Textiles on the Edge

TEXTILES ON THE EDGE Costa Rican artistic textile endeavors today have reached a point of encounter where the efforts of many artists – upon examining Costa Rican textile proposals – give shape to the “Textiles on the Edge” project, a sample that has stirred up new ideas and traditional practices for synthesizing a new way of appreciating objects that aims more at encouraging questions than giving finished results.

It is a true source of satisfaction for the Costa Rican – North American Cultural Center’s Sophia Wanamaker Gallery to add to its hall 26 proposals by resident artists of Costa Rica giving the viewpoint of textile as a form of expression that refines, from day to day, their communication strategies and finished works as a product of aesthetics. To this respect, what that encounter unites are the individualities and concerns of creative style in an aesthetic practice that is new for many and well-known but still challenging for others.

Since the IV International Biennial of Textile Art and Design in 2006 and the First Encounter of the Ibero-American Textile Network in 2010, and then with the experience in 2011 of the M.K. Ciurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas, Lithuania, this space for the arts has – accompanied by the advice and direction of Costa Rican artist Paulina Ortiz – made these incursions into textiles to awaken in our artistic community a curiosity for expanding visual languages, for seeing textile as a medium that goes beyond that for which it had basically been designed or interpreted.