“I see drawing as a way of thinking, it seems alive and direct,” says artist Anne Lindberg.
Lindberg uses an expanded definition of “drawing” to describe her three-dimensional, colored-thread sculptures.
Referring to her work as, “drawing in space,” she says, “I am always seeking to push the boundaries of what is considered a drawing.”
To achieve this luminous cloud of color, Lindberg works to pull thousands of colorful cotton threads taut between walls — a performative experience for the artist.
passage is a continuation of Lindberg’s career of working with color theory and colors’ effect on the viewer’s emotional and physiological response.
The greens and yellows of passage reflect calm and renewal, but also nature and growth.
Inspired by the park surrounding the Museum, Lindberg sees the installation as “the outside comes inside, a kind of inversion into the very center of the museum.”
Lindberg was introduced to textile art during her undergraduate studies at Miami University in Ohio.
She went on to diagram West African textiles as a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.
“This work honed my tendency to work with very fine delicate elements in accumulation,” Lindberg reveals, “[but] helped me to decide that I wanted to be an artist rather than an anthropologist. […] I realized that I wanted to make things.”
It was Lindberg’s unique attention to space and architecture — rooted in drawing — that makes passage a compliment to the Studio Gang-designed Museum and its permanent collection.
Take a moment to walk, literally passing through this evocative work. This action of motion is important to Lindberg’s artistic process and the viewer’s experience of her work.
“Works unfold at the pace of my step,” Linberg explains, “as I pull thousands of lines across a pliant mat board or cast them between walls while walking. I find context for my work within a long tradition of other ‘walking artists’ […] like these artists, philosophers, and writers, I use walking as time to encourage a fluid state of perceptions, to contemplate place, and to affect change and adaptation as it informs incremental, moment-to-moment decisions in the making of my work.”
