How did a rare 16th-century Renaissance tapestry, currently housed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, come to be the unlikely centerpiece of a fascinating performance running in downtown Manhattan?
is the brainchild of artist Suzanne Bocanegra, who has used the monumental weaving as a springboard to create a piece that is part lecture, part performance, part historical deep dive. Also titled , it’s brought to life by a vivid mixture of spoken word threaded with the artist’s insightful cultural commentary and personal reflections, colorful supporting visuals that play on a large screen, and a seamless performance by actor Lili Taylor.
If it sounds like there’s a lot to unpack here, that’s because there is. But trust me, it’s worth it.
For starters, , is “a key example of Renaissance weaving,” according to Elizabeth Cleland, curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Met. “It was originally the central hanging in a nine-piece tapestry series, known collectively as ‘The Honors,’ that is often perceived as the most important tapestry series of the first quarter of the sixteenth century,” she told me over email.
Honor from the series “The Honors.” Design attributed to Bernard van Orley and workshop, with collaborators. Designed before 1520, woven between 1525 and 1532. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The first edition of “The Honors” was made for Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and remains in the Spanish Patrimonio Nacional collection. Meanwhile, the Met’s tapestry “was part of the second (and only other surviving) edition, made some time between 1525 and 1532 for Charles’s trusted advisor, Cardinal Erard de la Marck, Prince-Bishop of Liege and one of the most powerful men of his generation.” The Met was fortunate enough to acquire the work in 2015.
The subject matter is also key; the series as a whole was commissioned and designed to present “a great allegorical guide to the qualities a successful ruler should espouse,” said Cleland. Seven tapestries were meant to capture the themes of Faith, Virtue, Prudence, Justice, Fame, Nobility, and Honor, with two additional works dedicated to Fortune and Infamy.
Bocanegra Takes on
Bocanegra first became fascinated by tapestry-making via the art of Anni Albers, particularly some of the Bauhaus artist’s 1920s weavings that she studied “and drew over and over again,” she told me in a phone interview.
This particular angle of her multidisciplinary practice eventually led to an introduction to the Met’s tapestry experts, including Cleland, who were interested in commissioning a related performance or lecture. The Met eventually commissioned and hosted the piece a few years ago. One of the producers on the current run is actor Frances McDormand who previously collaborated with Bocanegra on a Shaker Museum show and performance last fall. Bocanegra told me her initial tapestry research and work efforts were interrupted in 2020, giving her plenty of initial time to think about her technique and approach.
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor, in performance at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on February 19, 2022. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
However, Bocanegra has packed the lecture with so many insightful connections and detail, mining not just on her personal but ancient and social history.
Part of it reads: “I wanted to make pieces, complicated and busy-like Renaissance tapestries, but also simple and plain. There are exceptions—but historically Men weave for profit, the men who wove the tapestry were paid professionals, working in strictly regulated crafts guilds. It was Illegal for women to belong to the guild. Women weave cloth at home—for their family’s use. Unpaid.”
This thread leads on to personal reflections about how the artist resisted her mother’s urging to take home economics class in high school, and how she later found a library book on the history of home economics, randomly. “It was created by Ellen Swallow Richards a chemist specializing in sanitation and the first woman to graduate from MIT. Home economics was Richards’s attempt to bring honor to the work that women did in the home.”
Bocanegra also manages to weave in memories of her favorite childhood fairy tales, such as (a “gruesome story about starvation and killing your family” but also one with “a house made of candy”). There are also deep dives into the brutality of religious persecution via the Spanish Inquisition and the honor conferred to young girls via the medals and insignia of the Girl Scouts, of which Bocanegra was an avid member during her youth.
Taylor Takes on
“Suzanne follows things she respects,” actor Lili Taylor told me in a phone interview. “She makes connections and she keeps following things. She’s always making meaning, and I think it’s an important outlook for everyone, not just artists.”
Taylor has now been working with Bocanegra for over a decade, including on previous performances such as , , and , which appeared at various venues across the U.S.
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor, in performance at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on February 19, 2022. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
Previous one- or two- night performances of took place at the Met post-pandemic, but this two-week run at the the Performing Garage in Soho (ending Sunday, September 14) marks the longest continuous run to date.
Taylor, who is soon heading to Germany to commence multi-month filming of the prequel told me that performing every night “is actually kind of fun. Suzanne is loving it, because she understands what happens when you settle into a run. You don’t have to keep stressing out.”
Their shared ability to roll with the punches was more than obvious on opening night on September 3, when Taylor walked onstage with an air cast and a cane. In very meta-fashion, she said, “Lili will be performing with a broken ankle tonight. She tripped over her dog Oreo in the middle of the night. This is Oreo.” A large image of her Shih Tzu-Chihuahua flashed on a screen to laughter and “awws” from the packed theater.
When I asked Bocanegra about the set-up of enlisting Taylor to read (she wears an earpiece and receives the text as spoken from the artist), she explained: “I’m not an actor and I have seen so many artist and art historian lectures over the years where, even if the information is fascinating, of course they’re not trained. I don’t know how to entertain.”
Cleland, for her part, has enjoyed watching Bocanegra engage with the tapestry.
“She immediately grasped the performative character of the scene and the series,” she said. “So many modern-day observers would either dismiss or revere this as a precious but anachronistic relic of a totally distant society; conversely, Suzanne treats the tapestry and its message as a fresh and absorbing springboard for her own artistic ingenuity… is a work of art, provocative, funny, multi-layered and clever, and I love witnessing this 16th-century art and 21st-century artist collide!”
Honor
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
