About Alan Magee's TapestriesMagee began working on his first tapestry, Zazen, shortly after his 2002 exhibition at Forum Gallery, Los Angeles, when artist friends Donald Farnsworth and John Nava invited him to join them in their newly launched tapestry project. The two were about to install nearly fourty grand-scale tapestries in architect José Rafael Moneo's Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral. Nava's commissioned tapestries were based on his paintings and employed a process devised and refined by the two collaborators. The new method permitted an extraordinarily rich and detailed translation of image into woven fabric. This new generation of tapestries is woven in Belgium on Jacquard looms—machines often cited as the nineteenth century precursors of the modern computer. Over several years of work on the cathedral tapestries, Farnsworth and Nava, using their own patented software and color palettes, stretched the limits of the present day Jacquard. The results are dazzling–even to the master weavers operating the looms in Belgium. Magee's first tapestry was commissioned to hang in the Great Room of the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, Maine. More recently his tapestries have been displayed at the James A. Michener Art Museum, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Frye Art Museum, and the Shorenstein Building (Bank of America Building) in San Francisco. Alan Magee's tapestries are available through the artist's Maine studio where they can be seen by appointment, from the Edith Caldwell Gallery in Sausalito, California, and from Élan Fine Arts in Rockland, Maine. |
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