Background
Lenore Tawney was born Leonora Agnes Gallagher on March 10, 1907, in Lorain, Ohio. She was one of five children born to Irish American parents.
Lenore Tawney was born Leonora Agnes Gallagher on March 10, 1907, in Lorain, Ohio. She was one of five children born to Irish American parents.
Tawney's introduction to the tenets of the German Bauhaus school and the artistic avant-garde began in 1946 when she attended László Moholy-Nagy's Chicago Institute of Design.
Lenore enrolled at the University of Illinois to study art and studied with Moholy-Nagy, cubist sculptor Alexander Archipenko and abstract expressionist painter Emerson Woelffer, among others, and in 1949, she studied weaving with Marli Ehrman. In 1954, she studied with the distinguished Finnish weaver Martta Taipale at Penland School of Crafts. Tawney briefly studied weaving in Penland, North Carolina.
After the sudden death of her husband, Lenore began to travel. During living in Paris from 1949 to 1951, she traveled through Europe and into Morocco. Back in Chicago in 1957, she packed a few possessions into a car and drove to New York City.
Lenore settled in Lower Manhattan as one of a handful of artists who, seeking space, quiet and a chance to work apart from the New York art world, lived on Coenties Slip, near the South Street Seaport. Her neighbors in the late 1950s included the artists Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin. She and the slightly younger Ms. Martin were close friends and influenced each other’s work.
Beginning in the 1950s, Ms. Tawney executed several large-scale commissions in Chicago, New York and Santa Rosa, Calif. None of them remain on view. In 1955 Tawney began her pioneering work in “woven forms.” Her travels through the Middle East, South America, and India led her to simplify her work and to use only black or undyed linen fibres and a few primary colours.
Lenore invented new devices that enabled her to create woven forms on a large scale, some of them reaching heights of 20 feet (6 metres). Her inclusion of inwoven slits allowed light to function as part of the overall composition. An example of her work is Cloud. It was created for the Federal Building in Santa Rosa, California, where its 16-foot (5-metre) blue linen strands seem to drop like threads of rain over the immense lobby.
In 1965 Tawney began to make assemblages, and she also produced highly refined multimedia collages. In 1990 she was given a career retrospective at the American Craft Museum, now known as the Museum of Arts and Design. Her work has entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. She died in New York City aged 100.
In 1941, in Chicago, Lenore married George Tawney, a psychologist; their marriage only lasted eighteen months.