Past Sessions

Wednesday April 9: Loss, Recovery, and Archives of Skill

12:00a – 2:00p EST
Via Zoom

The Lost and Forgotten Architectural Glass Commissions of Helen Monro Turner
Sarah Rothwell • National Museums Scotland and Jessamy Kelly • Edinburgh College of Art

In this talk, we will look to rectify the lack of discussion on the artistic achievements of the distinguished Scottish glass engraver and educationist Helen Monro Turner (1901–1977), who was an artist of importance in the development of glass art, an early role model for women working in glass, and one who paved the way for future generations in the field, by exploring her lost and forgotten public work and architectural glass commissions. 

On the retirement of the Scottish artist John Lawrie (1928 – 2024) her friend, business partner and de facto-heir, the contents of the Juniper Workshop, the glass studio Monro Turner and he established on the outskirts of Edinburgh in 1956, was put up for auction on Saturday the 3^rd of September 2005 at the former Shapes Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers, Edinburgh, Scotland. The contents importantly included Monro Turner’s ‘sketch books, designs, archive material and ephemera – spanning an entire career’. Regrettably, in its subdivision for sale and ultimate distribution by the auctioneers, Scotland lost a vital resource that has consequently resulted in Monro Turner being somewhat forgotten amongst the names of influential twentieth-century British glass artists and designers. 

A small selection of Monro Turner’s archive from this sale was acquired by National Museums Scotland (NMS) in 2006 from a dealer who attended the sale. This fragmentary collection of drawings, ephemera, and photographs, provides a tantalising glimpse to a forgotten and unpublished area of her oeuvre, specifically her public work and architectural glass commissions, many of which have been lost to the passage of time. 

The talk will demonstrate how, though incomplete, this small collection of documents establishes Monro Turner as an artist of import in the field of mid-century glass art. How vital the role of museums and archives are in preserving an artist’s legacy for future generations when the physical work has been lost. And conclude by drawing upon the changing contemporary landscape of the glass art field and confront the difficulties that the discipline is facing—including the considerable losses faced where traditional craft skills such as copper-wheel engraving and stained glass are increasingly at risk of endangerment in the UK. 

Field and Furrrow: The Embroidery of Lily Yeats
Anna Flinchbaugh • University of Southern California

What do Joan Didion, Clement Greenberg, and Anni Albers have in common? All are part of a distressingly extensive cohort of art critics, writers, and general commentators who characterize embroidery as resolutely superficial. In this characterization, embroidery sits atop the ground fabric and is completely extraneous to it. This description casts embroidery – often explicitly – as a synonym for things that are frivolous, overelaborate, and unnecessary. This is, I argue, a fundamental misunderstanding of embroidery. In embroidery, thread is taken with a needle under, over, and through a ground fabric. This requires the practitioner to have a clear understanding of the weave of the supporting fabric, as well as the moment and method of puncture. The ground fabric is not a solid surface, but a matrix across and through which the thread plays.

I here demonstrate this dimensionality using the works of Lily Yeats, an embroiderer active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is best known for the work she produced for the Arts and Crafts design firm Morris & Co. as well as for her role as head of the embroidery workshop at the Irish company Cuala Industries. Her work is distinctive for the interaction between stitches and the ribbed furrows of the poplin that she preferred as a ground fabric. The ground fabric guides the distribution and direction of Yeats’ stitches and provides a contrasting geometry that shapes the stitched image. Yeats’ embroideries make the interdependence of ground fabric and thread dramatically visible.

This investigation builds upon the work of textile scholars who have taken stitches seriously as a unit of meaning-making, including Claire Pajaczkowska, Roszika Parker, and Rosika Desnoyers. It is part of a larger dissertation project that uses embroidery as a model for making tacit knowledge legible in design history more generally.

Viscosity of inheritance in craft-based animation
Margaret Fussell • Queen’s University

The films of early animator Helena Smith Dayton are considered lost. This should not exclude her from film histories. By exploring what can be made of the residues that remain, my work focuses on gaps and overlaps between the creative influences of my family and the history of animation, my chosen art practice. My animations combine extant archival material about Helena Smith Dayton with needlework techniques I learned from my great-grandmother, Greta Garfs Schroeder. Both women were born in 1883 and lived on their own terms in New York City. They had a similar subversive sense of humour, which endears me to the feminist in each of them. However, they led dramatically different lives.

I read about the work of Smith Dayton while researching early craft-based animators. I was charmed by her clay figurines made with attention to emotional and humorous details. Her story stuck with me. The more I read, the more closely she reminded me of my great-grandmother. I became obsessed and began searching for traces of Smith Dayton’s work. I found and purchased eight silver gelatine prints of her film Romeo & Juliet (1917) My presentation features these photographs and the story of their discovery. I include some of my short animations, made with these images and other archival ephemera.

Learning about a woman at the forefront of animation was exciting. However, because I could not watch her films, I felt a sense of loss, as if I had been robbed of a feminist inheritance that would have been helpful early in my career. This sense of absence is reflected in my artistic choices. I am looking for patterns in the gaps. I combine instances of Smith Dayton’s work gleaned from old newspapers and magazines with needlework, lace, viscous materials, and degraded print generations to document fragmented, stitched or glued-together family and feminist histories.

Tuesday, April 22: From the Hand to the People: Materials, Labor, and Social Relations

11:00a – 1:00p EST
Via Zoom

Illuminating the “Gillway”: Concealment of Black Women’s Labor at Gill Glass Company
R.J. Maupin • Bard Graduate Center

The American glass industry was embroiled in change at the beginning of the twentieth century. The introduction of automated machines, World War I, and stricter child labor laws forced manufacturers to reconsider how products were made and by whom. To confront the issue of the dwindling pool of child laborers, some glass companies began to employ Black women. In this essay, I present a case study of Gill Glass Company, a manufacturer of painted and engraved glass lighting fixtures in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that began hiring Black women around 1918. Most often, these women were tasked with operating molds and transporting blowpipes laden with molten glass between white male workers. In the first section, I utilize trade journals, government labor studies, census data, and union records to provide an embodied description of glass factory production. This approach helps uncover the lived experiences of Black women glassworkers, whose so-called unskilled positions were complex and strenuous. In the second section, I turn to catalogs and advertisements distributed by Gill throughout the 1920s. Despite the importance of Black women’s efforts, Gill Glass Company concealed all evidence of physical labor in promotional materials in favor of exaggerated claims about scientific progress and achievement. Using Walter Mignolo’s conception of “the darker side of Western modernity,” I argue Gill portrays itself as a modern, forward-thinking company while obscuring its handmade production process and exploitative model. By capitalizing on Jim Crow Era discrimination, the company ensured Black women would never find advanced roles or higher wages. The lack of information related to Black women laborers is not happenstance: manufacturers like Gill erased references to the production process in their published materials, effectively maintaining stereotypes about glass factories being white, masculine environments.

