Fiber arts encompasses fine arts practices that use natural or synthetic fibers and related materials, such as fabric or yarn, as their primary medium.

Fiber arts highlights both the tactile qualities of those materials and the artist's handwork as integral to the work's meaning, placing aesthetic expression above practical function.

Within the broader textile arts, which include practical making like clothing and household textiles, fiber art marks the point where techniques and materials become ends in themselves rather than means to function. In short, textile arts aim to be used, while fiber art insists on being seen. The line can blur, but the distinction helps map the field.

Textile practices date back to prehistoric times and have evolved with culture and technology. Early felting, hand spinning, and weaving became more complex when life became settled. Later, machinery produced during the Industrial Revolution scaled production and opened space for artistic experimentation beyond pure utility. In Europe, between the 14th and 17th centuries, monumental tapestries served narrative and decorative roles akin to painting, underscoring the aesthetic value of textiles.

The term "fiber art" emerged after World War II as curators and historians needed a name for non-functional artistic works created in fiber. By the 1950s, more weavers were binding fibers into art objects. The 1960s and 1970s brought an international revolution in which knotting, twining, plaiting, coiling, pleating, lashing, interlacing, and braiding expanded the medium's forms, with large-scale, wall-hung, and free-standing works creating interest and gaining visibility.

In the United Kingdom, the founding of the 62 Group of Textile Artists paralleled this shift. At the same time, in the United States and Europe, many of the movement's leading figures were women. Since the 1980s, postmodern ideas have pushed fiber work toward conceptual concerns, such as gender, domesticity, labor, politics, and social science, but without abandoning material exploration.

The vocabulary of fiber arts is drawn from thousands of years of textile practice. Plant and animal fibers, such as cotton, flax (linen), wool, and silk, are prepared and spun into yarn, then built into fabric through weaving, knitting, or crocheting; felting, an earlier technique, mats fibers through agitation into cohesive cloth. Weaving interlaces warp and weft on a loom, the foundation for both utilitarian and artistic textiles. These processes, materials, and structures remain part of fiber art's grammar, even when works depart from function entirely.

For much of art history, textiles were considered "women's work," confined to the domestic sphere, and devalued by critics who dismissed even radical 1960s and 1970s fiber sculptures as decorative or merely craft.

This coding was historical, not inherent. Across ancient societies, men and women both spun, dyed, felted, and wove. However, in Classical Athens, rulers sequestered weaving to the home and divided labor along gendered, hierarchical lines, a template that later spread through Rome, Europe, and colonial systems, stripping women of economic control over textile production. The result was a period of bias that kept fiber media outside of the realm of "high art" for generations.

Feminist artists and the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately reclaimed fiber, elevating fiber art to a high art form.

Today, artists use the softness, drape, and permeability of fiber to address identity, labor, ecology, and memory. Since the 1980s, a conceptual turn has explicitly treated gender and domesticity as subjects, not just contexts.

Institutionally, fiber enjoys dedicated platforms. Fiberart International is a triennial exhibition founded in 1967 by the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh and is globally recognized as a benchmark for contemporary fiber art.

Organizations representing fiber arts include the Handweavers Guild of America, the Fiberarts Guild of Pittsburgh, and the 62 Group of Textile Artists. The MidAtlantic Fiber Association produces the MAFA map, an interactive map documenting fiber guilds, museums, and related resources across the United States. Local meetup groups help artists share techniques, critique work, and build networks.

Fiber arts practices include weaving, tapestry, knitting, crochet, embroidery, spinning, felting, macramé, knotting, lace-making, quilting, basketry, coiling, dyeing, and surface design.

Several resources for fiber arts are listed below.

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