In the lecture “Thread of Abstraction: A Comparative Study of Italian and International Textile Artists,” curator Ginevra de Blasio presents a year-long research project funded by the Italian Council grant. Here, “abstraction” does not denote style, but a framework: textiles as metaphor for the structuring of existence.
Rather than treating textiles as defined by their material qualities alone, the lecture opens a broader understanding of the textile as a complex form of thinking that emerged with the earliest expressions of the human. From this perspective, the recent inclusion of textile in contemporary art discourse is less a novelty than a return: a renewed recognition of one of humanity’s oldest practices, reactivated under contemporary conditions.
The lecture travels through pivotal moments when textiles and art become most deeply intertwined. Rather than following a linear history, it compares textile practices across diverse socio-cultural contexts from the earliest mythological stories to the present. Despite sharp differences and contemporary adaptations within today’s infrastructures—fashion, computation, and digital systems—what endures across cultures, time, and geography are textiles’ fundamental principles: time, touch, and repetition. In a world increasingly driven by speed and screens, these practices insist on slowness and embodiment—rewinding us, thread by thread, back into our humanity.
This research project is granted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.
About the speaker: Ginevra de Blasio is a curator and writer from Rome, Italy, currently based in New York City. She holds a BA in Art History and Visual Culture from the University of Exeter, England, and an MA in Visual Arts Administration from NYU, New York. Her curatorial and professional experience includes roles at the Drawing Center, Performa, Fondazione Corsini, 99 Canal, and Paula Cooper Gallery. She is currently engaged in multiple independent and institutional projects, working alongside professionals including Adam Weinberg, Director Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Joachim Pissarro, founding member of the Global Museum Strategy Group and Professor Emeritus of Art History at Hunter College, CUNY. She is a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail and she recently received an Italian Council grant for curatorial research and will lead international public programs with partner institutions focused on textile artists.
