From Theory to Practice: Weaving in Response to the Grid in the Global Context

By: Meghan Kelly and Jessica Braum

The Art of the Grid

A grid is a framework of uniformly spaced horizontal and vertical lines that intersect at right angles, producing a series of squares or rectangles. One widely recognized example is the system of longitude and latitude lines used to locate points on a map. In art, the grid functions both as a visual structure and a conceptual framework, often linked to modernist movements. Although commonly tied to Minimalism—a movement that emerged in the late 1950s in New York—it holds broader historical and cultural significance. 

In her contribution to the catalogue for the National Gallery Singapore’s 2018 exhibition Minimalism: Space, Light, Object, Joan Kee writes, “the term [Minimalism] became shorthand for a heavily articulated set of imperatives and protocols governing a work’s physical appearance, creation, and its relationship with the viewer and the space of its display.”¹ Beyond the prescriptive thrust of Minimalism, grids have been employed for both aesthetic and functional purposes across diverse global contexts, predating and extending beyond the rise of Minimalism.

Reevaluating Minimalism as a component of cosmopolitan modernity is central to my dissertation research and LCDSS Graduate Externship project, which includes curating an online exhibition using Omeka, titled The Grid in the Global Context. I seek to expand the movement’s idiomatic scope with a particular focus on the formal language of Minimalism, which incorporates “such geometric fundaments as the grid and cube,” repetition, modularity, seriality, and systematic approaches to making art.²

By considering works by artists whose practices resonate with, but are not confined to, traditional definitions of Minimalism—including Kim Lim, Yoli Laudico, Annie Albers, Sopheap Pich, Rasheed Araeen, Nasreen Mohamedi, Mary Lee Bendolph, Mandy El-Sayegh, and others—I assemble a constellation of artists who exist outside the limited Euro-American canon. Their formal, conceptual, and contextual relationships enable a broader understanding of Minimalism and prompt a compelling revision of existing art historical narratives.

Workshop: Grids Across Borders: Art, Craft, and the Global Context

Building on my fellowship research that examines the dominant paradigm of the grid within an expanded framework, I partnered with Meghan Kelly, assistant professor of Textile Design at Jefferson University, to host the workshop Grids Across Borders: Art, Craft, and the Global Context, held in the LCDSS Innovation Space on 10 March 2025. Exploring the grid as a broadly-deployed visual, conceptual, and practical structure, the workshop braided together theory and practice by combining the hands-on experience of weaving with an art historical talk on the grid’s significance in modernity, expanding its interpretation across time, geography, and gender.

During the talk, workshop participants were first introduced to examples of the grid associated with a small group of mostly white, male artists who emerged in New York around 1960. Works by Sol LeWitt (and his referent, Eadweard Muybridge’s book The Human Figure in Motion, which charted the minute progression of human movement through thousands of photographs in grid format), Donald Judd, and Carl Andre typify canonical readings of the Minimalist grid. Many of these artworks helped illustrate how the grid was used to eliminate visual hierarchies, as a method of distribution, or to explore seriality and uniformity.

Attention then turned to Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay Grids, in which she describes the grid as “a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition within the visual arts,” prompting a critical reassessment of some of her claims. For example, Krauss states, “In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it’s antinatural, antiemetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.”³ Yet artists such as Agnes Martin complicate this reading. 

A recurring motif in Martin’s early 1960s work, dot-dash patterns appear in the painting White Flower, and by 1960 she had developed her signature grid pattern: a simple system of interlocking horizontal and vertical lines rendered in pristine, monochromatic compositions, typically in a six-foot-square format. While visually austere, these works retain an abstracted connection to the natural world. Titles such as Earth, Night Sea, and White Flower suggest Martin’s persistent engagement with organic themes, and her own writings affirm this connection—most notably her 1972 claim that “Anything can be painted without representation.”⁴ Through an extreme economy of formal means, Martin’s grid paintings convey a deeply felt emotional response to nature, challenging Krauss’s notion of the grid as inherently antinatural and detached from lived experience.

Finally, workshop participants considered artists belonging to the expanded vein of Minimalism whose works of art incorporate the grid. One such artist was Rasheed Araeen, a Pakistani-born, London-based artist whose work engages deeply with geometry, structure, and the politics of modernism. Araeen’s use of the grid challenges the neutrality often associated with minimalist form by embedding it with cultural critique and political resonance. 

Filipina artist Yoli Laudico served as another example. Laudico’s Three Works (1975) is an tri-part installation that explores the material and temporal dimensions of abstraction through the gridded configuration of refuse comprising stiff, oil-soaked banana leaves, black plastic photo backings, and bent black wood strips. The use of such materials highlights impermanence and decay, subverting the tenets of the material language of Minimalism which relied on industrial and non-art materials such as steel, aluminum, bricks, concrete, and fiberglass to emphasize objecthood.

Amongst a host of other works, participants viewed slides incorporating Kim Lim’s etching, Ladder Series I (1972); Ratanakiri Valley Drip, from a series of grid paintings by Sopheap Pich; several quilts by Mary Lee Bendolph; and Timing (1973/1980), a 16mm black-and-white silent film by Dóra Maurer.

