Fifty Years of Wire: Elizabeth Berrien’s Journey of Exploration-A Retrospective

A young student’s life was changed forever by the art teacher’s words: “Take this wire and mess with it!” Struggling for years, Elizabeth Berrien applied her love of basketry, weaving and other textile arts to gain control and fluency with the wire. She developed her unique, very personal textile technique of wire sculpture. Evolving it to museum level quality by the 1980’s, when few people were aware of wire sculpture and its validity as an art medium was very much in question.

The artist constantly expands her repertoire. From the dragons and unicorns of the 1960’s, she expanded to explore and embrace tigers and wolves, birds of prey, humans, botanicals, microbes and spacecraft... no end in sight.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.