Anita Bracalente

Artist Bio

She was an art museum administrator for 39 years, exposing herself to all forms of art across all historic periods and cultures. This allowed her to combine her knowledge and skill set as a practicing artist, as well as her love of art history and aesthetics. During this time, she continued to practice her studio work (painting) and she actively exhibited throughout the United States, having received awards and grants with her works entering into private collections in the U.S. and Europe. Her practice suddenly came to a halt for reasons she still cannot explain.

She became increasingly interested in craft and craft practices incorporated into the daily routines of indigenous craftspeople. Through a chance encounter, the local fiber store offered a class in bead knitting. Long ago, Anita collected antique beaded purses. She enrolled in the class, not knowing how to knit, and produced a small amulet bag in one color. She was hooked on the process, but her interest was in multi-colored compositions –a compliment to her paintings and mixed media collages utilizing patterns and inventive forms from nature that she produced over the years in her studio practice. The portability of these small, knitted works also allowed for “knit on the go,” thus incorporating the practice of working throughout the day routine and a full-time job.

In 2009, she was invited to participate in the Missouri Fiber Artists city-wide biannual exhibitions in St. Louis and the regional galleries, where her tiny works were received enthusiastically. Ten years into this invented process of hers, she had not identified as a fiber artist.

Due to the very slow process of knitted beads, she has not pursued one-person exhibitions as ambitiously as she once did, but she has been included in juried exhibitions and invitationals nationally and internationally ever since. Now retired from museum work, she has expanded her disciplines into paper weavings, Joomchi collages, and abstract patterns and forms found in nature through her digital photography, all of which inform her beadworks.

Education
Indiana University School of Fine Arts, BA
Area of Specialty and Expertise:
Visual artist, painter, fiber artist, landscape designer, photographer, landscape historian, lecturer, freelance writer
Art Museum professional (registrar) 1982 – 2021
Selected Exhibitions [in fiber arts only]:
Solo Exhibitions
Blooming-Ton, undistillung for tekstil (Venue for Textiles), April 29 – June 18, 2022, Copenhagen, DK2009,
September, Innovations in Textiles “8”, Bead-It, Edwardsville, IL, Missouri Fiber Artists
2007, September, The Devil is in the Details, Prima Gallery, Bloomington, IN
Juried/Invitational Exhibitions
Interplay, A National/International Juried Exhibition, Surface Design Association, The Dairy Barn, Athens, OH, June 27 – August 2024 Book of Hours
National Open Juried Exhibition 2024, Providence Art Club, RI, June 27 – July 19, 2024, Merit Award
Embankment, Undercurrent,
By Hand, Blue Line Gallery, Roseville, CA, Winter, 2024, Book of Hours, Winter Creek,
Craft Forms 2023 28th International Juried Exhibition of Contemporary Fine Craft, Davenport Gallery, Wayne Art Center, Wayne, PA, December 2, 2023 – January 20, 2024, 500 submissions, 96 chosen Embankment, Meditations Along the Water’s Edge
47th Midstates Craft Exhibition, Evansville Museum of Art, November 23, 2023 – March 17, 2024, Lost River, Indiana
Still, Embankment, Meditations Along the Water’s Edge, online exhibition, Artstonish, 2023
Material World: A Contemporary Fiber Arts Exhibition, July 28 – September 9, 2023, The Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County, NC, Under Current
Afterlives, Surface Design Association, online exhibition June-August 2023, Winter Creek
Indiana Now, Greater Lafayette Museum of Art, May 5 – August 6, 2023, Lost River, Indiana
Through the Eye of the Needle, Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, February – April 22, 2023, Peekskill, NY, Lost River, Indiana
Tenuous Threads, Atlantic Gallery, NYC, February – March 2023 Undercurrent
Site Brooklyn, Series, online exhibition, Fall, 2022 Midwest Landscape I: June; Midwest Landscape II Tornado; Midwest Landscape III Rural Crafts
2022 Yarn, Rope, String Fiber Art Now, December 8, 2022 – June 26, 2023, New Bedford, MA, with publication Fiber Art Now, Summer 2022, limited invitation to exhibit at the New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, MA. Midwest Landscape III: Rural Crafts, Breadbasket Doylie
2022 Surface: A National Juried Exhibition Highlighting the Use of Textures and Patterns in Artwork, May 28 – June 25, 2022, d’Art Center, Norfolk, VA. [Exhibition is archived at d’Art Center] 62 artists/ 64 artworks out of 738 entries Undercurrent
2020 The 11th Lausanne to Beijing International Fiber Art Biennale “Symbiosis to Coexistence” online digital, less than 10% of foreign submissions/applications accepted. Chance Encounters Bloomington-Madrid-Beijing
2019, Summer, Patterns, online exhibition, Surface Design Association
2018, Micro-Macro, September – December 1, 2018, The Foundry Art Center, St. Char

Artist Website

Artist Statement

My textiles are constructed of knitted beads comprising interlocking ordered patterns, which frequently dissolve into nonlinear disorder, randomness, and reinvention. The knitted beads are strung (backwards) onto the working thread and then knitted off. I am deeply engaged in both the process and technique.

I am interested in the intersection of human experience, nature, non-human creatures, the universe, and these relational patterns within entities. Formally, my ideas derive from an intimate encounter with patterns found in nature, the universe, and an eye towards the material culture of textiles found worldwide. We are habitual creatures living a patterned co-existence with fellow humans, nature, and the whole of the universe. Our lives are structured within a duality of behavioral patterns, beneficial, destructive, personal, communal, local, and global. Our perceptions are transient and exist on many levels simultaneously, awaiting inquiry, challenge, question, and dissolution. My inner thoughts and ideas evolve in tandem with the slow progression of the knitting process. While my compositions appear carefully constructed in a linear structure, in fact, they are created in an ever-evolving method of reassessment and spontaneity in a non-linear development. The interweaving of the micro and macro structures serves as a metaphor for the human/nature relationship.

Formally, I trained in painting, and my art practice moved through abstraction to figurative, landscape, back to abstraction, and pattern painting, which led me to an appreciation of textiles. While still a practicing artist, I worked as a museum administrator, exposing me to all forms of art across historic periods and world cultures. This allowed me to combine my skill sets as a practicing artist and utilize my art history and aesthetics in my daily work. I became increasingly interested in craft and craft practices incorporated into the daily routines of indigenous craftspeople, many of whom I had the honor of meeting. Utterly by dumb chance, I enrolled in a “bead knitting” class at the local fiber store. I produced a one-color amulet bag. I was hooked and moved towards what I call “beaded panels”, thus reinvesting in some of my earlier ideas in patterns and abstraction in my paintings.

I know of no precedent for my beaded compositions. This newfound craft-making allowed me to “knit on the go” and incorporate my making throughout the day, being inspired by indigenous craftspeople and their culture of craft and work. As in a painting, the very uselessness of my beaded panels defines its own function transcendentally as wholly an aesthetic contemplation.

As material and medium, beads have a universal appeal and transcend historical epochs, and speak to an ethnographic past and present. I have found that in sharing my works with indigenous peoples, from Native Americans, Chinese, and African ethnic groups, my works are relatable. Time is understood, marked on each knot and stitch.