Collection: Yielding, Selected By Ann Marguerite Tartsinis (online exhibition)

About the exhibition

To yield is to submit to pressure, to give way to an external force. It is also to produce or create something, the yield, from one’s own labor. The artworks brought together in this exhibition reflect the multiple ways matter can yield: Clay is molded and punctured by the sharp tip of the stylus, fabric gathers at the pull of the embroidery thread, and brushstrokes accumulate to reveal an overflowing mass of delineated forms on the page. While some of the artworks here physically represent how yielding is embedded in the very processes of their making, others visually suggest the act of yielding itself--white paper succumbs to a finely wrought nest of brightly colored cells and rectangular marks slope downward in the face of some unseen force. Together, these artworks animate and interrogate the multiple definitions of what it means “to yield,” inviting us to examine our own notions of productivity and, perhaps more importantly, to ask ourselves to whom or to what do we give way? 

About the selector

Ann is a scholar of twentieth-century American art and fashion. From 2010 to 2016, she was an associate curator at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York where she organized several design and material culture exhibitions. She is the author of An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design: 1915-1928 (Yale University Press, 2013) and contributor to Knoll Textiles: 1945–2010 (Yale University Press, 2011). Her work has been published in The Journal of Modern Craft, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, & Culture, and the Winterthur Portfolio. Her research concerns include the work of Japanese-American weaver Alice Kagawa Parrott, the French sound sculptors François and Bernard Baschet, and Yves Saint Laurent’s “Mondrian” dress. Ann is currently completing her doctorate in Art History at Stanford University with a dissertation on the interwar photography of Cecil Beaton, Walker Evans, George Platt Lynes, and Man Ray.