Schedule

Monday, December 1: The Tacit Syllabus: Craft in National Education
Monday, December 8: Tracing, Tangling, Threading: Craft as Method and Metaphor of Circulation
Monday, December 15: The Promise of Craft

Monday, December 1: The Tacit Syllabus: Craft in National Education

11:00a – 1:00p EST
Via Zoom | Register

The Role of Folk Craft Within Socialist Modernism: Processes of Knowledge Transfer (1945-1955)
Veronika Rollová and Johana Lomová • Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague

In Central-East Europe after 1948, people democracies based their state identities in both universal modernity and national specificity, or in terms of socialist realism, art was supposed to be international in content and local in form. The Czechoslovak Centre for Folk Art and Craft (ÚLUV) established in 1945 became an influential platform for both trained artists and institutionally untrained craftsmen to preserve folk tradition and in cooperation create a specifically Socialist visuality. Their activity was based in shared workshops where Modernist orientation at technological progress connected with folk artisanal knowledge. Both were supposed to be equally valued from the Socialist perspective. Traditional crafts based in rural parts of the country were supposed to become one of the actual building blocks of a new society. Should we understand the early years of ÚLUV as a radical rethinking of the art field, or merely as a formal appropriation of folk motives without any emancipatory consequences? Embodied knowledge of formally untrained women, domestic workers and craftspeople from rural areas could potentially alter the “elite” artists’ understanding of materiality in the shared ÚLUV workshops where they met regularly. How strong was their influence?

The search for a new visuality was documented in professional journals of (decorative) art and exhibitions such as “We Build on Folk Art/Craft” (1949). In our presentation we will introduce these documents and elaborate on the complex sources of Socialist Modernism with a special focus on different ways, in which craft intelligence shaped the working strategies and pedagogical approaches of ÚLUV members with professional artistic background such as Emilie Paličková (lace-making) or Antonín Kybal (tapestry). We believe that it is possible to find traces of folk craft practice in their creative process: emphasis on collective work, manual expertise and focus on the inner logic of the material. 

Negotiating ‘Taste’ and ‘Self-expression’ through Art Education in South Asia
Tanya Talwar • Humboldt University

The opening of the Schools of Industrial Art at the British presidencies of Madras,
Calcutta, Bombay, and Lahore reset the role of arts and crafts in industry and vice versa. I propose to reflect on the unfolding of art education at these Schools of Art to look at the entanglements of pedagogy with the incentives that came with this kind of education in crafts and industrial arts from an art historical and a transregional perspective. The work branches out of my ongoing doctoral dissertation at the Humboldt University of Berlin titled, ‘Art Education between Heritage-Making and Critical Transregionality’.

Central to my analysis of colonial art education methods and crafts production is their
entanglements to the notions of ‘taste’ and pressures of colonial government policies. The adoption of the South Kensington style of instruction at these schools of art, known for its emphasis on patterns of ornament and design, serves as a starting point for understanding the particularities in the local applications of these methods by educators and students for different ends during the first four decades (1850-1890s).

Methodologically, the work uses transregional and transcultural lenses to approach the scale and scope of art education in colonial art education. This work considers these schools as spaces of multiple transformations that incentivised certain skills and their applicability to projects of ‘taste’ and self-expression. The attempts to bring artistic and industrial education under the same institution also led to the disentanglements of the overlapping domains of fine arts and crafts, artists and artisans. How can we understand this rather simplistic binary in a better way to gauge the role of art schools in the region’s art history and heritage? Using case studies and archival material from different regional art schools, the story has more to tell than those printed in art school prospectuses.

