Artist to explore social fabric in Philadelphia exhibit

Fabric is central to the work of artist Ann Hamilton. Her exhibit “cloth · a commonplace” opens this fall at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

The National Medal of Arts recipient joined NewsWorks Tonight host Dave Heller to discuss her collection.

Although she professes to be “totally 19th century,” Hamilton is currently focused on a Tumblr website she is developing to collect literary fragments that use textile language.

The site is meant to be an online, publicly sourced alternative to the Fabric Workshop exhibit.

“It’s a very old form, but I think on Tumblr and Twitter, you have contemporary forms of sharing quotations and things you want to remark upon,” she said.