Lenore Tawney, an artist whose monumental sculptural weavings redefined the possibilities of sculpture and weaving in the second half of the 20th Century and helped create the genre of fiber art, died Monday at her home in New York City. She was 100.
Her death was confirmed by Kathleen Nugent Mangan, her assistant and a friend who was the curator of a retrospective of her work in 1990.
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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when art and crafts were viewed in America as mutually exclusive disciplines, Ms. Tawney united them decisively and controversially. Trained as a sculptor and as a weaver, she combined several different techniques — plain weave, gauze weave, slit tapestry and open-warp weaving — to invent large, abstract and free-standing, or rather free-hanging, forms.
Traditionalists on both sides of the art-craft divide found fault, but she persisted in work that came to assume a grand architectural scale.
She moved from Ohio to Chicago in 1927 and worked as a court proofreader while taking classes at the Art Institute.
Beginning in the 1950s, Tawney executed several large-scale commissions in Chicago, New York and Santa Rosa, Calif. None of them remain on view.
Her work has entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.