Wisconsin artist Mary Bero breaks all the traditional rules of fiber art. She weaves what she calls "tapestry paintings." Her primary technique is to hand-stitch cotton or silk thread or floss to a cloth backing, simultaneously building up areas of color and texture that form striking images and patterns when seen together. Sometimes Bero augments these methods with acrylics, cloth, or paper, creating primitive explosions of vibrant color and emotion. This new body of work includes a multi-themed series of Ideograms sewn on black fabric.
Bero's subject matter may seem simple and direct; freely-rendered human faces and forms, animals and plants, repeated shapes and patterns. However, her artistic choices and technical execution reveal dimensions of subtlety and refinement that belie such impressions of thematic simplicity. As the viewer moves closer to one of Bero's pieces, the complexity and variety of her surfaces become increasingly evident.
Bero's work has been shown in exhibitions across the nation over her thirty-plus-year span of art-making. She is a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and is in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI; Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, and more.
