Terri Friedman: Overmuch

PRESS RELEASE

 

Anthony Meier is pleased to present Overmuch, a solo exhibition of new and ongoing works by Bay Area artist and educator Terri Friedman (b. 1962, Denver, CO). Marking Friedman’s first solo presentation with the gallery, the exhibition illuminates a thirty-year artistic practice, focusing on the past decade of weaving as both formal investigation and philosophical inquiry.  

Friedman’s textile works are material objects, spatial interventions, and emotional registers, and their exuberant palettes lend themselves to the exhibition’s title, an Old English word meaning “too much” or “very much.” Here, Friedman reclaims the phrase not as excess, but as abundance: a celebration of the fullness of lived experience. 

Trained in kinetic sculpture, the artist turned toward weaving following a pivotal encounter in Barcelona, Spain, with a monumental Joan Miró tapestry. Since then, Friedman has approached the medium as a sculptural form capable of holding attention, feeling, and presence, culminating in large-scale woven works that oscillate between image and language. 

Often beginning with a single word or phrase as a starting point, each work unfolds through an intuitive yet highly structured negotiation of material and color. Drawing from decades of collecting fibers, yarns, cloth, and textiles—from Icelandic wool and upholstery piping to painted fibers and commercial neon acrylics—the artist employs the loom to render sensations and mood.

Created specifically for the Mill Valley gallery space, new works include Time of Day, a new four-work series conjuring the ocean, more specifically the Bay, at sunrise, daytime, and midnight, alongside a suite of intimate small-scale weavings. Throughout the exhibition, Friedman’s textiles make space for respite while illuminating the evolution of her practice, from earlier heavily sculptural textile forms toward increasingly pictorial compositions.

For Friedman, weaving is a system of repetition and time, through which emotion and lived experience are built materially. The physical accumulation of thread on the loom passes through the artist’s hands to form pathways that reconnect memory and suggest processes of healing. 

Several works in the exhibition emerged following the artist’s experience of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, and in the gallery vitrine, Standing Ovation: for anyone who has had Chemotherapy (2026), a monumental double-sided weaving incorporating plexiglass and glass, serves as a tribute to those who have undergone cancer treatment. 

Extending the lineage of the phrase “standing ovation,” originating from the public welcomes for soldiers returning home by ship, the work emerges from a tightly structured weave, then loosens into cascading rope-like knots, its surface alive with a dizzying array of color, pattern, and texture. Within, the words ‘WAY 2 GO’ affirm the courage it takes to endure a toxic treatment that doesn’t necessarily guarantee a cure. 

For Friedman, life is wonderfully overmuch: brimming with contradiction, pleasure, strength, and delight. Her works embrace this, asking how material, color, and language might help us navigate the complexities of being alive.

 

ABOUT TERRI FRIEDMAN

Oscillating between sculpture, painting, textiles, and language, Bay Area-based artist Terri Friedman (b. 1962, Denver, CO) creates exuberant woven works that expand weaving into a spatial and embodied practice. Through color, texture, and form, the artist’s large-scale textile works, often rooted in a single word or phrase, invite sustained attention while engaging the complexities of lived experience through themes of presence, resilience, transformation, and care.

Friedman has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at The Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco, CA), San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (San Jose, CA), CODA Museum (Apeldoorn, The Netherlands), Orange County Museum of Art (Costa Mesa, CA), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA). Recent solo exhibitions include Tomorrow is just a thought, Shoshana Wayne Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), REWIRE, CUE Art Foundation, (New York, NY), and ART WALL, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, (Berkeley, CA). Group exhibitions include Consider the Oyster, Anthony Meier (Mill Valley, CA), Don’t Forget to Hydrate, Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami, FL), Lover’s Eye, Sargent’s Daughters (Los Angeles, CA), The Weight of Matter, Roberts Projects (Los Angeles, CA), and A line can go anywhere, James Cohan (New York, NY). 

Friedman’s work is in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, the De Young Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The artist received a BA with honors from Brown University and holds a MFA from Claremont Graduate School. She is an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts.