Jason Pollen walks through 30 years of his art in Unfurled

To find order in disarray — to master what one can control while moving calmly down the current of all that can’t be predicted: This is how you sense that Jason Pollen has lived and worked, when he talks to you about his art. And there’s a lot to talk about in Unfurled: Thirty Years in Kansas City, the hypnotic retrospective now at the Kansas City Central Library.

Visible in the library’s gallery is Pollen’s journey. The New York City native, now 73, abandoned Vietnam-era America for France, where he was a portraitist until he couldn’t afford gesso for his canvases. When he was too broke to paint, he taught himself to work with fiber, the discipline that brought him to Kansas City. Much later, when bad spinal operations broke his body, he learned to walk again — and learned to tie surgical sutures as he temporarily rescaled his art.

On a rainy October morning, Pollen meets me at the library to tour some of the pieces in the exhibition (the first of two parts; the second opens November 9). He has the firm handshake of a businessman (Pollen has worked design commissions from some serious brands), the warm inquisitiveness of a lifelong teacher (he came here in 1983 to work at the Kansas City Art Institute and ended up chairman of the fiber department), and the enviable posture and glide of a dancer (he’s a tai chi practitioner and a tango lover). His body language is calm and economical, but his eyes and his speech radiate a mind in constant motion. It’s a tension made vivid throughout the layered, texturally complex works in Unfurled — art that’s still but not static, and never more so than in “Flicker,” the 2014 centerpiece of the show’s first half (pictured above). I asked him about that and the works shown on this page.

“Forest/Trees I” (1966)

“I ran out of money, so I coulnd’t afford gesso to size a canvas and I couldn’t afford paint anymore. I lived in the 16th Arrondissement, and I would always go walking in the Bois de Boulogne, and somehow one day I just started picking up these twigs. And I got back and I started to stitch them onto this fabric, and that was the first time I ever didn’t paint on canvas. I didn’t know that was going to change my life and that I would learn about the nature of cloth itself. How I later survived as an artist in Paris was as a textiles artist, because I could draw and paint, and they [designers] could print cloth out of it.”

“Forest/Trees IV” (2014)

“This year, I looked at it [“Forest/Trees I”] again as if I’d never seen it, and I wondered how I would do it if I were doing it today. I had this inspiring piece of African cloth, and the minute I figured out I could stick something in there — these are called floats; they’re warp threads, raised stitches — I was off. I thought about colors and rhythm, scale, size. I wasn’t trying to replicate [“Forest/Trees I”], but I was profoundly inspired by who I was, and here I am now, living in a place I never in a million years would have guessed. I decided to use twigs from my garden.”

“Flights of Fancy” (1998)

“These pieces are about creating a kind of order. And then there’s the dissolution of order. Order on one side and chaos on the other. A melting, as when ice turns to water or water to gas. I love that idea of pairing structure with less structure.

“Silk has the tensile strength of stainless steel. It’s very compliant, very forgiving. You throw it away if it doesn’t work. I’ve thrown away thousands of things. I draw two hours a day. I’ve done it since I was 4 years old. I get up at 5 in the morning and I draw two hours a day. Some days, depending on the state of mind, I feel like the mark-making is ripe. Other days, it’s not as great, and I throw those pieces away. Drawing every day is like practicing an instrument.

“Something important about everything I do: I come from a family of classical musicians, on both sides, all the way back as far as anyone can remember. And I am the first person who couldn’t play an instrument. My father had a string quartet, was a violist. My mother was a concert pianist. I became a dancer. But everything I do is musical. Art is composing anyway — composing a space and making decisions.”

“Barrio,” 2012 (detail)

“In about 2008, I had horrific botched back surgery. They cut my spinal cord when they did the back surgery, and I nearly died, and I had another surgery and I went to Mayo Clinic, and they saved my life. I have no feeling from my waist to the floor. I can’t feel anything. It took three years to learn how to walk again. In that time, in the hospital, I did lots of hand-stitched small pieces. All I could do, really, was stitch by hand the little pieces that people brought me in the hospital. This is very much the aerial view of the neighborhood where I grew up in New York. I know these buildings. I know my way to school and the church. I live right over here. [Points.] These things are the gauzes I had. The next show, you’ll see that the surgeon taught me the beautiful technique they use to make stitches.”