Carlson's all-over tweedlike patterns, done with repeated strokes of thick paint, are less specific in their references. And even if Jaudon doesn't insist on Islamic art as a source for her crisp interlace designs, it surely had some effect. Kozloff is forthright about the debt she owes to Moroccan and Mexican tile work. Her melding of brilliant colors with a basic Minimalist grid has yielded generous results in public architectural projects, and in her poetic and intensely political recent art.
Davis and Smyth lie a little outside the general P&D loop, one doing figurative work and the other mosaics. Robbin, who lived in Iran as a child, conflates geometric Persian motifs with others from Japanese silk kimonos. For MacConnel and Kushner, textiles themselves are a primary medium.
MacConnel glues pieces of Near Eastern and Southeast Asian fabric together into suspended open-work hangings. Kushner, who studied with MacConnel and traveled with Goldin to the Middle East, originally draped his painted fabric pieces over his own body in performances. One festive piece in the show, Visions Beyond the Pearly Curtain, is shaped like a chador, cape or kimono, although with its gathered swags and melon-orange curlicues it has the theatrical punch of a rococo opera curtain about to rise.
When Kushner finished this piece in 1975, P&D was taking off. It had avid collectors in the US; in Europe it was a hit. Then interest dried up. Worse than that, in the US, the movement became an object of disdain and dismissal.
There were reasons. Art associated with feminism has always had a hostile press. And there was the beauty thing. In the neo-Expressionist, neo-Conceptualist late 1980s, no one knew what to make of hearts, Turkish flowers, wallpaper and arabesques.
Thanks to multiculturalism and identity politics, we know better what to make of them now; the art world's horizons are immeasurably wider than they were two decades ago (without being all that wide). Besides, to my eye, most P&D art isn't beautiful and never was, not in any classical way. It's funky, funny, fussy, perverse, obsessive, riotous, accumulative, awkward, hypnotic, all evident even in the fairly tame selections by Anne Swartz, the curator for this show.
And not-quite-beauty is exactly what saved it, what gave it weight, weight enough to bring down the great Western Minimalist wall for a while and bring the rest of the world in. Let the art historical record show, in the post-movement future, the continuing debt we owe it for that.
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