Fibers, Clay, Basketry, Paint, Ideas
Lissa Hunter spends her life working in and around fibers. She has worked as a painter, weaver, basketmaker, coiler, papermaker, and assemblage artist. She also works with paints, paper and found objects. To Hunter, it is all about working with materials, techniques, and ways to express ideas.
It wasn’t always so. For a time—perhaps from the 1970’s through the 1980’s—Hunter’s work concentrated mainly on materials and techniques. She had a graduate degree in textiles and received a solid background working with weaving, embroidery, stitching, printing, dyeing, crochet, and silk screening. Lissa calls this “learning the vocabulary.”
She spent her undergraduate years studying painting and then textiles, graduating in the summer of 1967 and marrying. She worked as a teacher for a year in a music school, then decided to attend graduate school to study “communications.” Needing a letter of recommendation to apply, she approached her weaving instructor, Terri Illes. Illes inquired, “Why aren’t you going into art?”
Says Lissa, “This was just one of the many serendipitous moments that guided my life.”
It was in graduate school in Indiana University that Hunter learned about “the creative process not as a means for industrial production but as artistic expression,” writes Abby Johnston who wrote a book about the artist’s work. “Lissa recalls not feeling particularly attached to her work, but connected to it only by the process. Weaving is a demanding mechanical process that requires a great deal of time spent in preparing the materials and in setting up the loom. All of that would take place before she could do any weaving….The long process was not without reward: Lissa created well-crafted and innovative work—work that began to express ideas.” She also became involved with socially-conscious and politically-motivated ideas.
Lissa graduated with an MFA in Textile Design from Indiana University in 1971 and with a BA in Painting in 1967. She taught textiles in Pennsylvania at Mansfield University and by 1979, had divorced and moved to Maine. The 1970’s and 80’s were a “big time for basketry,” and Lissa did a lot of work in basketry and coiling.
By 1990, she began to more regularly incorporate her ideas into her work. She was scheduled to take part in an exhibition of work at the Gallery on the Green in Lexington, MA in January of 1991. Lissa had always enjoyed working towards a show as a motivating force. But at the time of this show, her father was diagnosed with cancer. She considered canceling, but both of her parents were very supportive of her artwork and insisted she continue. It was then that the idea came to her. Her father’s body was failing and the baskets she worked on became remnants and started to reflect the intensity of her experience. She did make work for the show and somehow, says Lissa, “viewers knew the work was different.”
“It was the first time I really understood about putting myself into the art in an honest and connecting way.”
As Abby Johnston wrote about Hunter, “I watched her find her place as an important contemporary artist with a mature vision and a poetic voice…..Her work became more conceptual and reflective of her personal life.”
In Maine, Lissa Hunter has been very involved in the arts. She volunteered for the Maine Crafts Association, participating in their early “Makers” show; served for years as a board member of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; exhibited her own work from Boston to Maine; and eventually, curated shows.
She curated “Flight” for Cove Street Arts in 2021; “The Sensuous Line” for Cove Street Arts in 2022; “Darkness and the Light,” for the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art; and a book arts show for the Maine Jewish Museum, all in Portland, Maine.
She has led a retreat for Maine fiber artists at Monson Arts, and has taught at Arrowmont, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Maine Art Educators and Fibre Forums, to name a few.
Her work has appeared in numerous solo and group shows in Maine and throughout the U.S. and is in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Museum of Art + Designing in New York, and the Houston Museum of Art, among others. She is a life trustee of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.
Lissa Hunter passed along these three books to Maine Fiberarts to help with this article.
—interview with Lissa Hunter by Christine Macchi; photography by Christine Macchi and Ella Hudson