Monday, December 8: Tracing, Tangling, Threading: Craft as Method and Metaphor of Circulation

11:00a – 1:00p EST
Via Zoom | Register

Traces of Collaboration on Commercial Embroidery from Late Qing China
Katy Rosenthal Jackson, Bryn Mawr College

Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, embroidery overtook weaving as the primary mode of textile decoration in China, becoming highly commercialized by the late Qing dynasty (c. 1796-1912). With base fabrics woven on industrial-scale looms, designs drawn by workshop-employed pattern drafters, and stitching executed to order by numerous hands, the collaborative processes by which commercial embroideries were made involved labor divisions that do not fit neatly into dominant pre- and post-industrial models.

This talk will focus on two silken garments—a sari and a tunic—that were embroidered by hand in China for customers in western India as part of a new niche market formed through nineteenth-century trade. On both of the pieces, the underdrawing that transmits the embroidery design is visible. Ink and chalk peek out beneath the silken stitches, serving as tangible lines of connection to the concerted efforts that combined to make one piece. Taking these traces as an invitation to investigate how the garments were crafted, I will attempt to parse out the multiple stages of their production. In doing so, I will demonstrate that a craft-centered approach can productively set aside grand historical narratives of industrial triumph or decline to instead recover as much as possible the constraints, opportunities, and decisions of makers.

The Global Entanglements of Lacquer
Elizabeth Carroll • San José State University

There is no better example of global art history than the production of lacquers that circled the globe from China, Japan, Southeast Asia to Europe vis-à-vis the Jesuit presence and on to the Americas. Lacquered objects from East Asia were among the most prestigious decorative arts to arrive in Europe which initiated a crucial phase of adaptation in its craft history.

Venice is considered the only center in Europe where a wealth of knowledge was accumulated and developed on varnish and lacquer technology. Lacquered objects from China and Japan were quickly consumed by Venetians, and it was understood that shipping from Asia would never meet the market’s demand. With brush in hand, were Venetian painters copying the objects from the marketplace? Did they develop their technique from the Chinese method? Venetian artisans would further adapt lacquer to create ornate lacquered book bindings: what was known as “in the Persian style.”

Drawing upon the framework of Glenn Adamson’s seminal work, Thinking Through Craft, (2007), I aim to re-examine the lacquer craft (1600-1750) in the context of Venice as part of a conservative guild-system that devalued painting on objects, yet I will question: were Venetian lacquer artisans merely following a legacy of “unbroken tradition…carried out in the spirit of revival?” Were Venetians attempting to replicate the “Chinese style” to meet with supply and demand? On the other hand, Venice serves as the nexus between Chinese products and the Syrian damascening which provided a rich lexicon of motifs. Lacquer, instead as a medium, provided Venetians with vast opportunities for experimentation and invention.

Morus Project: Home Sericulture
Hanna Norrna, Irini Gonou and Kleopatra Tsali • Morus Team

Morus is an international silk network proposing home-sericulture – meaning the breeding of silkworms in a small scale format in one’s home – in order to engage local communities in historical processes regarding the future silk production. Members of the network use a collective diary aiming to document their parallel processes of sericulture, whilst they individually work on multidisciplinary artistic investigations of the sericulture theme.

The purpose of the project is to raise awareness on the relationships between silkworms, mulberry trees and humans, as well as to state inquiries informing these relationships through social, ecological, artistic and ethical perspectives. Members of the Morus Community document their synced up or concurrent processes of home-sericulture in a collective diary. Through the diary, a geopolitical mapping of mulberry trees, weather and other circumstances that affect the cycles of the silkworms is formulated.

The aim of the collective diary is to build an archive of collected knowledge of home-sericulture on a small scale. Such an archive has so far not been composed or at least revealed, as the historical texts and descriptions of sericulture found in historical sources are aimed at industrial production with markedly different conditions.

Through a series of educational programs and workshops, the collective embodied, haptic, para-academic activities of Morus come together as a way to redefine and bring to the forefront processes of sericulture, both in tangible and in immaterial ways. By first preserving and then passing on knowledge related to making threads and to weaving with them after, amongst many others, the educational programs of Morus aim to give visibility to alternative knowledge production, investigate and write down social history and culture of the visiting sericulture areas.

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