Dialogue: Lindenfeld + Lindenfeld

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center presents Dialogue: Lindenfeld + Lindenfeld, an exhibition celebrating the works of mother-daughter artists, Lore Kadden Lindenfeld and Naomi Lindenfeld. Lore, who attended and graduated from Black Mountain College in the 1940s, made a career as a textile designer and educator while continuing to create weavings, fiber collages, artist books, and drawings. Her daughter Naomi creates colored clay objects that are tactile, useful, and visually complex. In the exhibition, the mesmerizing striations of color in Naomi Lindenfeld’s pottery are placed in dynamic conversation with her mother’s innovative textiles, mixed media collages, and drawings.

From Naomi Lindenfeld—

I grew up with my mother’s loom in our family’s living room. Not many years later I ended up with clay carving tools and a rolling pin in my own ceramics studio. The pairings of work in this show exemplify the influences of my mother’s work on me and have served as an opportunity to both grow creatively and to honor my mother and her life’s work.

I grew up hearing riveting stories of Black Mountain College, its avant-garde, experimental environment and brilliant, unique personalities. As well, I was exposed to many artists and craftspeople during my childhood and took my first pottery class with a friend of my mother’s. I responded to the immediacy of clay more than what appeared to be the tedium of threading warps on a loom. While working on a degree in ceramics from Boston University’s Program in Artisanry, I discovered the Japanese technique, Nerikomi, of layering colored clays to create patterns. I have been captivated by exploring many ways of working with colored clay ever since. I have also come to realize that my method of working with clay – the sense of movement, abstract graphic quality, nature-themed imagery and vivid color – echoes my mother’s textiles. In designing work for this show, I was first more drawn to my mother’s fiber collage work than her weavings, as a closer match for my own techniques and sensibilities. I later saw that the way I carve into the layers in two directions appears as woven fabric.

It was both fascinating and challenging to interpret a two-dimensional medium within a three-dimensional realm; to not just reproduce my mother’s ideas and imagery but to draw inspiration and design the pieces as my own. My hope is that my ceramics, while paying homage to my mother, stand on their own just as her fiber works do.

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ARTISTS

Lore Kadden Lindenfeld (1921 – 2010) emigrated with her family from Germany to the U.S. in 1938. After settling in a suburb of Boston, Lore worked to help support her family, earning fourteen dollars per week as a seamstress and sales clerk. She was the primary breadwinner for the family. She had previously studied fashion design in Germany and worked as a seamstress doing alterations and in various other jobs.

After enrolling in adult education classes at Harvard, she received a scholarship to study at Black Mountain College in 1945. She remained at BMC until she graduated in 1948. Lore studied textile design with Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Franziska Mayer as well as taking classes with mathematician Max Dehn, artist Josef Albers, and writer M.C. Richards.. Her training at BMC was integral to her development as a textile designer and her work in industrial textile production.

Inspired by the Alberses and the Bauhaus tradition, she worked as a textile designer for the New York fashion industry, followed by a career as a weaver, fiber collage artist, and as a weaving and art history teacher on the college level.

Naomi Lindenfeld has developed a line of colored clay works, intended for daily use as well as for gatherings and celebrations. Flowing movement is the main feeling that Naomi hopes to convey in her work. Her inspiration is drawn from her love of dance, patterns in the natural world that result from the movement of water and wind on materials like rock, wood, and shells. The colored clay technique allows one to work with colors while making a piece. Naomi loves to experiment with different color combinations to see how colors blend and contrast to create different moods.

She took her first pottery class at the age of 12, continuing to work in clay in high school, and finally earning a degree in ceramics from Boston University’s Program in Artisanry. Naomi has had the chance to share her enthusiasm of colored clay by teaching workshops at many craft institutes around New England, and since the fall of 1998, she has been the ceramics teacher at The Putney School. While being one of the founding members of the Brattleboro Clayworks, a potter’s collective, she now has her own home studio in West Brattleboro.

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RECEPTION AND TALK

Join us for the opening reception for Dialogue: Lindenfeld + Lindenfeld hosted at BMCM+AC on Friday, January 30, 2025 from 5:30–8pm.

On Saturday, January 31, 2025 at 11am, Naomi Lindenfeld will give a “Perspectives” talk about Dialogue: Lindenfeld + Lindenfeld and the artistic conversations between works in the exhibition.

Both events take place at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street, Asheville, NC}. Free and Open to All