- Artist or Maker
- Lia Cook
United States, active California, Berkeley, born 1942 - Title
- Tunnel Four
- Date Made
- 1990
- Medium
- Rayon, woven and pressed
- Dimensions
- 48 × 40 × 2 in. (121.92 × 101.6 × 5.08 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2019.218
- Collecting Area
- Decorative Arts and Design
- Curatorial Notes
Lia Cook is a textile artist, renowned for expanding the formal scope of her field, originating new processes and techniques, and combining artistic concepts with cutting-edge technologies. After studying at UC Berkeley in the 1970s, she served on the faculty of the California College of Arts from 1976 to 2016. Cook chose to work in the area of textile art because she felt it had been marginalized in the conceptually-oriented art world of the 1960s, and had deep potential to speak to women’s issues. As a result, her work often treats textiles as subject--they are textiles about textiles. She started the body of work that includes Tunnel Four by creating a piece with woven "pockets," based on the simple textile form. Once she achieved this, she created completely self-supporting "tunnels" that stood proud of the bottom woven surface. Tunnel Four is the last and most ambitious in her series of tunnel pieces.
Bobbye Tigerman, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator, Decorative Arts and Design, 2019
