Congratulations to Assistant Professor and graduate director Amanda Curreri, who, along with multimedia artist Andy Ness, created the exhibition Liber Floridus presented by the Wege Gallery. Curreri contributed woven textile-based works, while Ness contributed mixed-media works on paper. The exhibition highlights the artists’ visual lexicons through symbols, imagery, and patterns rooted in personal significance. Liber Floridus, meaning “Book of Flowers,” was a medieval encyclopedia created in Northern France between the 11th and 12th centuries. It is known to be the earliest encyclopedia and contains geography, mathematics, natural history, astronomy, and countless other subjects.
Liber Floridus at the Wege Gallery demonstrates a blending of the two artists’ work in terms of materiality and a shared wonder within their own unique processes with regard to evolving subject matter. Andy Ness contributes work that vibrates with a sense of energy via mixing of pigments and binders and mimicking medieval illuminators with the use of walnut ink. Amanda Curreri has a different approach, incorporating storytelling, social justice history, and folklore into her textile works. Through the use of the Jacquard loom, invented in the early 19th century, Currie’s digital Jacquard loom bridges an interesting historical crossroads between medieval tapestries and digital archives. Her artwork is interdisciplinary and dialogic, characterized by an engagement with social stories of resistance. The work is situated between textiles and painting, social practice and pedagogy. Textiles are key for their ability to invite an experience of collectivity and connection. Digital handweaving with the TC2 Jacquard loom is central to her ongoing inquiry into the intersections of material studies, visual culture, and collective futurity.
Curreri’s artwork has been recently commissioned by Facebook Open Arts, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Her work has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California (Queer California), Cincinnati Art Museum (Women Breaking Boundaries), Contemporary Arts Center (Archive as Action), Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Ortega y Gasset Projects (New York City), and the Incheon Women’s Biennale, Korea. She will be an 2025 Artist in Residence at Os Icelandic Textile Center working in the Digital Textiles Lab, was a 2024 Artist in Residence at Stanford Arts Institute at Stanford University, a 2023 Artist in Residence at Praxis Digital Weaving Lab, a recipient of an Alumni Traveling Scholars Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to research textiles in Japan, a Pogue Wheeler Research Grant to study textiles and architecture in México, a Summerfair Aid for Individual Artists grant, and a SF Guardian Goldie Award.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
LEARN MORE about Amanda on her website.
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READ MORE at the Wege Center.