Allen Fannin: Hand Spinning and Weaving, Nitty-Gritty Needs, and ‘The Black Craftsman Situation’
Olivia Comstock • University of Minnesota

My talk will include research in development for the first chapter of my dissertation on Allen Fannin (1939–2004), a Black studio craft practitioner known for his spinning and weaving in the 1960s–80s. Through Fannin’s frank appraisal of what he called “The Black Craftsman Situation,” or the limits of studio craft for those with “nitty-gritty needs,” the larger project critiques the antagonistic relationship between the studio craft movement, economic precarity, and race. Specifically in this paper, I establish Fannin’s innovations in weaving by examining the aesthetic and conceptual significance of his nubby, irregular hand spun yarn. Fannin positioned texture at the center of his aesthetic, combining natural and synthetic fibers to maximize possible hand-feel and employing muted and single-color palettes to center the yarn. Accordingly, I focus my analysis on texture, specifically to highlight it as a haptic metaphor for the meeting of difference in social relations. In my interpretation of Fannin’s artistic weavings, I focus especially on Stairwell (1968), a light-filtering casement weaving of rayon and flax yarn that was included in the landmark Objects: USA exhibition (1968) and samples of his hand spun yarn. This chapter in progress is informed by affect theories of the haptic and the intertwining of theory and practice in textile objects.

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Thursday, February 29: Exhibiting Global Craft in Midcentury America

10:00a – 12:00p EST
Via Zoom |

The Dakar Connection: Robert E. Paige and the Global Crafts of the Black Arts Movement
Chris Dingwall · Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis

Wednesday, March 27: Landscapes and Ecologies of Craft

11:30a – 1:30p EDT
Via Zoom |

Postindustrial Playbook++
Maxwell Fertik · Rhode Island School of Design

Mining Studio Craft: A Case Study from Glassmaking
Erin E. O’Connor · Marymount Manhattan College

Drawing from four weeks of fieldwork in the southeastern Appalachian region of the United States at mines and a glass batchmaking factory, interviews with mining geologists and engineers, and archival research, this talk will explore mining in studio craft in the case of American studio glass. In a 2015 American Glass Art Society national study, Landscape of Glass Art in America, the findings note the field’s fossil-fuel dependency and its “environmental insensitivity,” but also “little interest in tackling the problem due to small scale and tight budgets.” My current research takes up this call and aims to retell the narrative of American studio glass from the vantage of glass batch. “Batch” refers to the mix of mined, raw minerals from which glass is made.

This research is part of my second book project on American glass, The Middle Mineral & the Mine: the material life of American studio glass. This book will retell the canonical history of studio glass (one of white, male achievements) through both a critical account of settler colonialism and the perspective of minerals and mines. Theoretically, I draw from critical indigenous theory, material feminism, new materialism, and posthumanism, each of which de-centers the human. From this vantage, I attend to the material agency of quartz silica and feldspar among other minerals. In this talk, I will explore the affordances of mining to studio glass and discuss what alternative studio craft histories can emerge from attending to the mines and minerals of glassmaking.

“Popular Material Science”: Aesthetic and Materiality of Wood in Soviet Artistic Crafts
Elizaveta Berezina · Central European University

It may sound cliché, but wood can genuinely be identified as the most common and easily accessible craft material in Russia. Various forms of wood-related crafts, such as wood carving, painting on wood, woodturning, and inlaying, have traditionally been practiced in different regions of Imperial Russia. Some of these crafts endured into the Soviet period and soon gained recognition as “folk artistic craft,” a Soviet category designating handicraft productions with aesthetic value and symbolic significance as bearers of folk traditions.

The scholarly literature on socialist materiality often focuses on materials such as metal, concrete, or glass, commonly associated with notions of progress and modernity. In my presentation, I will analyze the meaning of wood, a material typically associated with traditions, the past, and historical roots, but which has secured a significant place in the Soviet symbolic imagination. This examination will encompass the attributes linked with wood and the meanings embedded in this natural material, as documented by Soviet art historians and critics from the 1930s to the early 1980s. A particular emphasis will be placed on an article titled “Aesthetic Meaning of Material in Folk Art,” written by the Soviet art historian Ekaterina Khokhlova (1922–?) and published in 1980. Despite its limited recognition within art history circles and beyond, this text provides numerous insights into the materiality of wood, its properties, agency, and the system of popular knowledge—referred to as “popular material science”—regarding the handling of wood and its transformation into an aesthetic object. Through my exploration of this overlooked text, my aim is to amplify the voices of female art historians from the late Soviet era and pay tribute to their pioneering ideas. I will also talk about aspects such as imitation, concealment, and exposure of the material in working with wood and the ideological evaluation of these manipulations in Soviet artistic crafts.

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Thursday, April 4: Crafting Feminist Networks

12:00p – 2:00p EDT
Via Zoom |

Grrrls on Video: Joanie4Jackie as Feminist Craft in the Pre-Internet America
Sara Blaylock · University of Minnesota Duluth

“I Was a Potter, I Worked”: Radical Craft Pedagogies and Women’s Creative Networks in Postwar St. Ives
Jeanie Sinclair · Falmouth University

Women came to St. Ives, Cornwall, in the 1950s and 1960s searching for radical new ways of living and working. It was the support networks that existed in the town providing jobs and training in craft – as well as support for accommodation, childcare, healthcare and social and political lives – that enabled them to fulfill their ambitions. Many women were able to find work for local pottery studios, craft businesses or artists, and learned and developed new skills to make a living.

Women’s oral histories reveal how craft skills enabled them to develop and participate in
professional and social networks. St. Ives provided unique opportunities for creative work and financial independence for women, and the chance to train and develop skills from peers that would have been difficult to achieve elsewhere. The creative community provided vital social and professional peer support networks, along with the economic benefits of cheap rents and flexible part-time work. These communities of craft practice offered both an escape from mainstream repressive norms of gender and sexuality, and a degree of autonomy and freedom that was arguably more difficult for women to achieve in urban centers. The ceramics community, with the Leach, Mask and Troika potteries, was central to the creative community in St. Ives, with the Mask pottery, set up by Jess Val Baker, and later run by Shirley Beck, distinctive in being run by women.

Listening to gossip and anecdotes about women’s work in the oral history archives reveals connections between their experiences, and a particular kind of alternative feminist modernism defined by a search for an authentic way of living, making a living through craft and handmaking. Importantly, the networks created by women offered freedom, by developing a creative practice through peer-to-peer learning and skills sharing common within the creative community.

Hooked with Love: Feminist Care Ethics in 20th-Century Craft Practices
Victoria MacBeath · Concordia University

Consider, briefly, the way that your grandmother’s home was decorated. What objects stand out? For many people from Canada’s Atlantic province, hooked mats, or rugs, come to mind. These objects are saturated with memory and sentiment; with the labour of love that is involved in crafting them. My presentation therefore explores the affective archives of care that hooked rugs contain.

Joan C. Tronto’s 1993 book, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, she asserts that “to create a work of art, is not care.” Since then, many contemporary artists have contested this statement. There has, conversely, been little work done to consider how crafted objects and practices of the 20th century are equally acts and archives of care. To fill this gap in knowledge, I will conduct an analysis of a hooked rug made in New Brunswick, Canada. Guided by material culture studies methodologies, I will consider the rug’s formal qualities, social function, methods of making, and the historical context in which it was made. By considering these components of, I argue that handmade rugs act as visual and material archives of Tronto and Fisher’s (1990) four components of care: “caring about, taking care of, caregiving, and care receiving” and the way in which this was enacted through textile making in 20th-century craft practices. This transdisciplinary research encourages a more holistic consideration of the significance of vernacular craft practices, and the affective histories and labour contained within these objects.

