Woven Together: The Fiber Work of Sherri Smith

Artist Statement

My current series of work concerns science, and sometimes mathematics. I look for images or other information that will allow me to generate an image. My most recent pieces are about astronomy. For most of them I work with NASA images made by our space missions or telescopes. I feel lucky to have NASA busy generating such splendid material for me. I have always been very excited by these images and enjoy working with them very much. These records of our ultimate explorations deserve to be celebrated; I am doing so. I have also done work from very old astronomy drawings, done before photographs, as well as from maps of the photographs we took of our moon prior to our lunar landings.

Biography

Born in 1943 in Evanston, Illinois, Sherri Smith is a fiber artist and professor of weaving and textile design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Throughout her career, Smith has had a significant impact on the field of fiber art, both through ambitious experimentation of weave structure and through teaching. Her work has charted diverse strands of technique and influence; complex compositions of interlaced cotton webbing, to strip-woven wall-hangings with patterns derived from astronomy, mathematics and the sciences. Smith earned a BA at Stanford University in 1965 and a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1967. Soon after graduate school, Smith worked as a designer for Boris Kroll Fabrics and Dorothy Liebes, Inc. In 1969, Smith’s work was included in the landmark exhibition Wall Hangings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her work has been acquired by several important collections, including Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dubai Airport Hotel, IBM in New York, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C.