Golden Thread 2 exhibition at Bravin Lee New York

Jill Krasny reports from Golden Thread 2, currently showing at BravinLee in New York

Textile artist Tula Oliveira makes provocative work that doesn’t shy away from confrontation. So, when longtime gallerist Karin Bravin tapped them to make a site-specific work for one of the oldest buildings in New York’s South Street Seaport, they knew they wanted to work with the 18th-century grain hoist.

Wheel of Fortune features a figure tied to the spokes, like a person being tortured by a breaking wheel. Hand-dyed silk colours the head, hands and feet a crimson colour; a dizzying patchwork of denim, polyester and old blankets covers the polyfill-stuffed body.

‘My work deals a lot with labour and thinking about the industrial past of the U.S.,’ says the Brooklyn-based educator, who used craft paper to plan a two-dimensional version of the object and determine its size. ‘I’m hoping it makes people think about fascism.’

For her part, Bravin hopes Oliveira’s work and others in The Golden Thread 2: A Fiber Exhibition, on view through May 19, makes people reconsider the medium of fibre art. ‘I wasn’t looking for a theme like weavers or embroiderers,’ says Bravin, who launched the offsite exhibition last year in the 1790s red-brick building, at 207 Front Street, with her husband, John Lee. ‘I wanted it to be: What can the medium do?’

With about 100 works by 61 artists, including eight installations, its dynamism is on full display. Chris Bogia’s painterly yarn-on-wood depiction of a candlelit table, Village Interior (Maspeth), greets visitors on the first floor. Steps away, in an adjacent room, Alissa Alfonso’s fanciful hand-dyed textile waste works, made to resemble household plants, line a fireplace. Nearby, a disembodied hand reaches down from the ceiling, showcasing Felix Beaudry’s ability to craft life out of machine-knit fabric and polyfill.

A third floor only accessible by staircase features Natalie Baxter’s soft sculpture series Warm Guns. Viewed from afar, the droopy pieces look like stuffed animals. Up close, their banana-shaped clips speak volumes about America’s gun violence.

The Golden Thread was initially conceived as an alternative to the ‘ice cube tray’ model, says Bravin, timed to coincide with art fairs like TEFAF and Frieze. This year, the couple is happy to embrace the foot traffic brought by those fairs. They extended the show to last for a month to give it its own special moment. ‘You’re taking this incredible space with history and repurposing it for art,’ says Bravin. ‘We wanted it to not just be lumped in with the fairs, but to enjoy that we have curators and clients in the city in May.’