Nicholson Tapestries 2011

Tapestries by Laura Foster Nicholson - Winter 2011
January 10 - March 18

Stone Tapestries is an exhibit of selected artworks by Laura Foster Nicholson, an internationally recognized artist who resides in New Harmony, Indiana.  The exhibit reveals a recurring motif in her work – small, multicolored ovals which can be viewed as pebbles, and which often stand in for soil in her garden-based series of tapestries. In later tapestries, she employs the ovals to create interest in and of themselves with no other visual reference.  These Stones pieces have become an exploration of space, color, depth of field, and surface in textiles. Ms. Foster Nicholson states "The resulting work, I feel, has great depth, movement, texture, and an emotion which has been made thread by thread in a meditative and intimate conversation between myself and my loom."

Laura Foster Nicholson is a textile artist known for hand-woven brocaded tapestries.  Educated at Kansas City Art Institute (BFA) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA), she has lectured, taught classes & workshops, and exhibited extensively in the US, Canada and Italy.  Grants and awards include an NEA fellowship, the Leone di Pietra prize at the 1985 Venice Biennale of Architecture, three Illinois Arts Council fellowships, and a grant from the Graham Foundation for Research in the Fine Arts. She owns LFNTextiles, which designs jacquard ribbon, custom upholstery and drapery fabrics.  She has licensed designs to Crate & Barrel, Land of Nod, Grow Kids, Renaissance Ribbons, and Larsen, Inc. for production. Laura Foster Nicholson’s tapestries are found in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, The Archives of the Venice Biennale, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Denver Art Museum, The Racine Art Museum, The Reading Public Museum, The Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum and many private and corporate art collections nationwide.