Claire Zeisler

Who was Claire Zeisler?

Claire Zeisler was a noted American fiber artist who expanded the expressive qualities of knotted and braided threads.

Claire Block was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Columbia College in Chicago for one year, then in 1921 married Harold Florsheim. In the 1930s she bought works by Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Picasso, and as well as tribal objects including African sculptures, tantric art, ancient Peruvian textiles and more than 300 American Indian baskets. After her divorce in 1943, she married Ernest Zeisler, a physician and author, in 1946.

Zeisler studied at the Chicago Institute of Design in the 1940s with Eugene Dana and the Illinois Institute of Technology where she was taught by the Russian avant-garde sculptor Alexander Archipenko and the Chicago weaver Bea Swartchild. In the 1950s she created flat weavings using a traditional loom, but by 1962 she began making freestanding, three-dimensional fiber sculptures using a variety of techniques.

Zeisler's work was presented in retrospective exhibits in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art.