Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen’s curation of Wall Hangings at The Museum of Modern Art in 1969 brought together an international group of artists who used hand weaving to create art. Presenting hand weaving in its own right, rather than as a sampling technique directed to the efficiency of industrial production, signaled a departure for MoMA. Textiles had previously been exhibited as industrial design and typically credited to companies rather than individuals. [1] Despite the exhibition venue, Glenn Adamson summarizes that the exhibition “was in some ways a very anti-modernist affair.”[2] Hand production—dare I say craft—was in plain sight. While subsequent decades saw the legacy of Wall Hangings fade, the exhibition’s influence, as this issue of the Surface Design Journal attests, has resurfaced. But the exhibition does not represent a singular, or exclusive, lineage.

Leonor Antunes arguably occupies another lineage, albeit one that overlaps with Wall Hangings. Lisbon-born and Berlin-based, Antunes consistently uses archival research, followed by adaptation and alteration of designs which she presents as a form of remembering...

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