Review: Fiberart International 2025 Contemporary Craft
- Camilyn Leone
- Aug 22
- 3 min read
Boisali Biswas
Diaphanous Illusions
2024 Weaving
84” x 120” x 120”
Review: Fiberart International 2025
Contemporary Craft
Fiberart Guild of Pittsburgh, Inc.
Brew House Arts
June 6-August 30, 2025
Camilyn K. Leone
August 22, 2025
Fiberart International brings together over 30 artists from around the world to Pittsburgh, PA every three years. Brew House arts and Contemporary Craft are fabulous venues. Brew House, an old factory, features soaring ceilings brightly lit by huge windows. Contemporary Craft is a modern building in an old part of the city overlooking the river. You enter a large gallery space surrounded by ateliers for visiting artists and classrooms for students. Both venues have an extraordinary sense of place bringing Pittsburgh’s industrial history to the present. Perfect spaces to show art of any kind, but particularly textiles.
When we think of textiles, we often think of something soft, textured and movable. This exhibit subverts our ideas of textiles. There are many weavings, felted works, quilts, crochet and knitted pieces. But, there are also porcelain, photos, steel, staples, plexiglass and paper.
Delaina Doshi’s Reconciled is shards of broken plates woven together with gold thread. Jerry Bleems’s As Gentle as Rain is made of plastic, mylar and acetate. It is held together by thread and staples. Diana Baumbach’s photographs of body art with fiber document her artistic practice. And, Risa Hricovsky’s Duality is porcelain, hard as a rock, but it looks like fiber. In these works, the boundaries are fiber art are torn open to include any material that references a filament that can be manipulated.
I’m a tapestry weaver and the first thing that I look for is traditional woven tapestry technique. Though I didn’t see anything that hearkens back to Aubusson or Dovecot, there were several weavings that caught my eye. Boisali Biswas’s Diaphanous Illusions invites you into the gallery space at Contemporary Craft. The translucent weavings glowed in the afternoon light. A mix of traditional weaving materials, plant material and recycled plastic bags are woven to create an ever-changing experience as the panels float in light and air. For me, this was the most joyous and beautiful weaving in the exhibit. I felt inspired and awed by the colors and textures. Gayla Rosenfelds’s Olive Tree at Night, made of die cut synthetic suede is remarkable. The geometric structure and subdued colors create a beautiful olive tree in a shifting landscape. I love the symbolism of the olive tree, especially at this moment in time. Also, the modular components evoke a sense of flying over a city and looking down at a city scape. Finally, Phoebe Vlassis’s Loom Music was a joy to see. With its accompanying video of Vlassis playing her loom with a band whilst weaving a traditional overshot pattern made me want to try a floor loom. The hand weavers in my local guild were particularly impressed with this play of traditional and contemporary woven design.
I attended the exhibition with my daughter and a friend. Neither had experienced a textile exhibit. All of us left excited about textile art. We loved the spaces and the choices that the curators made in selecting the artists. It is a new perspective on what textile art can be. So much to see. We look forward to returning to the next Contemporary Craft Triennial in 2028.
To see the other wonderful textile art in the exhibit, please visit: https://contemporarycraft.org/exhibitions/fiberart-international/
