Art Basel Miami BOOTH S18: MIAMI BEACH, FLORIDA | DEC 3 - 7, 2025

During the 1960s and 70s Pacanovsky moved from functional woven textiles to sculptural work, and became known for her use of clear, translucent, and opaque monofilament fibers. Since then she has worked exclusively with hand-knotted artworks, culminating with her Cosmic series, sculptural hangings which suggest the ever-expanding universe which she has worked on over several decades. About the Cosmic series the artist writes: “I am concerned with expressing interconnections – interconnectedness and continuum. My work has been combining natural materials with synthetics, relating opposites, randomness and order – dark, light, reflective, opaque, illumination to dematerialization, exploring cosmic energy fields. I have been knotting clear monofilament, a man-made fiber that transmits light, combining it with natural linen, opaque and light absorbent, incorporating gold leaf, reflective and alchemically symbolic – unifying them in a variety of densities, scale, and configurations. Monofilament is a flexible medium – moves with air currents –changes with various lighting, natural, seasonal, and artificial. I am interested in kinetics – dynamic pattern/resultant forms in spacetime. “ A friend and a collaborator of architect Lou Kahn and architect Ann Ting, Pacanovsky was introduced by the latter to concepts of geometric solids, particle physics and Jungian philosophy, which inspired the Cosmic Series. The artist expresses the idea of energy fields and the constant motion of the particles of matter in the universe through the use of knotted clear monofilament, natural linen, and 24 karat gold leaf. Her choices of materials and knotting technique are very deliberate: Curved knots receivingthe vectors of the straight lines, "feminine and masculine principals as referred to by Karl Jung." The knots become particles with the vectors that connect them as "the force of attraction and separation become a cosmic energy field catching the light." Natural linen, symbolic as of the earth, opaque and absorbent, is incorporated to break the density of the particle field. Gold leaf is reflective, precious, and ancient, speaks of alchemy and transcendent value. 

Ferne Jacobs

Ferne Jacobs (b. 1942) of Los Angeles, California, has been at the forefront of innovation in fiber art since the 1960s. Through reinventing and advancing traditional basket-making techniques, Jacobs has carved out an original and unique genre of sculpture in which innovative approaches, abstract forms, and contemporary concepts are coiled around the deep and historical tradition of basketry and fiber arts.

Liberated from the restrictions of a loom, her process enables her to shift freely between colors and forms, relying solely on her hands. She constructs organic yet solid structures using coiled, twined, and knotted waxed linen thread. Her pieces fuse meticulous attention to color with poetic, dreamlike forms, playing with the binaries of interior and exterior, mass and void, organic and artificial. Her works explore concepts such as gender, spirituality, religion, and the destruction of nature.

Jacobs began her artistic journey as a painter in the early 1960s and soon turned to weaving. By 1970, she began creating off-loom, three-dimensional fiber works using ancient basket-making techniques—a practice born from her fascination that thread can be made solid, that by using only her hands and thread, a form can emerge that physically stands on its own. “To make these forms,” she writes, “I am involved with every stitch, which slows down time. I create thousands of wraps with the thread, trying to listen. I never know what the sculpture will be until I cut the last thread.”

A pioneer of the International Fiber Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Jacobs received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University, where she studied under notable fiber artists Lenore Tawney and Olga de Amaral. She was an Artist in Residence at the La Napoule Art Foundation in France (1991) and a Finalist for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize in 2024.

Her sculptures have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide and are held in permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); the Museum of Art and Design (New York); the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.); the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston); the De Young Museum (San Francisco); and the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence). She received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1973–74 and 1977–78, the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists, and in 1995 was named a Fellow of the College of Fellows by the American Craft Council.

 Ethel Stein 

Ethel Stein (1917–2018) was an American textile artist celebrated for her masterful drawloom weavings that fused ancient techniques with modernist aesthetics. Born in New York, she spent much of her childhood with her uncle Abbo Ostrowsky, founder of the Educational Alliance art school, where she encountered artists like Rafael and Moses Soyer, Chaim Gross, and Zero Mostel. Her formal education began at the progressive Hessian Hills School in Croton-on-Hudson, emphasizing hands-on crafts such as shearing sheep, spinning, and natural dyeing, under teachers like George Biddle and Wharton Esherick. Though Stein's pursuit of weaving would not begin until she was in her early forties, she studied, taught and worked in diverse art forms: life drawing at the Traphagen School of Fashion, sculpture with Chaim Gross (alongside Louise Nevelson), and stage design, including sets for off-Broadway and Boston theaters like the Ford Hall Forum Players' 1939-40 season featuring Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing." In the late 1930s, while teaching at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum, she absorbed Bauhaus principles at the Graduate School of Design, studying under Josef Albers during his 1941 sabbatical. This experience profoundly shaped her focus on geometry, spatial dynamics, and color, and also brought her in contact with Anni Albers. There, she met her husband, architect Richard Stein, and after World War II, they settled in Croton, embracing environmental sustainability.

Stein's career spanned multiple media before centering on weaving in the 1960s, sparked by friendships with local artisans like Irene Miller, Vera Neumann, Lenore Tawney, Klara Cherepov, and Mary Walker Phillips. Initially crafting utilitarian items from unconventional yarns—like dog fur—she transitioned to intricate geometric and figurative designs using continuous warp and weft structures, enhanced by ikat dyeing for soft edges. Finding her 16-harness loom limiting, she modified a Finnish countermarch loom into a unique single-operator drawloom—described by curator Milton Sonday as one-of-a-kind—enabling mastery of damask, double cloth, and lampas. Her work evolved in phases: damask explorations (1981–1995), double cloth and lampas for figural illusions (1995–1999), and a damask return emphasizing composition and materials (2000 onward). From 1987 to 1993, she analyzed historic fabrics at the Metropolitan Museum's Textile Conservation Department, deepening her structural knowledge. Earlier, her resourceful puppet-making from old socks led to producing 10,000 units and designing characters like Lamb Chop for Shari Lewis's 1960–63 TV show.

Despite working counter to trends and prioritizing personal exploration over promotion, Stein gained late recognition, with her first retrospective, "Ethel Stein, Master Weaver," at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014–2015, showcasing works from 1982 to 2008. Her deceptively simple weavings investigated light, form, and even politics, like her opposition to the Indian Point nuclear plant. After age 90, Stein required assistance with loom threading due to macular degeneration, she completed final pieces relying on touch. Stein died on March 9, 2018, at 100. Her loom resides at the Art Institute of Chicago. As curator Daniel Walker noted, her profound innovation lay in making complex techniques appear effortless while revealing simple forms' intricacies.