Ferne Jacobs: A Poetry of Thread – A Pioneer in the American Fiber Arts Movement

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is excited and honored to feature Los Angeles-based artist Ferne Jacobs in her First Los Angeles gallery exhibition! The gallery’s focus on artists who engage in conceptual material practices aligns with Jacobs’ pioneering career.

Ferne Jacobs’ sculptures have been included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the MFA Boston, the MFA Houston, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the De Young Museum, and many more over several decades. Recently, Jacobs was a finalist for the prestigious 2024 Loewe Craft Prize. Currently her work is on public view at the MFA Boston and the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation.

At 82 years old, Jacobs is a ground-breaking pioneer in the International Fiber Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She continues her daily studio practice today, intuitively coiling and twining compelling abstract forms that infer historical provenance beyond their making.

On view will be coiled and twined free-standing sculpture and wall work, including new as well as work spanning over her 50-year career.

Jacobs is recognized for her technical mastery of material and process. Reinventing and advancing traditional techniques used for basketry and inventing countless other methods along the way, Jacobs has generated an entirely fresh format for sculptural art. Her acute sense of color melded with her poetic and intuitive approach are characteristic traits. Each piece begins with an idea, a dream, a story, or a picture in Jacobs' mind, but it grows and takes on its own form over the months in which she shapes the artwork.

Jacobs plays with duality in terms of textures, contrast of color, interior and exterior, solids and voids. In terms of concept, she investigates the significance of masculinity and femininity, spirituality and religion, and the destruction of the natural world... Her pieces are meditations on the fiber of society and the nature of humanity in the modern world.

– Emily Zaiden, Connected Cells, Breathing Forms, Craft in America Exhibition, 2022

When I begin a piece, I create a line by wrapping thread around a cord with a color that has been in my mind. From then on I live in a mystery, creating each cell (wrap) and connection, of what I hope is a living form. The cells make up a body, and I have no idea about what it will become until it is finished. There is no direct intention, only a hope that it has life and through that, is moving in some way.

– Ferne Jacobs, Connected Cells, Breathing Forms, Craft in America Exhibition, 2022