Siddhartha Mitter on Eric N. Mack

What Happens When a Painter Abandons Paint?
The artist Eric N. Mack, who’s always challenged norms, has created a distinctive visual language by focusing on fabric, space and form.

The artist Eric N. Mack, known for his abstract fabric assemblages, works in a simple studio in an office building turned creative hub in Manhattan’s financial district. When I visited in early June, I found the room packed with textiles — piles of colorful remnants, gauzy lengths unrolled on the floor and racks of clothing, some of Mack’s own design. A heavy-duty Singer sewing machine held the center of a cluttered worktable. Out the window, we could see the South Street Seaport at a distance, the ship sails echoing Mack’s fabrics.

Mack, 39, identifies as a painter — and trained as one in art school at Cooper Union, and later at Yale. Back then, he was already challenging the norms of the field, painting onto unusual surfaces like blankets and drop cloths and setting them up as sculptures; for almost a decade now, he’s used fabric and thread, not paints and brushes, to make his marks. His assemblages can stretch over metal frames or hang off lines and free-standing armatures, or cascade in bright hues across, say, a museum atrium, making the space itself a sculpture of light. When we met in the studio, he was preparing his exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea that opens today. Pinned to the wall were works he was making, including some for the show: Each was a kind of collage, joining small segments of many different shapes and patterns and materials, stitched and layered into irregular forms.

One of a cohort of young Black artists to appear in the early 2010s with fresh ideas and cross-disciplinary tendencies, Mack received institutional recognition almost immediately, participating in an influential group show of emerging artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2012. His work was in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and he had his first New York City solo exhibition that same year at the Brooklyn Museum. He’s shown widely ever since.

His fabric works join a lineage of conceptual experiments that are based on painting while also shedding the medium, in part or in full. Among his touchstones are figures like Sam Gilliam, the great Black abstractionist who began draping his painted, unstretched canvases in the late 1960s; Robert Rauschenberg, the protean assemblage figure who made textile works in the 1970s; even Christo and Jeanne-Claude, with their wrapped buildings and monuments. This fall, he will also appear in “Hard Art,” an intergenerational show of 44 artists at MoMA PS1 that traces the legacy of Black abstract painters, including Gilliam, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Joe Overstreet and more, across many media. (And a large-scale installation by Mack is on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., responding to the building’s architecture, through Nov. 29.)

But Mack finds equal inspiration in street and high fashion, and in the histories of quilting and the domestic arts. How fabric is made and traded, and with whose labor; how it is worn on the body; how it is kept or reused: All this, for him, infuses the material down to the snippet. This concentrated potential keeps Mack trawling fabric and remnant shops, visiting markets and artisans on his travels and accepting the miscellaneous batches of fabric that friends think he might want to use. It has led him to focus his practice. Where he once employed different methods — readymades, ornamentation, photo transfer, magazine-page collage — he has pared his priorities to fabric, space and form. The result is a distinctive visual language, sensitive to fabric’s social and emotional life, how a remnant can marshal a memory; how a pattern comes with a story embedded in it. Unlike paint, Mack told me, fabric can “also talk about time and fragility.” He added: “I like that about textile. It’s something that I’ve wanted painting to be able to do, which is why I’ve conceptually fused them.”

At the studio, I asked Mack to guide me through one of his works in progress. Pinned to the wall (and still untitled), the piece involved several dozen elements: a dynamic assembly of strips and squares of many colors, patterns and textures. The total work possessed the rough proportions of a dress — albeit one bizarrely confected, and then deconstructed by some centrifugal energy. Mack pointed out a rectangular section near the work’s top. It had bands of narrow stripes in shades of red, blue and green. He got it, he said, on Chongming Island, an outer district of Shanghai in China’s Yangtze River Delta, where women have woven homespun cotton for centuries.

As we continued to look over the piece, alighting on other fabric segments, it became a map of the artist’s sources. A lace section, for example: “I got this in Turin in a secondhand shop,” Mack said. An Indian-style, paisleylike print was purchased at a market in Rome, a bit of burlap at an ordinary home and garden store. A swath of linen came from Emblem Weavers, one of the surviving traditional suppliers in Ireland. “They gave me a lot of remnants that I’m still working with,” he said. And the larger rectangle, slightly frayed with loose threads hanging, in a tartan pattern anchoring the bottom of the work? “There’s a punk shop I go to in the East Village,” Mack said. “If it has a grid on it, I’ll get it. It felt like it kind of balanced everything out.”

A grammar was emerging, one that relied on a combination of history and intuition. The work’s energy — and also its control — dwelt in its torqued internal geometry, the way Mack positioned the patterned fabric pieces slightly off kilter. The artist often leaves deliberate gaps in his compositions that he likens to oculi or breezeways — “like the work is beginning to unmake itself,” he said. In the jagged edges, he was exposing the vulnerability of the material.

At the same time, all the reference points and different histories seem to create something familiar, a kind of connection between the work and the viewer. “People ask me if the viewers can touch the work,” he said. “And my answer is always that I think the viewers already know what it feels like. Because so many of the fabrics are so ubiquitous, you already can imagine, which ends up being a kind of sensorial overlay.”