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Tuesday, April 16: Discipline and Defiance

10:00a – 12:00p EDT
Via Zoom |

Art, Craft, and Incarceration in the French Penal Colony of New Caledonia
Sandrine Canac · Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

Luxurious Artifacts of an Ascetic Revolution
Elham Shahsavar Zadeh · York University Canada

The discursive shifts following the 1979 Revolution, marked by the slogan of supporting the oppressed and rejecting the excesses of luxury associated with the previous regime. Following this shift, many luxury items became sites of tension and were gradually eradicated from the material culture of Iran. The Iran-Iraq war further exacerbated economic hardships and fostered a culture of sacrifice that sought to eliminate whatever was associated with bodily pleasure across the country. Archives of local press from that time reveal that this discursive shift impacted heritage restoration, craft production, and the tourist industry in Isfahan as well.

However, this shift proved to be temporary. In this presentation, I will review local press archives to illustrate how a combination of local policymakers and craftspeople’s activities, along with the economic and diplomatic necessities of the war, changed the approach to Isfahan’s luxurious craft productions, resulting in its eventual prosperity in post-revolutionary years.

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[NEW TIME] Wednesday, May 8: Earth: Matter and Meaning

12:00 – 2:00p EDT
Via Zoom |

Moqueca Capixaba: Knowledge, History, Heritage
Victoria Gerson · University of Florida

From Earth to Breath: Studying the Material Journey of Bronze Masks in Tulu Bhuta Kola Performances
Arya Adityan · Florida State University

The Tulu region, or Tulunadu, comprising southern parts of Karnataka and the northern parts of Kerala, has evolved various forms of performance-based rituals invoking the native guardian spirits. Bhūtakola, a major annual festival of the Tulu region celebrates the several guardian spirits and tutelary deities (called daivas and bhūtas) who protect their villages. This ritual involves a medium or performer who receives the invoked spirits and answers practical questions, solves quarrels, and thus acts as a judge whose words go unchallenged. These deities are manifest during the festivals through ritual objects–in particular, masks, breastplates, and anklets–that are worn by human performers accompanied by visual and performing arts such as music, dance, dialogue, facial make-up, and decorations made of natural materials.

This research delves into the artisanal craftsmanship behind these ritual objects, exploring how they breathe life into materials drawn from the lived Tulu realm and integral to Tulu oral narratives and the quotidian lifestyle. The study investigates how these materials take on a more-than-human life during ritual performances, with a specific focus on the material biography of bronze masks—a distinctive element of Bhuta Kola performances. This is informed through a series of fieldwork in museums across Europe and USA and through interviews with artisans and scholars of these objects. The bronze ore’s journey from beneath the earth, subjected to heat and cold, exposed to atmosphere, and anointed for ritual performance culminates in the artisan breathing life into the mask through prāṇa pratiṣṭha, the ritualistic invocation of breath (or life) into the mask, transforming it into a more-than-human entity. This study explores the agency of these materials, revealing the dynamic interplay between ritual contexts, material biographies, and the transformative potential of these cultural artifacts.

Soft Matter, Forgotten Matter: An Account of Rammed Earth Craftworks
Erika Brandl · University of Bergen

This presentation revisits the neglected history of rammed earth craft in Norway, with a focus on the past conditions that enabled its emergence and use. Architectural representations in the country have been inexorably tied to craft traditions and localisms, framed as a marriage of natural materials and the built form; however, wood and stone occupy center stage of this material-oriented ethos. Very little attention is given to old rammed earth building techniques. Beyond tectonic considerations, the presentation’s aim is to reveal (and, with the help of archive documents, to illustrate) the value-tinged discourse around the making of rammed earth craftworks, with a focus on jordhus, which were built at the end of the nineteenth century, between 1920 and 1930, and during the post–World War II building boom. I speak of the social circumstances and ideologies that caused Norwegian individuals to turn to—and away from—such building material. Based on Asbjørn Klepp’s seminal ‘Jordhus i Norge’, as well as Akershus Museum’s little-known surveys, building projects in Østland, Vestland, and Sørland are the focus of this short study of the craft histories embedded in rammed earth free-standing walls. Notions of intergenerationality and sustainability, of vernacular knowledge and home aesthetics are then utilized to qualify and weigh the significance of jordhus building technologies for present-day architectural narratives of Norway, shedding a new light on the topic. In theconcluding part of the presentation, I briefly comment on rammed earth’s resurgence in the face of current climate concerns and describe a contemporary case study (Raab Jordhus, 2019) that shows the material’s significance for future Norwegian architectural cultures – and generations.

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Wednesday, May 15: Craft Pedagogies

9:30a – 11:30a EDT
Via Zoom |

Learning Making: Textile-Craft, Gendered Pedagogy and Philanthropy
Annapurna Garimella and Santhosh Sakhinala · Art, Resources and Teaching Trust, Bangalore and Visva Bharati University

Fictional Legacies: The Art of Crafting Intent in (Meaningful) Coexistence
Catelijne van Middelkoop · Technische Universiteit Delft

SintLucas is a vocational school in the South of The Netherlands which offers a number of educational programs centered around crafts. The school was founded by the Dutch Catholic Union of Painting Patrons (St. Luke Foundation) in 1948, and initially only provided courses for members of the union, professional painters from Boxtel, who during the winter months worked on improving their skill level. Nowadays the still existing painting program that specializes in restoration and decorative painting accepts students from all kinds of backgrounds and places, yet the curriculum, tools, and creative output have remained more or less the same. Students work on similar assignments in similar historical contexts such as the nearby local church, learning and professionalizing their craft as they are doing.

The history of four other crafts programs that are taught in distinctive ateliers at SintLucas’ location in Boxtel does not go this far back. The so called ‘Creative Craftsman’ that are educated here have (only) been working with ‘glass’, ‘leather’, ‘ceramics’ and ‘textiles’ since 2014, could also have opted for a similar educational focus at two other creative secondary vocational schools elsewhere in The Netherlands (Cibap in Zwolle, and HMC in Amsterdam and Rotterdam). All three schools are members of the so called Creative Craftsmen Consortium which aim to secure the existence of so called ‘atelierberoepen’, craft based trades that are taught in specialized workshops. Where the painting program in Boxtel was based on a local need for professional training in a specific craft, the ‘craft revival’ of the consortium started with a national agenda much less tied to (and sometimes even disconnected from) local heritage. This paper addresses the role of embedded history in crafts education today and takes a critical look at why some crafts programs might be more futureproof than others.

The Dryad “Handicrafts” Collection: A Global Movement of “Arts and Crafts” for Education
Maria Chiara Scuderi · University of Leicester

The Dryad “Handicrafts” collection represents a case study to investigate how craft practice was re-positioned in design education in the early 20th century Britain, with a global perspective. This paper invites to interrogate the notions of “modern” and “indigenous” in design by analyzing a collection that was gathered from the world to be of inspiration for the local School of Art in Leicester (UK). Therefore, it explores the process of appropriation of “indigenous” design pursued by a culture dominated by industrialization and imperial aspirations. The Dryad “Handicrafts” collection is extremely diverse in manufacture, ranging from basketry to textiles and woodwork, and it comes from British colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, as well as from the “peasant” Eastern Europe. It was purchased by Harry Peach in missionary exhibitions, Empire expositions and from his substantial network of relations of field collectors, with the scope to re-produce a world movement of “handicrafts” on display in his Leicester showroom, and on loan in the local School of Art.

