Briefly Noted: Green Textiles

Many of the baskets, tapestries, and quilts in Green: The Color and the Cause at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., are visually intriguing, but unfortunately the environmental theme required a series of hectoring artist statements. The exhibit, which closed in September, mixes old fabrics, such as a fourth-century Roman tapestry featuring a female figure, with contemporary weavings. 

Emily Dvorin's Verdundant, a spiky basket resembling an alien cactus concocted of green electrical wire, electrical connectors, and cable ties, is said to be "a commentary on overconsumption of commercial goods, societal excess, and throwaway consumerism." Objects such as Emily DuBois' exquisitely woven fig leaf and Ruth Marshall's knitted life-sized facsimile of a flayed jaguar skin are visually captivating and don't need to be justified by strained and tendentious "green" rhetoric.  —Ronald Bailey