Fiber artist weaves tradition with new techniques
Mar. 22—Bhakti Ziek has lived a lot of lives. First, she says, were her hippie days when she was looking for the perfect commune that she never found. And then she lived for five years in Mexico and Guatemala, where she learned the art of backstrap weaving and even briefly ran a restaurant.
She returned to the U.S. after living through a harrowing earthquake in 1976 in Guatemala, and a few years later, she wound up graduating from the University of Kansas in Lawrence with a second bachelor's degree. From then on — the next 40 years of her life — Ziek dedicated her life to weaving.
"What's interesting about weaving is that we know so much about cloth," says the artist, whose work is currently on exhibit at Santa Fe's form & concept gallery. "From the minute we're born, we're swaddled in it. We're buried in it. We wear it every day. We get up, and we put on cloth. It's invisible. Who thinks about it being made of these individual threads?"
Ziek, who lives in Santa Fe, will be at form & concept twice a week for the duration of her exhibit to answer questions and demonstrate how she works the loom. The exhibit also includes the work of a few other contemporary weavers who were taught by Ziek at some point during their careers.
"We're thinking about Bhakti as this master weaver who is kind of weaving stories between all of these threads and techniques," says Jordan Eddy, director of form & concept. "Bhakti very early on was creating this conceptual work that had a really strong craft tradition behind it. And then there's the development of technology around that time; she's switching between hand-weaving and the Jacquard loom, which has this programming element to it. You see how Bhakti rode every wave of evolution in this art-craft conversation."
Now age 77, Ziek, born Judith Ann Ziek, says her early life was marked by a lack of direction. She earned her first degree, which was in psychology, and was rejected when she applied to Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, for a graduate degree for the first time. She briefly enrolled at a craft academy in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, but she found that it wasn't for her.
details
Bhakti Ziek: A Tenuous Thread runs through April 26
form & concept
435 S. Guadalupe Street
505-780-8312; formandconcept.center
However, she developed a lifelong interest in weaving by studying how the traditional communities in Guatemala used the backstrap loom and later wrote a book on it with her mother, Nona M. Ziek, in 1978 (Weaving on a Backstrap Loom: Pattern Designs from Guatemala, Hawthorne Books). Ziek enrolled at the University of Kansas around that time and met her husband, Mark, while studying there. She changed her name to Bhakti after studying at a Ram Dass satsang, a meeting where visitors learn the teachings of Ram Dass, a modern yoga guru.
But one of her professors, Eleanor DuQuoin, really changed her life.
"She made me understand that by getting dressed in the morning, I was making choices," Ziek says. "She'd put a bowl on her head to cut her hair. She didn't show, and she didn't publish. She was never going to become anything more than an assistant professor. But she opened worlds to us."
While a senior at Kansas, Ziek says, she entered a competition for her weavings and won. The piece sold, and she began to think of herself as an artist.
Doors that were previously closed to her began to open. She was accepted at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1987 and studied under contemporary textile artist Gerhardt Knodel — and she finally received her master's degree in fine art in 1989.
A year later, she started at what she calls her first real responsible job: running the woven design program at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Sciences.
Fate then threw her an interesting twist: The college tossed its 19th century looms in favor of two electronic Jacquard-style looms, which uses a series of punch cards to control the weaving patterns. Ziek had to learn what this technology could help her create, since she had learned on the backstrap and floor looms.
"The thing about a floor loom is that when you step on a pedal, it raises," she says. "You're sitting there, and you're using your hands and your feet. And then you step on a different pedal and it raises completely different threads."
But the Jacquard loom allowed her to take a digital design and turn it into a woven structure. She could take the art of brocading that she learned in Guatemala and apply it in a different way; she could paint her wefts (the horizontal filling thread) and then detangle them to reposition them.
Ziek was inventing techniques and creating new forms, contributing to a tradition of artistry that had been invented thousands of years earlier.
In 2006, she co-wrote another book, The Woven Pixel: Designing for Jacquard and Dobby Looms Using Photoshop (Bridgewater Press), and made it available for free on the internet.
"It's central to all my work, the passing on of knowledge," she says. "I learned from somebody. I taught somebody else. I'll be gone. They'll teach. The whole history of textile is anonymous weavers. I don't have illusions. I'll be anonymous. But the knowledge keeps going."
Ziek taught at the University of Kansas and spent a summer as a visiting professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. She later moved in New Mexico, where she and her husband bought land in Cerrillos in 1998 and built a straw bale house. "We didn't pour the concrete," she says, "but I stacked every bale in that house."
They lived there from 2002 to 2007 and then moved to Vermont for a while, where she lived as a full-time artist. A few times a year, she says, students who were sponsored by grants would live with her for a stretch and study her art.
"They came from Germany and Japan and Finland. They came from all over," she says. "They mostly came to learn Jacquard, even though I could teach anything. ... They stayed in our house because there wasn't a hotel or anything. We lived in a town of 1,500 people, so I cooked for them, I taught them 24/7."
Ziek says she's been weaving in one form or another since 1969 and has mastered many different techniques and skills. But she's even more proud of passing along her knowledge. That's always been the motivating practice of her art, and her mission is to draw attention to the incredible traditions of craft that came before her.
"Some artists are going to tell you the most important thing is they get an idea across," she says. "But for me, it's always been, 'Oh, you can do that in weaving? Let me understand it.'"
