At Home With His Fathers Loom

Artist and archivist Kore Yoors, the son of the bohemian artist Jan Yoors, grew up in Greenwich Village, where he tends to the family legacy.

- WENDY GOODMAN

WHEN YOU WALK into the double-height living room of Kore Yoors's 1,500-square-foot full-floor apartment in Greenwich Village, the legacy of his father, Jan Yoors, a Belgian American artist who died in 1977, is everywhere. Kore, an artist himself who oversees his father's archive, lives with his father's paintings, sculptures, books, and tapestries-even one of his textile looms. The coffee table is made from the beams of a former loom: "They just thought the wood was so beautiful," he says of his father and the two women he collaborated with in his work and his life, one of whom is his mother. The other was the mother of his two half-siblings.

Kore spent his childhood in the Village, mostly on Waverly Place, and that loom loomed large. "The door would close, and it was just so silent; the city would be left behind," he remembers. The one thing ever present was the sound of the weaving, "the tick-tick-tick of the loom, and I didn't even notice it."