Lenore Tawney

Tawney took weaving off the wall and into the air. In her Coenties Slip studio in lower Manhattan, a neighbour of Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, she developed open-warp weavings in the early 1960s, tall narrow forms where sections of bare thread let light through, using an adapted loom and a reed she designed. Later came her Clouds, thousands of linen threads hung from a ceiling grid. The 1963 exhibition Woven Forms at New York's Museum of Contemporary Crafts helped launch the fibre art movement around her.