Upcoming Solo Exhibition:
Completing the Circle: The Fiber Art of Ina Golub
The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ
August 13, 2008 through May 3, 2009

Press Release: February 2008; The Newark Museum

The Museum’s Contemporary Craft Gallery and the Carole and Albert Angel Promenade will be host to an exhibition of the work of nationally known fiber artist Ina Golub. The thirty objects in the exhibition explore the range of materials and themes used by this versatile Newark-born artist over the past four decades of her career. The works include weaving, fiber collage and beadwork, as well as the exquisitely rendered design drawings that Golub prepares for her important commissions. In addition to pieces from the artist’s collection, objects have been loaned from across the United States for this exhibition.  Each of these works is infused with Golub’s strong sense of color and texture, which drew her from the world of tapestry weaving into the more three-dimensional aspects of working with beadwork.  

Ina Rudman was born in Newark in 1938.  At age six, when she was home from first grade with the chicken pox, her father taught her now to knit. She remembers visiting her grandfather’s tailor shop as a tiny girl and marveling at the sewing machine, the spools of colored thread and the racks of garments awaiting completion or repair. Her first knitted garment was a chrome yellow worsted sleeveless pullover that she made herself, and from then on there was no stopping her. She learned to sew and made her own clothing. She was encouraged in all kinds of crafts and art projects by her parents, and by the time she entered Weequahic High School in Newark she knew she wanted to be an artist. She enrolled in the Art Education curriculum at Montclair State University and took every textile and craft-oriented course she could find in addition to her fine arts classes. She started her career as a teacher, knowing that she wanted to an artist full time.  

Ina Golub’s defining moment was during graduate school at Indiana University. In 1963 she and her husband Herbert left jobs and family behind in New Jersey to further their careers. Ina won a teaching assistantship in the art education department and signed up for art history and drawing classes; but it was through a chance encounter that it dawned on her what direction her life and her work would take.  

One evening, after attending a university recital, Ina visited the school’s textile studio with a colleague from the experimental school on campus where she was working. Her colleague needed to get a particular yarn to complete a wall hanging she had been working on over the past summer. Having been in Indiana only a few weeks, Ina had never seen Indiana University’s textile facility, and when she walked into it her eyes popped. There were looms of all sorts, walls filled with many-colored yarns and an area for printing and dyeing fabrics. Then and there she knew where she would pursue her dream of being an artist. The next morning she telephoned the head of the Fibers program at Indiana University and, after her parents sent some samples of her textile work from New Jersey, was quickly accepted as a graduate student in Fibers. She graduated in 1965 with a Master’s degree.  

With this exhibition, Ina Golub returns to the city of her birth in her seventieth year, marking the completion of one circle in the artist’s life. Here, in the city where she first learned to love the artistic possibilities of fiber, we present the work of a lifetime devoted to art.