Angela Fraleigh's exhibit Threaded with Moonlight is on view at the Allentown Art Museum through March 17, 2024.
The Allentown Art Museum is featuring an exhibition of Professor of Art Angela Fraleigh’s show Threaded with Moonlight through March 17, 2024.
From the museum: Angela Fraleigh’s monumental paintings retrieve women from the margins of history, offering alternative, empowering narratives. By taking figures and motifs from the art-historical canon and placing them in new, dreamlike environments, she creates space for disruption and agency.
Threaded with moonlight is Fraleigh’s newest body of work, inspired by the Allentown Art Museum’s rich textile holdings and the long history of textiles as a medium associated with female labor. This trio of large-scale paintings and accompanying suite of small works explore spinning, stitching, and weaving as acts of power.
In these works, Fraleigh centers women as makers with the potential to craft meaning and magic as well as cloth. Her compositions layer global textile designs traditionally used to invite blessings, protection, or abundance—positioning these patterns not only as a complex subversive language, but also as talismanic. Fraleigh’s works also investigate women’s relationships with female deities associated with the textile arts, potent figures who in many cultures also play key roles in creation narratives, life, and death. A site-specific wall treatment inspired by tree-of-life textiles builds on these themes, situating Fraleigh’s paintings in an environment of burgeoning plant and animal life.
The exhibition presents these compelling new works in dialogue with previous work by Fraleigh, as well as a selection of textiles from the Museum collection that inspired the commission.
Threaded with moonlight intertwines traditions from across centuries and cultures, honoring women’s labor and examining the possible communications, intentions, and invocations embedded in their work.
Angela Fraleigh: Threaded with moonlight is supported through the generosity of The Bernard and Audrey Berman Foundation and the Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment.
Through January 26, 2023, The Sean Horton Gallery in New York City is presenting “Invisible Women,” a selection of Fraleigh’s small works. The gallery writes: “Drawn from her larger practice, and seen together as a group for the first time, the selection of small paintings by Angela Fraleigh serves as a survey of sorts, an introduction for some and a reminder to others, of the artist’s vast and rigorous research-driven museum projects spanning almost two decades.”
In the spirit of Giving Tuesday, Fraleigh is offering $200 off select watercolors and donating 10 percent of all proceeds to the Malala Fund. The organization provides educational programs and services to empower school girls in seven countries. Their work is achieved by delivering capacity-building resources to local activists, called Malala Fund Champions, to empower women through equal access to education. The discount is available through Saturday, December 2, 2023.