wool felt area at the lower left that, Haler says, suggests “organic wrought iron work I saw in Paris.” Another Haler creation, also displayed at the Peter Paul Gallery, was Artifact I, in which an English paisley fabric patterned in brown and beige and decorated with actual stones and a hand-made rawhide rose was employed to evoke a western landscape. “In New Mexico,” the artist says, “the immense expanse of land is now being patterned by subdivisions.” A third work, also evoking a specific place, was Haler’s Amazing Cloth, created after a family trip to Kenya. A black woven cotton dress decorated with beads and other small objects, such as a bone crocodile, reflected, according to the artist, “the joy in living” that she observed among even the poorest Maasai women. Indeed, Haler’s works of depth, significance and beauty are a joy in themselves. LADY IN RED above www.artsandculturemag.com shaler@ringling.edu arts and culture magazine : : 71 http://www.artsandculturemag.com
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