Therefore, the rationale of such miscellaneous collection was educational, and can be understood when looking at the objects as a whole entity: provide good examples of “handicrafts” that would serve as inspiration for the future generation of designers capable to appreciate shapes and patterns of an “indigenous” nature, and improve the craft-based educational system in Britain for a better national trade. Alongside the collection, leaflets with illustrations and instructional diagrams were published by the Dryad company and delved into objects creation and material preparation, proposing a worldview that valued “primitivism.” With an object-based focus, this paper asks: what does the Dryad “Handicrafts” collection reveal about the history of taste and design education between Britain and its global contexts? How has the category of ‘indigenous’ design being adopted and adapted for the production of ‘modern’ design?

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Wednesday, May 22: Data, Digitization, and Making

2:00p – 4:00p EDT [note daylight saving time change in U.S. and Canada]
Via Zoom |

“Computer vs. Hand”: The Critical Making of Data Visualizations
Rebecca Tegtmeyer · Michigan State University

March 9, 2023: Pulling the Golden Thread: Tracing Embroidery Histories

2:00p – 4:00p EST
Via Zoom

“A Workshop of Women: Byzantine-style Gold-figure Embroidery in 18th Century Istanbul“
Catherine Volmensky · PhD Candidate, Art History, University of British Columbia

An eighteenth-century Byzantine veil shows the recumbent figure of the dead Christ. A type of religious veil referred to as an epitaphios, this blue silk textile is lavishly embroidered with gold, silver, and silk threads. Similar types of religious veils were found in churches and monasteries throughout the Balkan Peninsula and the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Drawing on a theory of line and ornament, this paper discusses the entangled artistic, artisanal, and economic networks of post-Byzantine workshops shared between the geographic space of eastern and southern Europe. Through this methodology, this paper focuses on a workshop active in Istanbul in the eighteenth century, which produced religious textiles with Christian imagery and Ottoman-style ornamental borders. The Greek woman who ran this workshop, Despoineta, was a very skilled artist and embroiderer; her pupils additionally found success creating Byzantine-style gold-figure embroideries, demonstrating the active processes of knowledge transfer. The role of women as craftspeople active in the economy of the Ottoman Empire is also questioned, as well as how labor organization and women artisans have been examined or overlooked in previous scholarship. Since the intersection of lines create networks, the methodology of this paper also emphasizes a nonhierarchical approach to works created during the post-Byzantine period and moves away from scholarship that solely gives voice to works created before the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The idea of lines and network additionally helps unpack the aspect of the movement of ornament across cultures. The ornamental borders of the veils produced in Despoineta’s workshop reference Ottoman textiles, which offers insight into how the Greek community in Istanbul negotiated their daily life and artistic output on a local level. The emphasis on lines, network, and ornament offers a grounded methodology to approach the craft of gold-figure embroidery produced in the eighteenth-century.

“Textiles of Silver and Gold: Exploring the Development and Meanings of Burmese Shwe Chi Doe“
Rebecca Hall · Curator, USC Pacific Asia Museum

Burmese shwe chi doe textiles are difficult to ignore and yet they regularly get overlooked as valuable examples of Burmese visual culture. As impeccably crafted appliqued and embroidered textiles made in workshops for a variety of purposes, shwe chi doe hold great meaning for anyone interested in Burmese history, religion, court practices, and colonial impact. Several published articles and book chapters have focused on shwe chi doe by piecing together the possible histories of these objects. Yet, as is typical with craft across the globe, little is known about these textiles’ concrete and tangible history: who initiated this kind of textile and what were its specific uses? One theory asserts that it originated with the court at Mandalay and was eventually adopted as a popular art form, while others speculate that art form developed from the influence of Chinese groups who immigrated to Burma and fused textile embellishment techniques from home with needs of their adopted home. In looking at the purpose of these large, heavy textiles, explanations of use are widely varied as well, ranging from room dividers and photographic backdrops to coffin covers and backdrops for theatrical productions. Such a wide range of possibilities can leave researchers to question how much depth we can understand about these textiles beyond the surface details of production and the identification of featured narratives and iconography. This presentation represents the early stages of exhibition development. It explores the connections shwe chi doe textiles have with the multifaceted and multicultural landscape of Burma in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed with a glimpse at the continued production of these textiles in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, we can see the influences of immigrating Chinese populations, the connections Burma has had with neighboring India, and the central role of Buddhist stories and practices for a more complete understanding of the connections between craft and national histories.

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March 23, 2023: Revival, Renewal, and the Nation

January 12, 2022: Textiles, Identity, and the Marketplace

10:00a – 12:00p EST
Via Zoom

“Ribbon Skirts and Baskets: Indigenous Femininity in Canadian Centennial Exhibitions”
Lisa Binkley · Assistant Professor, Department of History, Dalhousie University

When Dr. Margaret ‘Granny’ Johnson (d. 2010) of Eskasoni First Nations displayed her hand-stitched ribbon skirt and handmade baskets at international and national venues in celebration of Canada’s centennial anniversary (1967), she participated both inside and outside the sphere of Western modernity. While her ribbon skirt embodied the traditional matriarchal teachings associated to women’s biological and reproductive roles, and women’s position within Indigenous society, her baskets served as a way for her to earn additional income to contribute to the home economy. Exploration of Johnson’s hand-stitched ceremonial dress and handcrafted baskets as material culture and through a lens of Native Feminist Theories identifies the need to expand ideas of Indigenous feminisms, reaching outside the parameters of Indigeneity and mainstream feminism, and toward a reclamation of Indigenous sovereignty.

“West African Artisanal Tailoring as Clothing- and Identity-Making”
Elizabeth Ann Fretwell · Assistant Professor of African History, Old Dominion University

This talk traces the history of Beninois artisanal tailors and seamstresses, and their work designing, cutting, sewing, and marketing clothing in twentieth century west Africa. Scholars have documented the key role of (mostly women’s) clothing consumption and fashion in negotiating political and social identities in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Yet these accounts elide that much of this clothing was tailor-made for clients and that consumption of bespoke clothing was shaped by makers as well as users. In centering the tailor, my research fills a significant lacuna in an otherwise robust literature on dress and fashion in Africa and shifts attention to how craftspeople created the forms and styles available to ordinary people and to how the exchanges between tailors and their clients helped embed clothing with its political and social meanings. By focusing on the objects, craft knowledge, and practices of tailoring from the pre-colonial Kingdom of Dahomey to the recent past, I argue that as tailors made clothes, they also crafted ideas and experiences of self, city, and nation. Drawing on evidence from archival, oral, visual and material sources, and an apprenticeship with a master tailor, I am attentive to the technologies and material qualities of the craft. I trace changes within the uses and meanings of sewing machines and other tools, clothing and sartorial embellishments, diplomas and membership cards, and workshop spaces. I also focus on sites of learning and production to show how state workshops and schools, open-air markets, private homes, and independent workshops shaped the content and quality of craft knowledge. With its focus on the material and how men and women gave it form, my talk reveals how craftspeople helped mediate modernity, urbanization, and political transformations in twentieth century west Africa.

