Kris Dey (b. 1949)
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Biography • Kris Dey (b. 1949)
Kris Dey was born in Buffalo, New York and raised in Oakland, California. She studied art at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) where she graduated with a BA in 1972. She went on to receive an MA and then an MFA at UCLA, completing her education in 1976. Important mentors there for Dey were Bernard Kester, a professor of Textile Design who curated many West Coast fiber art exhibitions, and Vasa Mihich, professor of Design teaching color theory who worked in plastics in his own art.
In her earliest works, Kris Dey wrapped yarn on vertical bundles of sisal twine. By the late 1970s, Dey found her signature technique of wrapping hand-painted cloth torn into strips around wooden slats and plastic tubing. This style brought Dey to the attention of MoMA who included her in the exhibition Wall Hangings: The New Classicism. The exhibition was a follow up to their 1969 exhibition that helped establish fiber as its own art form. Dey exhibited a huge wall piece Cisza III measuring 20 feet long. The other artists in the exhibition were Madeleine Bosscher, Nancy Guay, Richard W. Landis, and Ed Rossbach. The exhibition curators Arthur Drexler from MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design and Jack Lenor Larsen selected the participating artists because their work marked a shift in intentions, moving their work back to the wall with rectangular formats and refinement of materials. This marked a second generation of fiber artists who no longer needed to take their work away from the wall to prove it was a worthy art form, like the works displayed in MoMA’s 1969 exhibition Wall Hangings. Textile scholars noted Dey’s use of traditional methods of local dying and wrapping that Dey made completely new.
Kris Dey looked for a technique that would capture the light and shifting patterns of nature. Using painted strips of fabric woven around tubular units, she created diffused patterns that appear to emanate light by orchestrating light and dark values. To make her strips, Dey would paint cotton sheeting with a solid background of variegated hues then hand-rip and wrap each strip onto narrow rods. These rods exposed a fraction of the fabric surface which was then airbrushed in place with an additional series of color gradations resulting in patterns of dashes against the solid background, sometimes even unwrapping to paint the backside of the fabric too. This method made use of a traditional resist-dye process. After all this, Dey would then have her materials to use for her finished works. In Horizon Series: 12:00AM, the base color of the fabric shifts from a pinkish-buff at the bottom through purple into a midnight blue at the top, suggesting the transition of the sky at dawn. Bright colors are added as perpendicular paired marks in arrangements of yellow and pink, green and red, and blue and red. A New York Times reviewer called her a “fiber pointillist,” an apt definition as each painted mark is a clean, defined color. There is a general movement in Horizon Series and Ribes as patterns march across and up the surface. Dey brings action to her works with juxtapositions when the shifts in the dyed material and the changing colors of the dots and dashes are offset. With the optical mixing of color and the break-up of patterns, Dey’s work appears to shimmer as the viewer takes in the work as a whole.
Dey’s mentor Bernard Kester wrote in the magazine American Craft that she offered “a relief surface that is at once illusory and perceptual coherent.” Often her work was noted for its optical effects leading to comparisons to Op Art painters.
In addition to an active museum presence, Kris Dey showed at the Allrich Gallery in San Francisco and Hunsaker/Schlesinger Associates in Los Angeles. In New York, she showed with Modern Master Tapestries. She received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1979. Dey’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA.
Major Exhibitions
Wall Hangings: The New Classicism, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1977
Young Americans: Fiber / Wood / Plastic / Leather, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC, 1977. Traveled to Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now Museum of Arts and Design), New York, NY
California Fiber Artists, Riverside Museum, CA, 1978 (six artists including Neda Al-Hilali and Lia Cook)
Transformation: UCLA Alumni in Fiber, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 1979
Threads, Dayton Art Institute, 1981 (included historic artists like Anni Albers, Lenore Tawney, Sheila Hicks and younger artists including Dey and Itter)
Pattern: An Exhibition of the Decorated Surface, American Craft Museum (now Museum of Arts and Design), New York, NY, 1982
Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical, American Craft Museum (now Museum of Arts and Design), New York, NY, 1986
Fiber Directions: West Coast, Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR, 1990, traveled to Redding Museum of Art and History, CA
Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001. Three-part exhibition from 2000 to 2003.