The Heroes Tapestries

I am painting a series of heroically-scaled portraits inspired by the Met Cloisters’ Heroes Tapestries to hang in the Heroes Gallery. During the decade-long conservation of these important early 15th c tapestries, one of them will always be conspicuously missing from the gallery. My paintings will celebrate the ongoing effort to conserve these medieval artworks, creating a dialogue with the tapestries in the room and reminding us of the one that is absent.

During my visits to the Met’s textile conservation lab, I have studied the Julius Caesar tapestry with conservators Kathrin Colburn and Kisook Suh. We discuss the structure of textiles and the myriad choices that must be made in conservation. The Heroes tapestries are at once massive and delicate. Their continued existence demands that broken warp threads be replaced for structural support. After I marveled at how surgically Kisook inserted new threads through the channels of 600-year-old pass threads, these threads have become part of the composition of my painting.

My conversations with curators the Medieval Department reveal how differently historical and quasi-mythic figures such as David or Julius Caesar were celebrated in Medieval art. Throughout this project I am challenged to consider contemporary views of The Hero and of the figures represented in the tapestries and my paintings. The large square format of my paintings and the super-sized faces pay homage to Andy Warhol’s Mao’s and Chuck Close’s warts-and-all self-portraits, also to comic book superheroes.

I call these paintings portraits. But what are they portraits of? Each painting represents a section of tapestry that represents a face. In early 15th century Paris, this tapestry was woven from a painting, a cartoon. My portrait is of the tapestry up close in its current worn, torn, repaired and clumsily patched state. Broken warp threads form shadows and create shapes that neither the weaver nor the artist of the cartoon intended. My paintings honor the long history of these tapestries, revealing them as they are now. King David, for example, who will not be conserved for some years, has repairs all over his face. His left eye looks like it was split in the middle and patched back together. This makes for a truly strange face that I find fascinating. The more I research the biblical figure of David, the more I see him as a kind of anti-hero.

Each of the paintings develops in its own way and I look forward to sharing my process with a curious public. I will be speaking about the project in the gallery on April 6th.

In the same way that I created Think Big! for the Bode Museum in Berlin, this will be a creative collaboration with my friends who are actively engaged in the thoughtful labor of preserving a piece of our material past for future generations.