AHST 398-Sr Seminar: Textiles and Texts Across Cultures: Home

The status of textiles as an art medium is highly ambivalent. Traditionally, they have been situated on the margins, in a borderland between art and craft. Since the 1960s, a growing body of contemporary art demonstrates a new engagement with the materials and techniques of crafts, particularly textiles, raising questions about the value of the handmade in the digital age. This show will include artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry, Ghada Amer and Kimsooja who use textiles as a powerful tool for epressing ideas about the social, political and artistic.

This extensive work dedicated to the unique textile art of Bhutan is an impressive illustration of how closely art, spirituality, and life are interwoven in the last of the Buddhist kingdoms in the Himalayas. It gives new insight into Bhutanese cosmology, worldview, culture, and society, which is associated with a variety of historical, philosophical, religious, social, and artistic perspectives. The remote mountain location, low-key foreign policy, and basic principles of Buddhism has made it possible for Bhutan, the last of the Buddhist kingdoms in the Himalayas, to preserve a remarkable form of textile art that is interwoven with all aspects of life. Karin Altmann shows us Bhutan textiles in their diversity: they are clothes and everyday objects, currency and commodity, mark important events as gifts during life, and are testament to the social status of a person.

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of "craftivism"--the politics and social practices associated with handmaking--Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s--including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet's torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt--are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much "in the fray" of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions.

The needle arts are traditionally associated with the decorative, domestic, and feminine. Stitching the Self sets out to expand this narrow view, demonstrating how needlework has emerged as an art form through which both objects and identities social, political, and often non-conformist are crafted. Bringing together the work of ten art and craft historians, this illustrated collection focuses on the interplay between craft and artistry, amateurism and professionalism, and re-evaluates ideas of gendered production between 1850 and the present.

Textiles are the most ubiquitous, diverse, and consistently creative art forms on the planet. This work comprises more than one thousand images that highlight the beauty, subtlety, simplicity, or complexity of textiles created around the world.Based on knowledge accrued over a lifetime of immersion in the textile arts, Mary Schoeser's definitive text offers sweeping insight into the role that textiles have played throughout human civilization. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary examples highlights the skill and imagination of textile designers through the centuries as well as the remarkable range of achievements..