Claire Zeisler

Claire Zeisler began her career as a fiber artist relatively late. In her forties, she studied sculpture with Alexander Archipenko and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy at the Illinois Institute of Technology and weaving with Bea Swartchild; her first solo show took place when Zeisler was 60. Following instruction from a Haitian artist on knotting, her work in the 1960s was particularly avant-garde, pushing the definitions of fiber art, moving away from the loom toward three-dimensional, free-form structures. Claire Zeisler's innovative use of dense knotting and cascading hair-like fibers has been a major influence on successive generations of weavers and artists.