Meet the artists who are redefining the tradition of knit and crochet, bringing yarn out of the house and into the world. Reinventing our relationship with this colorful tradition, Yarn weaves together wool graffiti artists, circus performers, and structural designers into a visually-striking look at the women who are making a creative stance while building one of modern art's hottest trends:
Olek
A loop after a loop. Hour after hour my madness becomes crochet. Life and art are inseparable. The movies I watch while crocheting influence my work, and my work dictates the films I select. I crochet everything that enters my space. Sometimes it’s a text message, a medical report, found objects. There is the unraveling, the ephemeral part of my work that never lets me forget about the limited life of the art object and art concept. What do I intend to reveal? You have to pull the end of the yarn and unravel the story behind the crochet.
My work changes from place to place. I studied the science of culture. With a miner’s work ethic, I long to delve deeper and deeper into my investigations. My art was a development that took me away from industrial, close-minded Silesia, Poland. It has always sought to bring color and life, energy, and surprise to the living space. My goal is to produce new work and share it with the public. I intend to take advantage of living in NYC with various neighborhoods and, with my actions, create a feedback to the economic and social reality in our community.
Tilde Björfors & Cirkus Cirkör
Cirkus Cirkör started when Tilde Björfors and some artists went to Paris and fell in love with the possibilities that the contemporary circus offered. They decided to stop dreaming big and living small and instead give their all to make reality of their dreams.
Twenty years later more that 2 million people have seen a Circus Cirkör show on stage and in festivals around the world. 400,000 children and youth have trained, created and been taught with contemporary circus. Contemporary circus is now an established art form in Sweden. You will find the circus in all sorts of places–from pre-schools to Universities and in homes for the elderly.
Tinna Þórudóttir Þorvaldsdóttir
Tinna, from Iceland is part of the world of ‘yarnbombing’ or ‘yarnstorming’, which is street art mixed with knitting. There is an International Yarnstorming Day in the first weekend of June, where groups around the world ‘bomb’ their towns and cities–with yarn covering statues, trees, anything in the public space–to reclaim public space through knitting.
Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam & NetPlayWorks
The genesis of these structures is Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam’s explorations as a textile artist and researcher dating back to the 1970s. The first public project, however, was for a national park in southern Japan in 1979. This was followed by a commission from an art museum in Japan for a sculpture children could not just look at but touch, play with and experience through all the senses.
In 1990 Toshiko and her husband Charles MacAdam established Interplay Design and Manufacturing, Inc in Nova Scotia, Canada, to develop the concept of play ‘sculptures’ on a commercial footing, beginning with a project for a national park located in Tokyo. The children’s park-within-a-park of which it is one of the principal features won a national design award in 1992. Eighteen years later this project still delights and entertains large numbers of children just as it did almost a generation ago.
The structures are strong as well as beautiful utilizing specially constructed net which is resilient and responsive to the slightest movement. Their innovative design allows tension to be maintained as the fibre stretches thereby enabling children to play safely. Each project is engineered by Norihide Imagawa, one of Japan’s pre-eminent structural designers.
Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver's work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. She received the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work, and in 2010 won Britain's Orange Prize for The Lacuna. Before she made her living as a writer, Kingsolver earned degrees in biology and worked as a scientist. She now lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
CINE GLOBAL
Highlighting the intriguing parallels among the diverse cultures in the region, Cine Global is a program of films reflecting the cultures and experiences of the newest Minnesotans. Cine Global benefits from an Advisory Group whose members represent 22 countries.