Fiber Artists, and Old Tribeca Friends, Are Co-Founders of a New Gallery

Susan Byrnes, left, and Shari Werner in the Textile Art Gallery they recently co-founded in Chelsea. Their friendship in Tribeca goes back 35 years. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Shari Werner, a retired dentist, and Susan Byrnes, who owned a photography studio in Tribeca, have known each other since their children were at Washington Market School and PS 234. Last month, 35 years into their friendship, Werner, 70, and Byrnes, 67, both now fiber artists, became founding members of Textile Art Gallery, the only gallery in the city exclusively devoted to textile arts.

In Werner's loft on Duane Street, where her intricate fiber art pieces graced the walls, we talked to Werner and Byrnes about how the gallery was born. The interview is edited for length and clarity.

You both came to fiber art from very different backgrounds. Were you also both artists beforehand?

WERNER: I really never had an interest in painting, but I always did art. I was a weaver in high school and college, and I knitted and crocheted. I carried my loom around to three different apartments, and a couple of houses, but I just never had room to set it up. And so the weaving went by the wayside, and I started taking classes in quilting.

BYRNES: I have always been a painter and photographer. But each medium calls to different parts of my personality. The material drives what I make, each is a different language. 

How is fabric different from working with other mediums?

WERNER: I have always been attracted to fabric. The texture. The softness in my hands, the yarn, the fact that it becomes something dimensional. It's a response to texture. I love texture. 

BYRNES: I was inspired by watching Shari work on her pieces. It was so beautiful and so complicated–the sewing and the putting it all together So I started stitching pieces together, sewing embroidery on fabric, and making drawings on it. I immediately liked the texture of working with fabric, the movement of it, the sewing, the colors, the cutting, and drawing on it. The imagery that comes into my mind when I'm working in fabric is completely different from the imagery that comes into my mind when I'm painting. 

WERNER: I'd like to correct something I said before. I said I was a quilter, but I really don't think of myself as a quilter, which has a connotation of what some people's grandmothers did. These are lovely, but really have very little to do with what we do. I make two-dimensional fabric constructions. That's not as easy to say! 

You said to me earlier that you think fabric art is "having its day." What do you mean by that?

WERNER: There's definitely a discussion in the art world about whether fiber art is a fine art or a craft. A few years ago I began studying with Nancy Crow, in Ohio, who was in the forefront of the art quilt movement that views quilts as art that is meant to be hung on the wall and not just utilitarian. She very much instills in you that you're an artist, and this is not just a craft. That's wonderful too, but that's not what we're doing. You have to take your art seriously. 

BYRNES: Shari convinced me to go to Ohio with her to attend classes there. So I went out there, and that's where my journey began. It was startling to learn a technique I knew nothing ahout. But once I learning the craft, then I could start designing, which was my baliwick.

There have been a number of fiber art shows in the city in the last few years. Does that mean that the medium has finally arrived?

WERNER: No, I don't think we've quite arrived. I think  we are getting there, and more people are accepting fiber arts as an art form, rather than as crocheted potholders. MOMA just did a show last year that was all about textiles. South Street Seaport had two shows. A gallery on our corner had a giant show of larger than life-size portraits done in thick yarn. Really wonderful. So in some places, it's arrived, and other places around the country, it's still catching up. 

What made you think of opening a gallery?

WERNER: Last February, a friend  of ours, Ellen Piccolo, suggested that I join Prince Street Gallery. She's a painter, but was starting to do fabric, and she was a member. She said, "You should apply. It's good for them to broaden their horizons. They're all painters."  I applied but it was clear that they were not interested in a fiber artist, and didn't see it as fine art. I wasn't invested in it, so it was okay. But Ellen was incensed.

"I think we should start own fiber gallery." she said to me. I said, "Good idea," and I told  Susan and others about it and by the end of the summer we had 30 artists from across the country–Texas, California, Alaska, Canada and Vermont. That's the critical mass we needed to get our artist-run cooperative gallery off the ground.

Some artists paid their dues a year in advance–even before we had a space! They really wanted to help in any way to get this gallery going. But the artists are not only invested financially, but emotionally too. They really want this venture to succeed because they feel like it's an avenue for fiber art to be seen, a space where they can be represented in the art world. 

The inaugural group show, "Surface Tension: Founding Artists of Textile Art Gallery NYC"  is on view until May 1. The gallery is at 529 W. 20th St, 6th fl. Hours: Tue—Sat, 11am-6pm. www.textileartnyc.com