Courtesy of Aaron Dean Stalnaker.
A strong constructivist trajectory runs through postwar American fiber art. In this direction of artistic research, the desire to get “off the wall”—to break the flat plane of the wall hanging—has not meant abandoning planar structure itself, or the loom. Rather, the grid-based logic of conventional weaving was respected and retained, but deployed in free space. One of the key exponents of this approach was Budd Stalnaker, who noted specifically in the original Objects: USA catalogue, “my sculptural objects are all of one piece and are not pieced together after coming off the loom.”
In this respect, Stalnaker’s work bears comparison to that of figures like Lenore Tawney, Kay Sekimachi, or Warren Seelig. If he is less well known than these other artists today, that is partly because of his focus on teaching: for almost forty years, from 1964 to 2003, he was head of textiles at Indiana University. Stalnaker is succeeded there by Rowland Ricketts, featured in the contemporary section of Objects: USA 2020.
