36 geometric design, influenced by her architectural studies, cosmological diagrams, and her peers in Latin American abstraction. The Brazilian artist Lygia Pape had a similar arc in her practice: she began with the vocabulary of Geometric Abstraction but expanded into various media, including immersive installations of radiant beams created with taught golden thread. Central to Pape and others in Brazil’s Neo-Concrete movement was “the avant-garde’s primary quest of integrating art into everyday life and achieving a synthesis of the arts.” 14 This aim is also a core tenet of most craft philosophies. Amaral’s practice achieves this synchronicity; she connects the corporeal to the conceptual, tradition with innovation. ALCHEMICAL RESULTS In 2020 the Cranbrook fiber department bears no resemblance to the weaving studio with an orderly row of looms experienced by Amaral in the 1950s. The loom is one tool among many, and the materials are similarly diverse due to unhindered self-selection. Today, gender is not a binary that assigns a method of creative production but a conceptual topic Figure 10 Figure 10 Jesús Rafael Soto, Houston Penetrable , 2004–14, lacquered aluminum structure, PVC tubes, and water-based silkscreen ink, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2010.1489.