Color Decoded: The Textiles of Richard Landis

Color Decoded: The Textiles of Richard Landis celebrates the recent acquisition of six of Landis’s most important works for Cooper Hewitt’s collection, installed together with three process drawings and 13 more of Landis’s textiles, and all produced between 1967 and 1995. The drawings demonstrate how Landis would calculate and visualize every permutation possible within a defined set of colors. While the actual weaving could be completed in days, it sometimes took Landis a month or more to work out the full range of tones and hues on paper, design the geometric pattern, and prepare the loom to weave the cloth.  Using his preferred weave structure—double-cloth—Landis would simultaneously weave two parallel planes of fabric,  a technique that allowed for the creation of the multicolored complex patterning of his textiles. The remarkable intricacy, dynamism, and luminosity found in works such as Campo di Fiori (1976), Untitled (1982), and Nines (1995) show a designer working at the height of his creative powers.