b'rather than exhibitions. Abakanowiczs fiber sculpture is radically exper-imental, breaking away from the traditional forms of weaving and tex-tiles. Often free of the wall, instead suspended or rising from the floor, it distances itself from the more utilitarian and craft-oriented traditions of textile art. Contemporary PracticesMany modern and contemporary artists who work with weaving and other textile techniques are interested in the connotations that come with them. To stitch pieces of cloth together is a creative act, but this does not neces-sarily mean creating something entirely new ; it can also involve mending something broken or torn. Sewing has an aspect of care, and this caring can be reciprocal. Through the time and concentration invested in the act, it can have a therapeutic quality for the one sewing as well as for the one being mended, as in The Mending Project, by Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei. That sewing transforms fragile individual threads into artworks of strength and structure can also be considered metaphorically, with political implications understood by some of the many artists today who are interested in envi-ronmental issues.It may seem paradoxical that textile and fiber art, with their keen interest in materials and tactility, emerged at about the same time as Con-ceptual art, which emphasized language as the most important medium and distanced itself from materiality in an almost Platonic way. Yet both were part of a turn against the traditional hierarchies of art. The legacy ofConceptualarthasinfluencedboththepractitionersandtherecep-tion of textile and fiber art. Many have pointed out the shared etymology of text and textile, coming from the Latin word texere, to weave. 7And the fact that computers and computer programming developed out of early-nineteenth-century weaving machinery, the Jacquard loom. Today, Qualeasha Wood makes tapestries that relate to computers, resembling screenshots from everyday Internet surfing to explore racial, sexual, and gender identity.There is also a revival in the spirit of a new interest in materiality, in the knowledge and traditions of craftas manifested, for example, in the Venice Biennale of 2022. For a contemporary artist such as Jordan Nassar, the histories of the materials and techniques he uses charge the works with emotional and political meaning.Endnotes1See Achim Borchardt-Hume, A Metaphorical Critique of Broad Reflection, in Richard Tuttle, Magnus af Petersens, and Borchardt-Hume, eds., Richard Tuttle : I Dont Know. The Weave of Textile Language(London : Harry N. Abrams, 2014).2See Jenelle Porter, Fiber : Sculpture 1960Present, exh. cat. (Boston:Institute of Contemporary Art, and Munich:Prestel Verlag, 2014), pp. 910.3See Beatrijs Sterk, Lausanne Tapestry Biennial Nomad Tapestries 2016, Surface Design Journal 40, no. 2 (Summer 2016) : p. 37.4See Porter, Fiber : Sculpture 1960Present, p. 12.5Isabella Ducrot, The Checkered Cloth (Rome : Quodlibet, 2019), pp. 4344.6Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated) : Art from 1951 to the Present was the title of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2004.7See af Petersens, The Visual Poetry of Richard Tuttle, in Richard Tuttle : I Dont Know, pp. 7380.'