This Website concentrates on the fine arts of weaving and tapestery, needlepoint, embroidery, design, pattern, repetition, all kinds of stitchery. It also delves into related subjects to form a context within which to view the "grid arts". to help set them in their appropiate place. Indeed, tapestry and weaving have encompassed, influenced and decorated, in their long and varied history, every art. This site explores the incomparable influence of pattern on art and on life. It is likely that repetition, certainly replication, is the very source of life itself. With the computer, Chaos Theory, Mandelbrot Sets, Fractals, new arts/sciences/ways-of-seeing have taken a great leap forward.

In ancient China there were coded looms. The grid, the precision of one thread crossing another, is the most ancient of all arts. Celebrated and obscure, the pattern arts, the weaving arts have, throughout history, prehistory, and the entire domain of humankind, been predominately practiced by women. "Women's Work," "Crafts" The Domestic Arts," "Decorative Arts," -- there is a wide range of slightly condescending terms to separate out the, perhaps, most beautiful arts in the world and put them in a different category from "the fine arts" of painting and sculpture.

Mukhra/Tukra/Chakradar -- a needlepoint in progress

However, this abundant category of exquisite works has been around longer, takes more skill, knowledge, claims longer and stronger traditions, has been more underpaid and more enduring than any art known to the human race. For there is the possibility that we are "nothing but" pattern. From repetition pattern emerges, and from pattern emerges organic form. Just as every cell in the human body has the same DNA, every pixel on the Net, every junction on the grid has the same potential, the same relative dimensions. It is this very restriction that leads to the compelling beauty of the grid arts: freedom and restraint -- the basis of human life, the fundamentals of all art.

21st CENTURY ART, C.E. -- B.C., a Context is designed to be both a gallery and a personal vision with a changing collection of works on display, essays on aspects of these arts, book reviews, reference to other Websites, artists, galleries and museums. It is an eclectic resource through which to pursue the study of 21st Century Art, a fountainhead of both mundane and esoteric information.

Pattern is the art of the future, pattern is the most ancient art of the past. Pattern is the creation of the world. Textile artists have been conveying knowledge to the cognocenti behind/within the beauty of cloth art/crafts for thousands of years. Geometric beauty -- becoming fluid, becoming organic as in the Mandelbrot sets -- is an element of the magic that lies behind music -- "the grid," the pattern in drumming especially. Patterns communicate the soul of the drummer, create the face of God.

If you would like to show work on this Website, contact Jan Haag via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu. Keenly interested in improvisational needlepointers, weavers, and those who, with or without knowing it, encode knowledge into their designs, I am also eager to show works by older women and men, those whose knowledge must be caught, interperted and preserved now. Through the Open Studios Project, I also hope to teach other 21st Century artists to create Websites so that their work can be made available in cyberspace.