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January 26, 2022: Beyond the Craftsperson: Craft and the Agency of Materials

10:00a – 12:00p EST
Via Zoom

“A ‘Suave Combat’? Distributed Agencies between Matter, Artisan, and Workshop in Early Modern Venetian Glassworking”
Emily Hyatt · Research Assistant, Heidelberg Center for Cultural Heritage, Heidelberg University

In chapter twenty-nine of his 1564 work Dello specchio di scientia universale, the Italian traveler and physician Leonardo Fioravanti praises the work of the glassmakers of Murano. “Nowhere else in the world,” he writes, “has thus far been able to make this art in such perfection.” This achievement, Fioravanti claims, is due to the supreme technical skill (artificio) of the Muranese glassmakers. However, crucially, Fioravanti also emphasizes that “God and Nature have provided [this place] for the benefit of this art,” since such glass can only be produced with Venice’s “lagoons of salty water,” “plant ashes brought from Syria,” and the “light and beautiful flame” of the furnaces themselves. The craft of glass, evidently,is wrought by many actors. Taking Fioravanti’s pronouncement as a starting point, this talk identifies and discusses contemporary artisanal and literary attitudes toward the craft of glass in early modern Venice (c. 1450–1600). In contrast to dominant art historical paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth century, which tend to privilege notions of stylistic purity and the cult of the individual artist, this research suggests an alternative interpretive model. This exploration is rooted in the so-called material turn of recent years as well as in sixteenth- century sources, both of which (re)cast the material as expansive, polyvalent, and agentive. Through tracing the itineraries of the raw materials of two types of colorless Venetian glass, vitrum blanchum and vetro cristallo, and by mapping their production within the node of the Muranese glass workshop through artisanal manuals and recipe books, it becomes possible to highlight the extent to which the realization of this craft was distributed across space and among various agents. Such an approach relocates Venice-made glass within a broader provenance and proposes a polytemporal, multi-nodal, and transcultural mode of interpretation.

“Materiality in Mexico’s Arte Popular: Amate as a Case Study”
Estefania Sanchez · Independent Scholar

The 1921 “Exhibición de Arte Popular” established the category of arte popular in Mexico. The exhibition required that all works be made from materials originating in the country of Mexico and created through “authentic” Indigenous traditions. In other words, the focus was on creating a national identity founded in Indigeneity rather than on the Indigenous communities themselves. Since 1921, discussion of arte popular has focused on either dismissing it as a tourist trinket or advocating for its inclusion as ‘art’. However, there has been a serious lack of discussions centered on arte popular’s appropriation of Indigenous cultures for a national aesthetic. This has led to an underwhelming focus on the relationships between contemporary Indigenous communities and the objects they are creating. This presentation applies an alternative approach to the study of arte popular by taking a decolonial approach that focuses on the relationship between contemporary Indigenous communities and the non-human (materiality). I provide a case study that maps the way that the relationship between the Hñähñu’s (Otomi) communities and amate (bark paper) have developed. 

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February 23, 2022: Crafting Histories and the Present

10:00a – 12:00p EST
Via Zoom

“Crafting the Patawomeck Eel Pot: History, Survivance, and Culture”
D. Brad Hatch · NEPA/Cultural Resources Media Manager, U.S. Department of the Navy

Traditional crafts associated with Virginia Indian tribes have drawn the attention of colonizers, collectors, anthropologists, and material culture researchers for hundreds of years. The vast majority of these crafts have a connection to traditional foodways systems and serve as major aspects of tribal identity and continuity from the pre-invasion period to the present day. One of these crafts that is intertwined with the culture of the Patawomeck people is the white oak eel pot, a specific type of woven eel trap. My research examines the history of these objects, their role as an object of survivance, and their cultural implications from the perspective of a material culture researcher, archaeologist, and one of two remaining traditional makers of these traps within the tribe. The critical engagement with the materials and histories of Patawomeck eel pots ultimately reveals a broader understanding of changing Patawomeck communities and identities from the pre-invasion era until today. After providing some background on the form and construction of these objects, I place them in the context of Virginia Indian fishing and basketry traditions and discuss how the eel pot has become an object of survivance among the Patawomeck, helping to tell our story to each successive generation. I conclude with a reflection on the fragile nature of craft within Virginia Indian communities by discussing how the eel pot tradition among the Patawomecks was almost lost and my current efforts to ensure its survival.

“‘A Map is Not the Territory’: Unsettling Craft Histories in Shaped by the Loom“
Hadley Jensen · Research Fellow in Southwest Modernism, Lunder Institute for American Art; Research Associate, Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History; and Raphael Begay, artist and Public Information Officer with the Navajo Nation Division of Human Resources Administration

For this co-presented talk, Hadley Jensen and Rapheal Begay will discuss their work on land-based and relational practices of Navajo weaving. In building upon current research and fieldwork on the Navajo Nation, this presentation brings landscape into view as a craft(ed) “object” or site of inquiry, both historically and into the present. With support from NYU Gallatin’s WetLab, Begay and Jensen worked on a collaborative field documentation project in Fall 2020 that examines relationships between people and place. Through 360-degree panoramic images, still photographs, and audio recordings, we aim to provide an immersive and sensory experience of the animate landscapes and varied topographies of the Navajo Nation, evoking a multisensory document of place from a Diné worldview. This media content will be featured in two forthcoming exhibitions on Navajo weaving in an effort to reimagine and rechart Diné space, particularly within the context of institutional histories and collecting practices. In building upon the exhibitions’ themes and narratives, this project foregrounds reciprocity efforts, making this documentation accessible and relevant to descendent communities whose past, present, and future homelands we inhabit. Ultimately, this initiative strives to create a more dynamic future for exhibition-making to enable new forms of curatorial scholarship.

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March 9, 2022: The Lure of the Local

10:00a – 12:00p EST
Via Zoom

“Rural Craft Production in Britain and Ireland: The Travel Diaries of Margery Kendon”
Thomas Cooper · PhD Candidate and Pigott Scholar, History of Art, University of Cambridge

Margery Kendon (1902-1985), spinner, natural dyer and hand-weaver, is virtually unknown today. She trained under Ethel Mairet, the leading figure in the revival of hand-weaving in the early twentieth century, at Gospels in Ditchling, East Sussex. Kendon and Mairet became close friends and collaborators. Kendon was also colleagues with Elizabeth Peacock, Phyllis Baron and Dorothy Larcher. She was involved with the Rural Industries Bureau and gave craft workshops and demonstrations to a variety of audiences, from rural Welsh communities to the Queen. She is thus at the centre of an important network of artists, designers and craftspeople and of significant developments in the status and use craft in the twentieth century. During the 1930s and 1940s, Kendon travelled around remote coastal regions and wild highlands of Britain and Ireland in search of rural craft production and indigenous methods and materials used to make textiles. Travelling by boat, train and foot, she journeyed through coastal counties of Wales, Northern Ireland, Donegal and the west coast of Ireland, and the Scottish Highlands. Along the way she met and stayed with local makers and observed how these people lived, how they worked, what they made and the place of craft production within these remote regions. Kendon recorded these journeys in detailed written diaries, which are the subject of my paper. They remain unpublished in the archive at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft and, to my knowledge, have never been critically examined. Through close reading of the diaries, supplemented by study of photographs, weaving samples and craft tools, my paper will consider why Kendon went to these places, how she engaged with rural craft makers and production, and how these diaries contribute to a broader understanding of craft, class and industry in Britain and Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s.

