Stainless steel, pandan leaves, and patent leather belts are some of the unexpected materials challenging the dominant legacy and traditional format of tapestries in Salon 94’s group exhibition “The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry” (through December 21, 2024). The show borrows its name from a celebrated 16th-century Flemish tapestry cycle, taking the works’ subject, technique, and lingering mysteries as points of departure. Expansive in both material and geographical scope, the featured works defy the looming legacy of the vaunted tapestry cycle to chart new futures for the medium.
The Mysteries of The Lady and the Unicorn
Housed in a special climate-controlled room at the Musée du Cluny in Paris, the Lady and the Unicorn is composed of six tapestries in the mille fleurs (“thousand flowers”) style. Showcasing a striking red background brimming with more than 40 different types of cultivated and wildflowers, each panel features a svelte and bejeweled woman flanked by domesticated, feral, and mythological animals. The tapestries were originally woven around 1500 in Flanders for the Le Vistes, a French family that held various political and administrative appointments at court. Rediscovered in the mid-19th century, the works were swiftly memorialized by acclaimed writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and George Sand.
Five of the six panels in the cycle are allegories on the senses. The subject of the sixth—featuring a woman inspecting jewelry—is still debated to this day. Fueling the mystery is an inscription reading À mon seul désir (“To my only desire”) woven into the background tent. Scholars have alternately interpreted the phrase as either a celebration of free will or a clandestine message hiding the initials of lovers. Both its secrets and its superlative craftsmanship have contributed to the tapestries’ continued historical relevance through the centuries, including their revival by William Morris for textile and wallpaper designs.
However, some more recent experts have argued that celebrating the unicorn cycle as the apogee of tapestry arts crowds out the importance of other textile traditions across the globe. In her 1965 treatise “On Weaving,” the late artist Anni Albers lauded the unicorn tapestries as “great works of art” but also advocated for a simultaneous and equal appreciation of Andean textiles. Similarly, Fabienne Stephan, the curator of the show at Salon 94, notes that “works in the exhibition may not all have the scale of 16th century tapestries, yet they are proof that centuries after its creation, the medium of weaving can be used to tell new epic stories and inspire an ideal future.”
Beyond the Loom
Several works in “The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry” underscore the importance of inherited Indigenous knowledge in weaving and textile arts. The California-based Zapotec artist Porfirio Gutierrez uses materials ranging from pecans to pomegranates to dye his fibers, transforming the flora of the mille fleurs from a background decision into a foundational element of the entire work. The senior Yolngu artist and master weaver Margaret Rarru Garrawurra used parts of the pandan tree (also known as the screw pine) to dye and weave a towering sail, emphasizing her practice’s position at the juncture between ancestral knowledge and quotidian goods.
Other artists in the exhibition tackle the industrialized process of tapestry creation itself. Kyoto-based Mitsuko Asakura’s sculptures, which resemble half-finished tapestries on bamboo looms, address the region’s long historical tradition of dying and weaving kimonos. In some cases, Asakura weaves the wooden supports themselves into her works, unraveling the hierarchy of production.
Sagarika Sundaram’s wool sculptures bypass weaving altogether. Describing her work as a combination between papermaking, collage, and sculpture, she creates pressed felt “blind,” building a backwards palimpsest of pigments on wool obtained from locations as various as Oaxaca and the lower Himalayas. She notes that her broad sourcing of materials echoes that of classical European tapestry producers, as indigo and many of the other materials commonly used to dye have their own wide “geographical footprint.”
“My process mirrors the complexity, ferocity, and savagery that exists both in nature and in our human nature,” Sundaram tells Artnet News. Comparing the wound-like openings in her sculptures to eyelids, she says their “visceral quality” ensures “they feel like membranes, they feel like skin and bones,” while their overall “edible quality” means the work “hits the register of the mouth.” Here, the senses serve as connection points between the tapestry cycle and her sculptures: compressed, embodied, and exhumed.
Weaving Desire
Multiple artists in “The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry” interrogate the yearning inherent in the unicorn tapestries—including the yearning for money and power that has shaped the history of the medium. For instance, during the French Revolution tapestries and furnishings in the royal collection were burnt for their gold and silver threads to help finance the state amid the turmoil. Using stainless steel and flax linen, Adeline Halot creates gleaming metallic sculptures whose gold and silver tones allude to the destructive potential of material desire. Of Halot’s materials, Stephan says “it is rare to see an artist developing a craft that is her own, based on history and looking into the future. In a moment when we are constantly shown AI-powered, illusionary images, Halot’s work glitches reality by weaving and sculpting metal thread with linen.”
Qualeasha Wood directly engages with the accelerated pace of desire in the contemporary digital world. Referring to textiles “as a bridge between the analog and the digital,” she has woven the pieces in this exhibition from a computerized loom, then further transformed them through hand embroidery and beading—a process that combines impersonal precision with, in her words, “the intimacy and imperfection of handcraft.” Endemic to her approach is an acknowledgment of weaving’s central yet underappreciated role in technological innovation; the jacquard loom, for instance, is widely considered a predecessor of early computers due to its interchangeable punch card system.
“I am interested in how platforms and technologies thrive on desire: the desire for interaction, affirmation, and escape, but also the darker, voyeuristic desire tied to surveillance and control,” Wood says. Her tapestries center her identity among these digital fragments to critique how “Black women’s bodies are often surveilled, consumed, and commodified, both online and offline.” Her digitally mediated threads also offer a contemporary update to Albers’s claim that “threads were the earliest transmitters of meaning.” Ultimately, Salon 94’s exhibition shows that textiles and weaving remain essential media for communication, whether they are untangling the allegorical and technical mysteries of The Lady and the Unicorn or expressing other personal and cultural histories that deserve to be seen just as clearly.
