Ann Glazer

Red Garden

September 3 - October 8

In a series of ritual textiles, inspired by a100-year-old family story of love and death, collaged images of 19th Century Eastern European embroidery, enlarged and printed on velvet, reimagine traditional fertility imagery.

In the early 1900’s, Alter Brody, an immigrant from Belarus, wrote poems about a family tragedy, about a mother’s love and loss. The soul of that ancestral story flows through Red Garden.

Historically, in villages in Eastern Europe during droughts, epidemics and other disasters, women gathered at dawn to spin, weave and embroider sacred cloths. If completed in one day, the embroideries were believed to ward off evil. The imagery in these cloths originates in pagan beliefs. Stitched in red, they feature a goddess, flanked by horses, birds and flowers. Symmetrical, the designs manifest the harmony of moral balance and offer blessings for harvest and fertility.

Inspired by the poems of Alter Brody and these ancestral traditions, Glazer uses technology to reboot the one-day cloth and create ritual textiles for our time. Collaged and enlarged images of 19thCentury Eastern European embroidery are UV printed on velvet and hang like tapestries from the ceiling.

Ann Glazer creates works that cross mediums. Her experimentation with process combines technology, research, and intuition to conjure the unknown. Glazer received a BA from Brown University, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and fellowships from the Dallas Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at Salon Acme, Mexico City; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the Torrance Art Museum, CA; the Dallas Contemporary; the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, the Reading Room, Dallas; Women & Their Work, Austin; and Barry Whistler, Conduit, A.I.R., DW, Kirk Hopper, and Liliana Bloch Galleries. Glazer lives and works in Dallas and New York City and will be teaching BAD DRAWING at Williams College in January.