If Swiss-born textile artist Silvia Heyden had had her way, she would have been a violin maker. Born in Basel in 1927, she was an avid violinist even as a child. While still a girl, she decided she wanted to learn to make the object that brought such beauty into her life, but she was born too soon for that life course. “Her dad took her around to a few violin makers. They said, ‘Oh, this is nothing for a girl or a woman. It’s too rough on your hands.’ She was disappointed, but she accepted it,” said her son, Daniel Heyden, during a recent conversation. Instead, Heyden became a tapestry weaver, a path nearly as difficult, and which her teacher Elsi Giauque told her it would “take a lifetime” to learn. For over half a century, Heyden did just that, devoting herself to the loom and creating close to 800 innovative and rhythmic tapestries until soon before her death in 2015. From Switzerland to Durham, North Carolina, where she moved with her family in 1966 (her husband was hired as a professor at Duke), Heyden found the manipulating of tensile threads an experience akin to the manipulating of strings on a violin. She created unexpectedly modern tapestries inspired by the movements of the natural world and music—but which never received widespread acclaim in her lifetime. Courtesy of the Heyden Estate and Charles Moffett Gallery. Now, a new exhibition “Improvisational Nature: The Weavings and Drawings of Silvia Heyden” at Charles Moffett (through June 7) is shining a light on Heyden’s overlooked oeuvre, marking both the first New York solo exhibition for the late artist, and the first exhibition of the artist’s tapestries and drawings in the U.S. since 1972. The exhibition, which was put together in close collaboration with the artist’s son and daughter, is a joyful introduction to a vibrant, hitherto unknown creative talent. Heyden, over her decades of experimenting, discovered a singular approach to weaving, working in a spirit of improvisation that embraced learning