Claire Zeisler

Claire Zeisler (April 18, 1903 – September 30, 1991) was a noted American fiber artist who expanded the expressive qualities of knotted and braided threads, pioneering large-scale freestanding sculptures in this medium. Throughout her career Zeisler sought to create "large, strong, single images" with fiber. Zeisler's non-functional structures were constructed using traditional weaving and avant-garde off the loom techniques such as square knotting, wrapping, and stitching. Zeisler preferred to work with natural materials such as jute, sisal, raffia, hemp, wool, and leather. The textiles were often left un-dyed, evidence of Zeisler's preference for natural coloration that emphasized the fiber itself. When she used color, however, Zeisler gravitated towards red. Her work is influenced by and has influenced fiber artists in the 1960s and 70s such as Kay Sekimachi, Barbara Shawcroft, Lenore Tawney, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and Sheila Hicks.

Claire Block was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Columbia College Chicago for one year, then in 1921 married Harold Florsheim (an heir to Florsheim Shoe). After her divorce in 1943, she married Ernest Zeisler, a physician and author, in 1946. In the 1930s she bought works by Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Picasso, and as well as tribal objects including African sculptures, tantric art, ancient Peruvian textiles and more than 300 American Indian baskets. The ancient and ethnic textile cultures in Zeisler's private collection contrasted the textile culture in the West that became dominated by the mechanized loom after the Industrial Revolution. Instead of an emphasis on the utilization of textile making, avant-garde artists instead sought to revitalize the mechanized process through an emphasis on handcraft in which the artists gained "unmediated contact" with the materials. Zeisler's interest in working by hand using elementary construction techniques, common interests held by the avant-garde fiber artists in the 60s and 70s, often had "low culture connotations" of "utility, femininity, domesticity, amateurism, decorativeness, and even primitiveness."

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