Textiles and Modernist Architecture: a proximate relation
About the lecture
Join distinguished art historian and curator Dr Lynne Cooke as she considers a selection of tapestries by artists including Le Corbusier, Josef Albers, Mona Hessing and Helen Frankenthaler, all collected by renowned Modernist architect Harry Seidler.
Annie Albers' On Designing argues for a partnership between designer and architect; Dr Cooke will continue that conversation through Seidler's collections and the relationship between textiles and Modernist architecture.
While studying architecture at Harvard with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and champion of the Modernist movement, Marcel Breuer, Seidler spent a summer at Black Mountain College where Annie and Josef Albers were teaching. He later described this formative experience as game changing.
This lecture will examine what came of these relationships and the impact on textile practices and architectural modernism, asking if textiles emerge as central, rather than only decorative.
Dr Lynne Cooke’s visit is supported by the Macgeorge Bequest, the School of Social and Political Sciences and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney USA Foundation.
About the speaker
Dr Lynne Cooke
Dr Lynne Cooke is a curator and art historian based in New York. Her recent exhibitions include 'Outliers' and 'American Vanguard Art', 2018; 'Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction', 2023-2025, and 'Ceija Stojka: Making Visible', presented at The Drawing Center, New York, in 2026. Cooke has published widely on contemporary art including essays on Francis Alys, James Castle, Zoe Leonard, Agnes Martin and Rosemarie Trockel. A 2026 Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, she has texts forthcoming on the work of Analia Saban and William L Hawkins.
Further information
Image: Australia Square plaza with Le Corbusier UNESCO tapestry, March 1968, photograph: Max Dupain © Penelope Seidler
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