Current Exhibition

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is excited and honored to feature Los Angeles-based artist Ferne Jacobs in her First Los Angeles gallery exhibition! The gallery’s focus on artists who engage in conceptual material practices aligns with Jacobs’ pioneering career.

Ferne Jacobs’ sculptures have been included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the MFA Boston, the MFA Houston, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the De Young Museum, and many more over several decades. Recently, Jacobs was a finalist for the prestigious 2024 Loewe Craft Prize. Currently her work is on public view at the MFA Boston and the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation.

At 82 years old, Jacobs is a ground-breaking pioneer in the International Fiber Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She continues her daily studio practice today, intuitively coiling and twining compelling abstract forms that infer historical provenance beyond their making.

On view will be coiled and twined free-standing sculpture and wall work, including new as well as work spanning over her 50-year career.

Jacobs is recognized for her technical mastery of material and process. Reinventing and advancing traditional techniques used for basketry and inventing countless other methods along the way, Jacobs has generated an entirely fresh format for sculptural art. Her acute sense of color melded with her poetic and intuitive approach are characteristic traits. Each piece begins with an idea, a dream, a story, or a picture in Jacobs’ mind, but it grows and takes on its own form over the months in which she shapes the artwork.

Jacobs plays with duality in terms of textures, contrast of color, interior and exterior, solids and voids. In terms of concept, she investigates the significance of masculinity and femininity, spirituality and religion, and the destruction of the natural world… Her pieces are meditations on the fiber of society and the nature of humanity in the modern world.
– Emily Zaiden, Essay: Connected Cells, Breathing Forms, Craft in America Exhibition, 2022

Improvisation guides Morabito’s woven abstractions; bold intersecting geometry with electrifying gold and hot neon colors are the intuitive gestures of “the body pulsing to the rhythm of the beat.” Morabito’s work delivers “a spark of divinity,” reaching back in time to the cultural zenith that celebrated queer spaces. However, citing health as the orthodoxy of reason, AIDS provided political heft for the erasure and censure of queer public centers in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Morabito’s unabashed emphasis on metaphor, beauty, and sensuality fuels the recovery of queer identity, community, and place—“where glamour, glitter, sweat, and low light open embodied pathways to find something greater than yourself.” Glass beads, hand-dyed wool, and cotton in the hands of Morabito become the sacrament of possibility, defying voices that would choose to turn back the clock of time.

In tandem with their studio, John Paul Morabito pursues a practice-led scholarship that positions weaving as a critical platform of cultural production. Their writing has been published in Art China, The Textile Reader 2 (China Academy of Art), The Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice, Textile: Cloth and Culture. They are the editor of Weaving Beyond the Binary, a special issue of the international peer reviewed journal, Textile: Cloth and Culture. Their work has been included in museum exhibitions, including the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC; The Threads We Follow, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC; Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ledesma, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Arts, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou City, China. Their tapestries are included in public and private collections, with a recent placement at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.