Crafting Community

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Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to all of our contributing authors: Stephanie Anderson, Nicole Archer, Nicole Burisch, Sonja Dahl, Mackenzie Kelly-Frère, Ana Paula Fuentes, Ector Garcia, Janis Jefferies, Jovencio de la Paz, Rowland Ricketts, and Stacy Jo Scott. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable input on this volume, and to the Journal’s Editor, Dr. Catherine Harper. We are especially grateful to all those who made this issue possible especially given that the labor of academic writing, editing, and reviewing continues to be primarily unpaid.

Parts of this Introduction were previously presented in a paper titled, “Crafting the Social: craft, collaboration and skill” by Lisa Vinebaum, College Art Association Annual Conference 2013; and by Kirsty Robertson and Lisa Vinebaum at a co-chaired panel on the theme of Crafting Community at the College Art Association Annual Conference 2014.

Notes

1. Despite these developments, some critics continue to insist on fiber's inferior status, reiterating pejorative and outdated clichés about craft and the domestic; for example, Jonathan Jones (2014), reviewing Tuttle's Tate Modern project for the Guardian, compares the monumental sculpture to a Christmas garland, and uses depreciatory references to textiles to assert, "This is post-minimalism so confident of its place in the modern canon that it just keeps on going like someone crocheting obsessively, or knitting one sweater after another, without stopping to ask why."

2. Detailed accounts of the revival of textiles and the handicrafts can be found in Auther (2010), Jefferies (2011), and Buszek (2014).

3. James Herring (2013) notes that Maker spaces originated in children’s and science museums as a means of encouraging learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM.

4. Interestingly, Fiona Hackney asserts that British women who participated in making crafts in the home during the 1930s‒1950s were participants in "imagined and actual communities of magazine readers and handworkers," thereby demonstrating "that the social, communal, reciprocal, and identity forming aspects of amateur making were fully established long before the Internet and Web 2.0" (Hackney 2013: 182).

5. On histories of collaboration in art extending back to the Baroque period, see Lind (2009). On histories of collaboration in art and genealogical accounts of social practice, see Dezeuze (2012), Stimson and Sholette (2007) and Thompson (2012). On social practice, see also Finkelpearl (2013), Jackson (2011) and Kester (2004). To date, very little attention has been paid to the social histories of fiber or craft in genealogical accounts of the field of social practices, despite the contemporary and historical prevalence of relational approaches in the handicrafts. Art historians Jenni Sorkin and Julia Bryan-Wilson have both written extensively about craft and collaboration, feminism, and politicized craft practices.

6. The histories of hands-on craft education are explored in detail in Fariello (2011).

7. At the same time, some feminists called on women to abandon the handicrafts, perceived as contributing to women’s oppression.

8. On Greenham Common, see Robertson (2010) and Feigenbaum, Frenzel, and McCurdy (2013).

9. On this point, see Bryan-Wilson (2011).

10. According to Etsy's own 2013 report “Redefining Entrepreneurship,” 88% of US-based sellers are women; sellers in the US earn on average 10.2% less than the American national average (in Krugh 2014: 291).

11. Nicole Burisch and Anthea Black are working on this very issue, which they describe as “craftwashing”; see http://performedausterity.tumblr.com/craftwashing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kirsty Robertson

Kirsty Robertson is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum Studies in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on activism, visual culture, museums, and changing economies. She has published widely on the topic and is currently finishing her book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums and Culture. More recently, she has turned her attention to the study of wearable technologies, immersive environments, and the potential overlap(s) between textiles and technologies. She considers these issues within the framework of globalization, activism, and creative economies. Her co-edited volume, Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism in Canada, was released in 2011, and her tri-authored volume, Putting IP in its Place: Rights Discourse, Creativity and the Everyday, was published in 2013.

Lisa Vinebaum

Lisa Vinebaum is a Chicago-based scholar and interdisciplinary artist. Her research explores labor, performance and collectivity under late capitalism; the social histories of textiles; and the public and participatory mobilization of fiber in contemporary art. Her work has been presented, performed, and published internationally. Recent publications include contributions to the Handbook of Textile Culture, Danica Maier: Grafting Propriety, and Companion to Textile. She holds a PhD in Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. Lisa Vinebaum is an Assistant Professor of Fiber and Material Studies, and affiliated faculty in the department of Art History and Critical Theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. [email protected]