Clothing and style are fodder for experiments that have landed along the spectrum between fashion and art. He’s collaborated in the past with the London-based streetwear designer Kiko Kostadinov and with Grace Wales Bonner, now the creative director of Hermès men’s wear. (When we met, Mack was dressed unassumingly in jeans and a Supreme jacket.) At one point, he was making “outfit collages,” incorporating full clothing pieces — trousers, windbreakers — into his scrap-and-remnant assemblages. Though there are fewer overt explorations of fashion in his work now than earlier in his career, the possibilities lurk. While we were looking at the patchwork piece we had analyzed on the studio wall, he said, “I think it may need to be worn.”

Mack grew up just outside of Washington, D.C., and his parents both worked at the National Gallery of Art — his father in exhibition installation, with a specialty in plexiglass vitrines, and his mother in the gallery archives. The family identified so much with the museum that they chose his middle name, Nathaniel, for its alliteration with “national.”

Mack’s father also owned a clothing store, so his son would either accompany him to the museum, where he roamed the galleries and watched him clean the vitrines — “with his personal proprietary solution”— or help out at the shop. These formative experiences built his awareness of not just art and fashion but “how close they were at times,” he said. “What people were wearing on the street, how culture moved through fashion — there was this progress where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m seeing this in real time.’”

Outside was the Black D.C. of the 1990s, rhythmed by go-go music, the stubbornly regional dance genre epitomized by bands like Rare Essence, Trouble Funk and other hyperlocal acts. “It was an interesting kind of cultural specificity, and it had its own resistance,” he said. “It just had such a flavor and feeling — really Black, but also just complex.”

He’s titled works and shows after D.C. locations or bands. How these memories filter into his art is abstract. “Just as I’m preserving an old piece of fabric in the middle of these newer materials, or thinking about simultaneous contrast, there’re these moments of culture that I want to compress into the work.”

Equally in the air for Mack, who attended an arts program in high school, was the local fine-art legacy — notably the Washington Color School painters of the 1950s and ’60s, who sought a language of color on canvas using acrylic and methods like shaping and soaking. This group, plus offshoots, included Kenneth Noland, who cut canvases into sculpted shapes; Morris Louis, who poured color on large unstretched canvases; and Gilliam, as well as the great Black painter Alma Thomas, known for the bold rhythms and patterns of her abstract paintings. All were influences on Mack, he said.

Shortly after high school, he visited a Gilliam retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, followed by one of Louis in 2007 at the Hirshhorn Museum. Later, he said, he realized that “these were bookends — these are saying so much, and they’re local artists who, unlike go-go, were really able to penetrate. They’re in museums all over the world.”

Mack has “an almost encyclopedic knowledge of all these artists and movements,” said the artist Abigail DeVille, whom he befriended at Yale. “I’ll show him a picture of a work in progress and he’ll have immediate references.” The artist Tomashi Jackson, a friend since Cooper Union who showed alongside him in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, said that anywhere Mack went, he always looked for the library. “He is a good-faith participant in art-historical lineage,” Jackson said. “As a maker, and then inside of our inherent responsibility to give it back.”

In the late winter of 2019, while Mack was preparing for the Biennial and had installations up at the Brooklyn Museum and the Serpentine gallery in London, he participated in a fourth show that is perhaps the one that most impacted him as an artist, even though its material trace has been lost. For the Desert X outdoor biennial in California, he draped billowing lengths of cloth over the plaza of an abandoned gas station just outside the town of Mecca, by the Salton Sea. The fashion house Missoni donated fabric. He titled the work “Halter.”

One month into the exhibition, the work disappeared, leaving only bits of fabric and rope, apparently burned, in circumstances that have never been resolved. Speaking at the time to ArtNews, Neville Wakefield, the exhibition’s artistic director, said there was little to be done: “The beauty of the piece was that it was extremely fragile, ephemeral, diaphanous work. The fact that it has succumbed to its own fragility might add to the narrative.” The loss strengthened Mack’s resolve. All his pieces since then, he told me, “come in a continuum where they’re answering for the absence of that work.”

From this perspective, the outdoor work Mack showed last year at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan was cathartic for the artist. The piece, titled “Cartouche,” part of “Fishers of Men,” Mack’s solo exhibition at the academy, addressed the peculiar architectural setting: The mannered Beaux-Arts complex of Audubon Terrace — the grand dream of an early 20th-century philanthropist — dead-ends at the rear facades of two prewar apartment buildings more typical of Washington Heights, with their fire escapes and water towers. Against this backdrop, Mack strung two parallel ropes and attached between them a billowing textile collage that stayed up through most of the winter. “This exposure to the elements — and being braced by the architecture — was ideal,” Mack said. From earlier New York artists, he added, he’s come around to the idea that “the city is a collaborator.”

When I asked Mack’s old school friend DeVille about him, she’d replied with a poetic note. “I think of Eric’s work not only as an extension of the body but as an ancient technology of place making,” it read in part. “It’s carving out a space of memory, loss, whimsy, dreaming as a poem or song.”

In the studio, Mack put his aspirations differently: “I think the way that I break through is with this kind of public address. This relationship to freedom. Taking these knowable formats and introducing these worlds that I don’t see as disparate at all.”