“Julia Keiner and the Search for Localism at the New Bezalel”
Noga Bernstein · Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Hebrew University in Jerusalem

The search for local roots and identity was one of the main aspects of the Hebrew art in Palestine and Israeli art in general. Scholars continue to debate which sources shaped Israeli modernism, and what political implications followed the incorporation of Middle Eastern traditions, European Jewish heritage, or international avant-garde movements into an Israeli national style. My presentation will examine the artistic and pedagogical ideology of Julia Keiner, who founded the handwaving department of the New Bezalel School of Art and Craft in 1941 and directed it for two decades. Keiner’s work has hardly been studied despite her successful international career as a handweaver, and her role as director of the first and only textile program in Israel prior to 1970. Born in Germany, Keiner studied at the progressive art and design school Kunstschule Frankfurt in the late 1920s, where she also directed an experimental weaving workshop, and immigrated to Palestine in 1936. Her design ideology was grounded in the objectivist, universalist principles of her modernist German training, and thus, her engagement with questions of localism and the pursuit of a Hebrew style was never explicit. However, from her position at the New Bezalel, Keiner’s work as a designer and teacher was entangled with explicit attempts to cultivate and define a national Hebrew/Israeli style in the fields of textile, needlework or fashion. I argue that this tension between localism and universalism was particularly demonstrated in the different approaches that shaped the two main fields of training at Bezalel’s textile department: weaving and embroidery. While the former related to progress and modernity, the latter was associated with ethnic identity and tradition. This presentation is part of a broader research project that examines Israel’s textile art and design between 1940-1990 as a hotbed for a range of issues at the interstices of aesthetics, national identity, and gender.

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March 23, 2022: The Crafts in War and Displacement

10:00a – 12:00p EDT (please note shift to U.S. Daylight versus Standard time)
Via Zoom

“Renewing, Repairing, Remembering: Craft in Jewish and Baltic Displaced Persons Camps, 1945–1951″
Alida Jekabson · Curatorial Assistant, Museum of Arts and Design, New York

While spanning less than a decade, the history of craft in Displaced Persons camps across ally-occupied Germany demonstrates craft as an active force in transferring cultural knowledge and providing rehabilitation. Looking at this history of objects and making within refugee communities demonstrates the endurance of craft as a cultural technology in the creation of new national ideas. Craft was also central to supporting the normalization of life in the camps immediately following trauma of Holocaust. Using material from museum and private collections, including ceramics, textiles and clothing, this workshop will discuss the shared qualities of crafts in the camps associated with renewal, remembrance, and observance. Also vital to consider are the contrasting circumstances of how Baltic and Jewish refugees arrived in Germany, offering overlapping lenses on refugee engagement with craft. The DP camps, divided by nationality, each functioned as a small city. Spread across allied-control, camps had elected leaders, schools, religious and cultural institutions. Craft in the camps was generally accessed through official government run and private aid organizations and was also rampant within the camps’ trade economies. Refugees put their skills, sometimes newly acquired, and sewed, worked with metal and wood, among other mediums, often using creatively sourced materials, such as parachute silk, army blankets, and lumber from bombing rubble. Some refugees used tools or materials they had been able to carry or that were provided by family or donation. Many examples of craft in the camps were motivated by cultural practice, replacing lost ritual objects or taught to pass on local traditions. Looking at these objects and histories foregrounds an understudied area of craft history and the many ways people access craft as a tool for social and political expression and economic renewal in the aftermath of war and displacement.

“A New Focus on War Lace: Approach, Framework and Methodology”
Wendy Wiertz · Senior Research Fellow, Department of History, English, Linguistics and Music, University of Huddersfield

Lacemaking is an important part of Belgium’s cultural heritage. During the First World War this renowned industry was in danger of disappearing forever: demand for the luxury handmade fabric plummeted, while the supply of materials was interrupted. Thousands of lacemakers faced unemployment. In response, humanitarian organizations developed lace-aid schemes with a twofold goal: saving an imperiled European tradition, and ensuring the wartime employment of Belgian lacemakers, often women who supported themselves and their families. The schemes were highly successful, bringing unprecedented publicity to the industry and to American philanthropy, and employing more than 50.000 women in German-occupied Belgium and among Belgian refugees in Holland, France and the UK. War lace, with its unique iconography, sometimes referred directly to the conflict and included names and portraits of people, places, dates, coats-of-arms or national symbols of the Allied Countries, of the nine Belgian provinces or of the Belgian towns who suffered most during the German invasion. Art historians and craft practitioners have known about war lace, but their focus has been on the small number of high-quality laces designed by recognized artists. Combining archival, collection and practice-led inquiry, this paper will look instead at war lace as material culture in the context of a transnational history of humanitarian handicrafts. In particular, this re-focus on material culture and making processes will draw attention to the tangible and intangible ways in which Belgian lace was mobilized as cultural capital for new nationalist or wartime agendas, and the potential effects of these objects as socio-cultural participants in their own right, both at the time of their production and consumption.

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April 6, 2022: Mobilities of Craft Knowledge

10:00a – 12:00p EDT
Via Zoom

“Formalisation and Informalisation: Julaha Handloom Weavers in Colonial North India”
Santosh Kumar Rai · Professor of Modern Indian History, University of Delhi

This presentation explores the transformation of a traditional craft structure towards modern production and marketing practices through the case of an occupational caste group of Muslim Julahas handloom weavers in the north Indian province of United Provinces presently known as Uttar Pradesh. Here a predominant craft skill-based lifecycle of the Muslim Julaha weavers shifted towards the modern industrial apparatus in relation to the organization of work, workplaces, capital-labor, techniques, and training relations. I argue that the experiences of Julaha weavers of this region cannot be unequivocally located along the premodern/modern or formalization versus informalization divide. This industry structurally situated within the informal sector was marked by paradoxical processes. Though the traditional community mechanisms of control continued functioning through pre-capitalist kinship and religious identities, in new circumstances confronting the new challenges, they had to negotiate with capitalist labor relations in handloom production for the compulsions of survival. Political mobilizations, selective migration, reproduction of community hierarchies, use of invisible labor through family members, limiting the scope of skill, and saturating the production processes were critical to this scenario. This study of the competing and tension-riddled yet overlapping processes in the handloom industry shows complications started the very moment clash of formal colonial capitalist processes began with informal production processes. New processes produced the “exclusive” space of “community economy” in reverse mode, creating a social capital for Julahas, simultaneously running suppressive mechanisms of both the caste based occupational labour relations and also the capitalist system of production. Practicing their skills in an apparent informal ambiance, this weaving community could resist the aggressiveness of organizational formalization under colonial capitalism. To explain both the mutual coexistence as well as contradictions of formal versus informal processes, locating the transmission of craft skill, knowledge, and craft products through community, caste, kinship, and locality ties holds the key. The persistence of caste and family based production sought to situate this internally differentiated but outwardly unified community within the complex process of interaction between informal and formal practices.

“A Transitional Artisan: Reclaiming Multiplicity in the Craft Making in Deccan India”
Rajarshi Sengupta · ​​Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

Upon my first visit to artisan Bhikshamayya Chary’s workshop cum residence in Uppuguda, Hyderabad, I was confounded by an assortment of tools, books, objects, and machinery that are not usual in a block makers’ workshop. Chary, hailing from a wood carver’s family in Nalgonda, Telangana, was trained to do woodblock making but also constructing looms as well as carving ornamental doorways. He was appointed as a block maker at the Weavers’ Service Centre (WSC), Hyderabad, in the 1980s by craft activist and scholar Pupul Jayakar. Upon his recruitment, he became invested in building a rich repository of woodblocks at WSC to be used for textile printing and teaching purpose. Knowing the trajectory of his career at the WSC, I expected his workshop to be a typical of the block makers’ workshops I was familiar with. Over the course of our conversations that afternoon and beyond, I came in terms with my disquiet on not finding scattered woodblocks and tools in Chary’s workshop. The problem had less to do with Chary and more with my approach towards craft making in the Deccan region of India. Transition, adaptability, and coexistence have always been integral aspects of artisanal practice, and yet institutional and disciplinary practices stress on equating a specific craft with its maker. Chary’s multifaceted exercises allow us to assess interconnections between craft practices and fluidity of community occupation. More importantly, it sheds light on the role of woodworkers in shaping several Deccani crafts, including carving, and loom and machinery making, while reflecting on the possibilities of writing artisanal histories.

