Continuing through September 18, 2026
I am a painter who uses the loom to paint.
I just lose track of time. The repetition … puts me in a trance state.
— Terri Friedman
Terri Friedman’s fiber practice evolved out of painting and kinetic sculpture. She had an epiphany about medium and message a dozen years ago while visiting the Miró Foundation in Barcelona. There, a gigantic 60-by-30-foot tapestry designed by the Spanish Surrealist converted the painter to fiber for its tactile appeal and emotional effect. After studying with fiber artist Lia Cook, Friedman, an inveterate collector of fabric (as well as stimulating quotations) was on her way into an exploration which has warm psychological associations she found lacking in “intellectual” oil paint.
In an interview, she explained: “… Fiber’s a sensitive material; it can hold thoughts and feelings in addition to being kind of a utilitarian material, that … can capture all kinds of other matter as well in its form or structure or surface … people are drawn to fiber … craft evokes a somatic body response [and] an emotional response and it brings up memories.”
Fiber afforded Friedman a meditative medium for processing the too-muchness of contemporary life, and even a place of joy and healing in which carefully planned shapes, colors and textures coalesce into llyrical, brightly colored dreamscapes reminiscent of Klee and Kandinsky.
When you view the works in Friedman’s “Overmuch” exhibition try not to be lured into cliches about the touchy-feely Bay Area sensibility. Think instead of Matisse’s vision of art as soothing and restorative, a “good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.” Friedman plans her artworks on gridded paper, belying their air of radical improvisation. The works here are challenging and unforgiving aesthetic adventures.
Included are twenty-two pieces made since 2019, the majority dating from 2026 alone, in an Arachne-worthy display of focus and virtuosity. Among the older works, “Green Placebo” (2019) suggests a healing foliate spirit simplified to a modernist totem or mask. “You Don’t Get to Know” (2021) is a primal landscape of red and black, with undulating horizontals suggesting schematized waterflow, as in Max Ernst’s visionary frottage landscapes. And “HELL NO” (2025) stands a Surrealist one-eyed deity in a desert landscape beneath what might be aboriginal or Native American sky gods.
Among the works completed this year are an identically sized trio depicting the local times of day. “Sunrise,” “Twilight,” and “Midnight” might be difficult to differentiate, as they share the same palette and general appearance. Their ambiguous cubistic forms are set against dark plaid backgrounds suggestive of towels or tablecloths, with twined yarn tassels hanging below, humorous stand-ins for the dripping paint of Abstract Expressionism. The tactile, haptic effects of the cotton chenille, acrylic, wool and metallic fibers are complex and not easily described. Our digital era has led us to the false expectation that online photographs can substitute for real objects made by hand. But you sometimes have to see to believe. These works are a prime example.
Also of note in “Overmuch” is “Undermuch” (2026) a large wall weaving, and a small early version of it, a study, and something of an anomaly among Friedman’s works in that it was not carefully pre-planned. Friedman’s aesthetic does not take to correction or erasure, however wildly spontaneous it may appear to be. Given this paradoxical nature, it is engaging to consider the similarities and differences in the early and final stages of the “Undermuch” study, with its rectangular top and triangular, tasseled bottom.
As an image it suggests a stylized cat or bird, or perhaps a partly unraveled woman’s slip. Some of the motifs in the study — the light mountains set against a dark sky at the midriff, the horizontal strata of chenille at the bottom, the spray of fabric corsage at the left breast — recur in the final version. Because “Undermuch” is taller, we see a full-length garment rather than a shirt dress or slip. The image is suggestive of a Navajo kachina or aboriginal wandjinas — i.e., primordial, supernatural presences from the subconscious. Friedman considers herself an empath who has found in art a way to heal and restore herself and her audience, including women who have undergone chemotherapy. On second thought, perhaps the touchy-feely Bay Area interpretation is not completely out of left field.
Finally, there are Friedman’s small word works, with one of a few words threaded through floating lyrical imagery. The byplay of word and painterly woven atmosphere in “THIS,” “HELL NO,” “GIVE,” “KIND,” “CARE,” “VERY,” “Mend,” and “WHY NOT YOU” lends the pieces an intimate charm and mystery, as if we were parsing fragments of old documents, or hearing whispered invocations or admonitions. Friedman greatly admires the colorful screenprints of Sister Corita Kent for their fusing of Pop vernacular with very un-Pop spiritual and political texts. Much of that spirit comes through in Friedman’s joyously optical and tactile work, but that spirit also hints that we can always do better. This may be risky messaging in today’s culture of constant complaint. Says the artist, “I envision my works as salves or remedies for the ailments around me.” And they are.