Weaving: The Grid in Practice

The second portion of the workshop emphasized the pedagogical potential of the grid as both a conceptual framework and a material practice. Meghan guided participants through a hands-on activity that explored the grid in its tactile form through the act of weaving. Using small frame looms—simple, portable devices with notches to dictate warp spacing—participants translated abstract ideas into woven compositions. Meghan introduced the fundamentals of weaving, including how to read and draft a weave pattern—a gridded diagram that maps the threading, tie-up, and treadling of a design. This session reinforced the grid’s value not only as a visual structure but as a tool for cultivating structural thinking, creative experimentation, and historical awareness through material engagement.

Weaving, defined by the interlacing of two sets of yarns at right angles, provides a concrete method for understanding structural logic. The warp—the vertical yarns held under tension on the loom—served as the fixed foundation, while the weft—the horizontal yarns woven through—offered a dynamic counterpart. As participants manipulated the warp by lifting and lowering threads, they gained a deeper understanding of how spatial relationships and visual effects emerge from the systematic interlacing of materials. The weaving process became an experiential lesson in composition, rhythm, repetition, and order.

Participants engaged with pattern drafting as a process of design thinking rooted in the logic of the grid. Black and white squares arranged in geometric formations formed the visual language of the weave draft. Traditional weaving manuals provided drafts that yielded repeating forms—rectangles, diamonds, and optical illusions—while the frame loom, a blank grid, and yarn invited intuitive exploration. The pedagogical aim was to encourage participants to move beyond replication, using the grid not as a constraint but as a generative structure for invention.

In weaving drafts, black squares represented “raisers,” where the warp threads lifted above the weft, while white squares denoted “sinkers,” where the warp threads dropped below, allowing the weft to surface. Designing a draft required participants to think critically about how warp and weft interacted to build structure. A simple checkerboard draft creates a plain weave (or tabby); a 2×2 draft produces basketweave; a 3/1 twill—used in denim—generates a diagonal texture. 

Each participant designed a repeatable motif, which, when replicated across the warp and weft, became a complete pattern. Some chose to deviate from their initial drafts, incorporating stripes, asymmetries, or contrasting colors to explore the expressive potential of the loom. These spontaneous variations underscored the workshop’s broader pedagogical goal: to present the grid not only as a tool of order and repetition but as a flexible framework for creativity, critical reflection, and embodied learning. Many participants were inspired by themes and aesthetics explored presented throughout the art history talk. One weaver drew upon the colors in Annie Albers’s Pasture (1958) while another was inspired by the hanging warp of Dinh Q. Lê’s Splendour & Darkness #29 (2017).

Conclusion

By pairing historical inquiry with hands-on practice, Grids Across Borders offered a multidimensional exploration of the grid as both concept and craft. Through critical engagement with artworks and material experimentation at the loom, participants were encouraged to reconsider the grid not as a rigid, prescriptive system—a hallmark of canonical Minimalism—but as a generative, transdisciplinary structure that accommodates improvisation, subjectivity, and cultural specificity.

The workshop challenged the formal and material constraints associated with Minimalism’s industrial precision and serial logic by foregrounding impermanence, tactility, and embodied making. In doing so, it expanded the grid’s expressive capacity and recuperated its global histories, reimagining Minimalism not as a closed aesthetic doctrine but as an open framework continually reshaped by diverse artistic practices across geography, medium, and tradition.

End Notes

1. Eugene Tan and Russell Storer. Minimalism: Space, Light, Object. Singapore: National Gallery Singapore, 2018.
2. Anna C. Chave. “Minimalism and Biography.” The Art Bulletin, 82:1, 2000, pp.149-163, DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2000.10786924. Accessed 2 March 2025.
3. Rosalind Krauss. “Grids.” October, vol. 9, 1979, pp.51–64. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/778321. Accessed 14 Feb. 2025.
4. Agnes Martin. Writings. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005, 37.

Image Credits

1. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/maurer-displacements-step-18-with-two-random-quasi-images-t15451
2. https://www.talwargallery.com/exhibitions/nasreen-mohamedi#tab:slideshow;tab-1:slideshow
3. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lewitt-small-etching-black-white-no-1-p78435
4. https://ia801303.us.archive.org/2/items/Eadweard_Muybridge_-_The_Human_Figure_in_Motion/Eadweard_Muybridge_-_The_Human_Figure_in_Motion.pdf
5. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2803
6. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lim-green-etching-p07179
7. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/araeen-zero-to-infinity-t12756
8. Photo credit: Meghan Kelly
9. Photo credit: Jessica Braum
10. Weber, Nicholas Fox, Manuel Cirauqui, and T’ai Smith. On Weaving: New Expanded Edition. REV-Revised. Princeton University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc772j6.
11. Photo credit: Jessica Braum
12. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/489779
13. Photo credit: Meghan Kelly
14. https://www.asianarthistories.com/site/a-review-of-dinh-q-le-monuments-and-memorials/
15. Photo credit: Jessica Braum
16. https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/roberto-chabet-archive-solo-exhibitions/object/yoli-laudico-at-the-regent-exhibition-view-11123