“Journeying Artisans and Circulating Craft Practices”
Valerie Nur · Research Associate to the Chair for Anthropology in Africa, University of Bayreuth

Craft is often perceived as bound to old traditions that change slowly and lag behind the times. Especially, when it comes to endogamous professional groups in West Africa often described as caste or caste-like groups. Caste simply implies that people’s life seems to be prescribed.Based on long term anthropological field research among Tuareg artisans, called inadan, in the Aïr mountains in northern Niger, I challenge the notion that craft practices are fixed to dusty family traditions and thus stuck in the past. Among inadan craft practices are indeed very closely interwoven with the family but in present relationships rather than to long-dead generations. In my paper, I will explore how craft practices become intermingled with and transmitted throughout the family at the occasion of trade journeys, work migration, weddings and family visits. Craft practices change, are modified, improved and new forms develop as they move on. Furthermore, I can show that craft is not simply handed over from generation to generation in a linear fashion but circulate in the wider endogamous family across the country as artisans travel and marry. Therefore, each artisan acquires an individual repertoire of practices from different relatives in different places. Although women are tied to the home, they also share craft practices with relatives in other places through marriage and visits.

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April 20, 2022: Craft Politics in Imperial, Soviet, and Contemporary Central Asia

10:00a – 12:00p EDT
Via Zoom

“Crafting Futures: Dismantling and Rebuilding Histories Together”
Rathna Ramanathan, Joseph Pochodzaj, Tom Simmons, and Eleanor Dare · Central Saint Martins, Royal College of Art, Cambridge University

Crafting Futures is a British Council funded project whose stated aim is to support the future of craft around the globe, strengthening economic, cultural, and social development through learning and access.” Crafting Futures also aims to “support practices and people through research, collaboration, and education.” These intentions are laudable, and yet the reality of delivering this is far more complex. Since we started working on the Crafting Futures Central Asia project in 2019, we have encountered our role as researchers with an increasing degree of ambiguity. Not least of our concerns has been a top-down theorizing of change and the origin of agency implicit within the project, and indeed, within the broader domain of community-based research that emanates from Global North imperatives. In relation to these power structures, local research partners often battle with who gets to define the meaning of craft for their communities, and this has become a core question for our own research and contributions. As researchers operating within the power structures and academies of the Global North, we must also ask ourselves what ideologies are we projecting onto our participants and collaborators? And to what end? In addition to our own ideological projections, what agency is appropriate when we encounter neoliberal frames of reference and stated aspirations from within the crafting communities we work with? 

For the last two years we have worked with craftspeople and labor organizations in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to generate visual and sonic narratives about the meaning and history of craft; at the center of our research methodology is the imperative of countering and moving beyond naturalized colonial assumptions about what counts as craft and orthodoxies of who gets to define its histories. Despite the construct of craft as entangled in the theories of change and economic imperatives of the Global North, our work in co-creating narratives of craft confirmed, as Balaram (2011) observes, that human need is the origin of design, and this is not just physical but also psychological, socio-cultural, ecological and spiritual. We propose a cooperative, intercultural, dialogic model of working on crafting futures that reflects on the deficits of the Global North model and aims to learn from Global South practices, communities, and knowledges.

“The Making and Unmaking of Craft in late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union”
Sohee Ryuk · PhD Candidate, History, Columbia University

This presentation will discuss transformations in the craft of carpet weaving in Central Asia and the Caucasus from the late 19^th century to the 1930s. At the of the 19^th century, there was a heightened interest in recording and documenting the handicrafts, including carpets, in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Expeditions were spearheaded by the Ministry of State Domains in the Russian Empire in order to determine and record the economic significance of handicrafts in the national economy. These results were instrumental for making arguments for material subsidies as well as various forms of technical or instructional assistance in order to further develop the industry. Despite their admittedly practical interest in the handicraft, observers meticulously the specific processes of making a carpet, from procuring and cleaning of wool, spinning, dyeing, and the knotting and weaving of carpets. Expeditions on these traditions continued into the twentieth century after these areas were incorporated into the Soviet Union, as ethnographers from research institutes sought to understand the handicraft traditions. During the course of the twentieth century, scholars and interlocutors increasingly interlaid national paradigms onto the patterns of carpets. Carpets were included in a particularly Soviet conceptualization of national cultures, which involved formal institutionalization of national artistic culture at the republic level. The institutionalization of carpet and folk-art studies from this period continue to have important ramifications for the present, even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. My presentation uses these descriptions of carpet making as an entry point in order to discuss the changing perceptions of the craft. This presentation will place the history of the handicraft carpet industry against a backdrop of broader economic, social, and political changes in the region. It situates the locus of skill, knowledge, and tradition as the carpet weaving became further institutionalized. 

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May 4, 2022: The Maker’s Hand: Digital Craft

10:00a – 12:00p EDT
Via Zoom

“Shiny New Toys: A History of Digital Technology in Canadian Post-Secondary Craft”
Lynne Heller, Dorie Millerson, and Kathleen Morris · OCAD University

This talk draws from the findings of an in-progress Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant titled Thinking Through Craft and the Digital Turn (CDT)*. We are investigating the history, implications and emergent futures of digital technology in post-secondary craft studios and curriculum as well as community engagement and perception of the digital turn. Students, faculty, and technicians in craft-based programs explore the relationship of handwork to digital technologies daily with varying degrees of access to tools and facilities. Due to a lack of research available on craft and digital pedagogy in Canada, our project is tasked with furthering our understanding of the history and present conditions of the adoption of digital technologies—tools, methodologies and networks—and how they intersect with traditional processes. This talk focuses particularly on embodied pedagogy and digital technology through the lens of precariousness. With the advent of an international pandemic and distance teaching, makers and educators have been catapulted into digital immersion. This development has lent further urgency to our project. By offering up both historical and current insights from across Canada, through research findings and data captured from surveys of faculty, students and technicians at post-secondary institutions, we look in depth at aspects of precariousness and precarity, differentiate between the two and relate these concepts to craft and digital ubiquity. We speak specifically about the practices of Downloading Risk and Responsibility from institutions onto individuals; Loss and Opportunity within digital ubiquity; the issue of Shiny New Toys destabilizing traditional craft practices; and the Seismic Shift Online as a response to the threat of the pandemic.

*CDT is a collaborative effort between Emily Carr University of Art + Design (Hélène Day Fraser, Keith Doyle), Alberta University of the Arts (Mackenzie Kelly-Frère), OCAD University (Lynne Heller, Dorie Millerson, Kathleen Morris, Travis Freeman), Sheridan College (Gord Thompson) and NSCAD University (Greg Sims). For more information, see http://www.craftandthedigitalturn.com/.

