Department of Art History

Drawing together the works of Chicago-based Ukrainian American artists, Anna Kuczma (1910-2002) and her daughter Lialia Kuchma (b. 1943), Side by Side: Color and Textiles situates modern artists’ experiments with color in textile histories, practices, and technologies. To further elucidate these connections, the show also includes quilted and embroidered works by fellow Chicago artists Liz Barr (b. 1993) and Charlie Kolodziej (b. 1999) as well as dyestuffs and related objects from the Joel Snyder Materials Collection.

All four artists’ works depend on the grid as well as a palette of colors made possible through innovations in textile dyeing, particularly the introduction and subsequent proliferation of synthetic dyes in the mid to late nineteenth century. In her embroidery, Kuczma relied on the woven ground and its perpendicular interlace of warp and weft as a foundational geometry for cross-stitching. The tiny x-shapes that comprise the designs tessellate, like pixels, in varied hues across that gridded ground. Kuchma weaves the grid that forms her tapestries, each pass of the weft over or under the warp constitutes a colorful square, part of a field, plane, or line within the composition.