Lore Kadden Lindenfeld was born in Wuppertal, Germany. She was a student at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, when the family was forced to flee at the time of Nazi rule. They went to Holland where she worked as a seamstress and later to the United States. Lore took classes in English and attended the Institute for Social Progress at Wellesley College. She went to Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC, where she studied with Josef and Anni Albers, and graduated in 1948 in Weaving and Textile Design. In 1982 she earned a master’s degree in Creative Arts Education from Rutgers University.
Lore moved to New York City and became a textile designer for a succession of fabric houses, designing materials on the loom for women’s coats and dresses. She stopped work after the birth of her second child, but returned to work in 1968, to be a faculty member in the Visual Arts department at Middlesex County College, where she established a weaving workshop and remained for 18 years. She also taught weaving at the Princeton Adult School for many years.
Lore was a volunteer with the curator for ethnology in the Newark Museum for many years, and later a docent in the Princeton Art Museum. She was a member of the Textile Study Group of New York and the Princeton Artists Alliance, participating in many of their group shows.
Lore was also an independent textile artist, making woven wall hangings and later fiber collages and constructions, often using unconventional materials. Her work was in exhibitions in this and other countries, and is in many collections, including those of the Newark Museum, the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Museum of Art and Design in New York (formerly the American Craft Museum), and in private collections in the United States and in Japan.
Lore died in 2010. Until the time of her last illness she was an inspiration and a role model for several generations of younger people. Her life was characterized by her critical eye, her thoughtful comments, her ever-new approach to art, and her deep enjoyment of beauty wherever she found it.
Artist Statement:
To accompany her later work, Lore Kadden Lindenfeld said that she was intrigued with the potential of reinventing visual images of natural forms by combining the real with the imagined. She searched for those elements in the world around her that she could envision in their transformation into fiber compositions. She merged graphic elements of drawing and stitching with fiber techniques, and so found herself rediscovering basic forms of design in newly conceived constellations. The work in this exhibition is an example, based on a favorite forest walk in Vermont, whose image became more and more abstract as she reconstructed it in her memory.