“Conceptualising Amateur Filmmaking as Digital Craftivism in Queer Disabled Contexts”
Jenna Allsopp · PhD Candidate, History of Design, University of Brighton

Drawing upon Betsy Greer’s co-authored Manifesto, “craftivism” is generally understood as a practice of engaged creativity which somehow raises consciousness, shares ideas, challenges injustice and/or contributes to wider conversations about uncomfortable social issues. Craftivism involves the reclaiming of creating something by hand, with thought and with purpose, and has the power to connect communities and networks of like-minded people through the act of making.  Echoing Greer, the Craftivist Collective assert that craftivism is not about direct campaigning, but rather raising awareness and provoking people to think—craftivism’s power lies in the possibilities it fosters. This work-in-progress paper is based on current doctoral research in which I consider digital amateur filmmaking as craftivism and whereby I argue the film festival, or its historical counterpart the “cine-club,” can be reframed as a craftivist circle. Scant historical research has been undertaken to explore the connections between amateur filmmaking and craft, so my paper treads new ground and is approached from a design historical perspective. Advances in technology have changed our understanding over time of what a crafted object is and how digital practices can be considered forms of craft, such as hacktivism and the crafting of computer coding. 

As a case study, my paper mobilizes Oska Bright, the world’s largest learning disability film festival, based in Brighton, UK, and, in particular, their “Queer Freedom” strand launched in 2017. By highlighting the work of two British self-identifying queer learning disabled filmmakers associated with “Queer Freedom,” I explore how the filmmakers mobilize performance and self-portraiture motifs to occupy space and self-represent at the still-taboo intersection of queer learning-disabled identities. While not directly campaigning for a particular queer or disability right, their films align with the more ambiguous form of activism promoted by Greer, whereby creativity is used instead of just the voice to communicate meaning and raise consciousness; without the need for “banners and chanting.”

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[NEW DATE] May 25, 2022: Like/As/Is: Metaphor, Empathy, and 20th-Century Politics

10:00a – 12:00p EDT
Via Zoom

“Art between Text and Textile: The Deployment of Fiber in the Southern Cone”
Jacqueline Witkowski · Visiting Assistant Professor, Massachusetts College of Art and Design

At its outset, my research asks why and how artistic approaches to the political situation in the Southern Cone of South America between 1964 and 1990, as this region endured authoritarian governments, were carried out through the metaphorical use of the textile. Within the countries of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, textile materials, techniques, and concepts initially appeared under a modernist, primarily formalist paradigm. But as each country faced increasingly repressive regimes, artists harnessed such forms and traditions to address local historical and sociopolitical concerns. I examine how references to unspun wool and fiber, and threads more broadly, were not only explored through their material qualities but also acted as a process to engage the political context. Artists further adapted textile concepts through accompanying mediums such as poetry and writing, often in order to subvert censorship.

To understand how artists utilized the notion of the textile to counter censorship, articulate processes of colonization, and assert a local identity under the globalizing rubric of conceptual art, I consider the strategies that took place within the specific artistic and political contexts of each country. Currently, the project analyses Brazil and the work of Lygia Pape, as she employed a theoretical apparatus that was based in earlier manifestations of antropofagia; Mirtha Dermisache, whose asemic writing antagonized the military junta’s censorship and control of language to maintain power in Argentina; and lastly, I look to the poetic propositions of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña in conjunction with her exploration of the Incan medium of quipu while she lived outside the country. My argument analyzes how the utilization of the thread in South America at a moment steeped in interconnected political and aesthetic challenges perhaps necessitated the textile as an operational force. I argue that the medium and concepts afforded by the textile—or what has recently come to be called “textility”—were able to provide alternative methods to understanding a tumultuous historical situations and support avenues outside of dominant hegemons and forms.

“‘Sometimes I feel that if I am intimate enough with the object it will come alive’: Crafting Empathy in the Late Twentieth Century”
Rachael Schwabe · Independent Scholar

We are living in a moment in which empathy has taken on a new sense of urgency. Added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1895, this initial definition of empathy identified it as relational structure of feeling into another person or thing. The transcendent and ordinary dimensions of empathy were expanded in the late-twentieth century with events like the civil rights and gender equality movements, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the Vietnam War. I seek to build upon this historic context in which empathy entered mainstream discourse, by examining craft works made in the late twentieth century, whose forms and surfaces confront their viewers with the intimate labor of their makers. I contemplate the dynamics of empathy and craft through objects lovingly made by Ruth Asawa, Senga Nengudi, Felix González-Torres, Janine Antoni, and Lorna Simpson, between the 1960s and early 2000s. I argue that these artists participate in a legacy of empathy by creating object-conduits whose properties destabilize the discrete boundaries of a viewer’s physical and emotional being. My project explores a two-pronged line of inquiry oriented in my perspective as a craft historian: What can crafted objects teach us about care, trust, and collaboration? And how might these objects continue to perform as channels for affective and activist work, outside their maker’s control? Asawa and Nengudi fashioned organic forms in wire and nylons that articulate the denaturalized body in space. González-Torres’ candy spills, Antoni’s gnawed sculptures, and Simpson’s felt prints manifest surfaces that viscerally evoke the body’s flesh. All five artists are united in their use of craft’s relationality not only to enact the body, but also to reveal tensions of love and labor. More significantly, their hand-worked objects provide empathetic encounters that imagine more equitable models of reciprocity and communion among crafted objects, makers, and viewers.

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December 1, 2021: The Industrial Handmade: Craft and Design in Pedagogy

10:00a – 12:00p EST
Via Zoom

December 15, 2021: Material Knowledge

12:00p – 2:00p EST
Via Zoom

“Parelmoerwerkers and Plasticity: Material Literacy in Early Modern Dutch Craft”
Cynthia Kok · PhD Candidate, Art History, Yale University

How is the process of making also a process of making sense? In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, unfamiliar resources like mother-of-pearl challenged the imagination of Dutch makers. Through handling such a material directly, artists learned about its plasticity—how it could be physically and conceptually manipulated. As the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) established global trade networks, mother-of-pearl became increasingly available throughout the Netherlands. Close study of how makers thought with mother-of-pearl complicates mother-of-pearl’s categorization as a natural wonder and re-situates the material as a commercialized resource, a researched specimen, and an artistic medium for the early modern. Craftspeople found ways to integrate the unusual plasticity of mother-of-pearl into a continuum of objects, from nautilus cups to still-life paintings, panel inlays to engraved snuffboxes. Examining the ways in which artists worked from the shell, we can better understand how tactile and sensory competency guided artistic methods and generated knowledge of materials.

“Art, Craft, Ecology, and Aesthetics: Ideas on Basketry in Japan”
Daniel Niles · Associate Professor, Geography, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto

This paper examines the intersections of craft, art, and aesthetic sensibility in general, arguing that these fields act together as an important mode of social communication. As a fundamental technology enabling many landscape-based livelihood practices, traditional basketry in particular expresses and conveys important material-ecological knowledge. Examining basketry in Japan, where its material record extends for more than 7000 years, this paper suggests that the persistence of certain basket techniques and types is linked to the persistence of bodies of material-ecological knowledge. I suggest that this ecological knowledge is often communicated in the aesthetic realm, which is not “decorative” or additional to other more substantial concerns, but instead acts as a kind of code indicating essential techniques of life in particular places. In this sense, aesthetic experiences act to unify sense of self, community, place, and environment in a tight set of overlapping complementary associations. I suggest that such experience is significant to cultural coherence, persistence, or resilience through time, and so also to the material crisis of the Anthropocene.

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