Lenore Tawney's Home and Studio, New York City, NY

Paul J. Smith, Lenore Tawney's 20th Street Studio, 1985; digital file from the negative; dimensions variable. Courtesy of Paul J. Smith.

Clayton J. Price, Albert Zahn angel hanging in Lenore Tawney's loft at 32 West Twentieth Street, New York, 2008; photograph. Courtesy of the artist and the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, New York.

Clayton J. Price, Lenore Tawney in her loft at 115 Spring Street, New York, 1966; photograph. Courtesy of the artist and the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, New York.

The Site

After moving to New York to pursue a life as an artist, Lenore Tawney lived and worked in a series of lofts around the city. She surrounded herself with things that propelled her fiber-art practice forward. Organic items such as feathers, eggshells, and bones were arranged in her space alongside studio tools, skeins of thread, collectibles, and mementos she acquired in her extensive travels. These items were equally sources of inspiration and materials to be incorporated into her weavings, collages, and assemblages. The clean, white spaces spoke to Tawney’s dedication to deliberate meditative ways of working—stacked stones, cleanly designed wood furniture, and suspended gauzy works of art contributed to an ethereal atmosphere. She made each space she inhabited her own—a singular work of art, collapsing the distinction between her life and her artistic practice.

Prior to her death, Tawney established the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. In 2018 it worked with the Kohler Foundation, Inc., to gift key studio components and four major works of art to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

Lenore Tawney

1907–2007

Lenore Tawney (Leonora Gallagher) was born in 1907 in Lorain, Ohio, one of five children. She moved to Chicago at the age of twenty, where she worked in publishing and attended classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute of Design. Her marriage to George Tawney in 1941 was cut short by his premature death two years later. Compelled by her artistic ambitions, Tawney moved to New York City in 1957. She lived and worked in a series of lofts, which became works of art in their own right.

Tawney’s innovative interpretations of traditional practices were central to shifting the perception of weaving from a utilitarian craft to fiber art as we know it today. Her experimentation with open-warp techniques resulted in gauzy, loose works of a nonfunctional, free-flowing nature. In what she referred to as “woven forms,” Tawney’s unorthodox sculptural works took weaving beyond the expected flat rectangular format, moving fiber art off the wall and into three-dimensional space. Tawney’s interdisciplinary oeuvre also spanned drawing, collage, and assemblage. Tawney died in 2007 at the age of one hundred. In 2019 the John Michael Kohler Arts Center worked closely with the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation to acquire hundreds of key components from Tawney’s last studio environment with assistance from Kohler Foundation, Inc.