This special issue of the Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice is the second collaboration between the Textile Society of America (TSA) and the journal. The editors selected the essays in this issue from the many dozens of papers presented at the TSA’s 17th Biennial Symposium, held online October 15-17, 2020. Titled Hidden Stories/Human Lives, the symposium provided a global platform for the sharing of new research, untold narratives, and previously excluded voices in the production and interpretation of textiles across time and place. In line with the symposium theme; the TSA’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion; and historic events that brought racial and social justice to the forefront of the national dialogue in 2020, this special issue features papers that discuss textile histories and practices of American communities traditionally underrepresented and obscured in the political, academic, and cultural landscape. Offering approaches and insights that often challenge mainstream academic discourse and longstanding frameworks of knowledge, these articles underscore the plurality of textile histories, producers, and purposes while advocating for alternative, more inclusive methodologies and ontologies in textile studies.
Three papers on Native American textile arts embrace decolonized academic models that encourage community-based research and the prioritization of Indigenous traditions and knowledge systems in object studies. Jennifer Byram describes a project in which Chahta (Choctaw) community members and artisans collaboratively studied archaeological and textual sources as the foundation for the creation of an eighteenth-century style Chahta skirt. Made of bison and dogbane fibers sourced, processed, and woven by group members, this skirt and its production process served to strengthen bonds within the community and between the community and the natural environment while reviving a textile tradition that had been dormant for more than two centuries. Cultural revitalization and the recovery of lost traditions also is the focus of the paper by Vera Sheehan, which describes how a team of Abenaki women designed and made regalia to be worn in Abenaki agricultural ceremonies. Highlighting the cultural significance of Abenaki regalia objects, Sheehan outlines the consensus-based collaborative processes that enabled their creation and ensured the passing on of skills, designs, and histories from one generation to the next. She describes these acts as “a form of Indigenous resistance and exercise of sovereignty.” In her paper on Native American fishing nets from the mid-Atlantic region, Annabelle Camp provides a model for community-driven research and the possible role of academics and museum professionals in object-based decolonization and knowledge reclamation. The Lenape Tribe of Delaware chose fishing nets—utilitarian objects crucial to their subsistence for millennia—as the subject for this research project. Camp served as a facilitator for the project and involved the Lenape in each step of her research on the construction, use, and cultural significance of historic fishing nets.
Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines Black feminist-womanist theories, methodologies of material culture studies, and archival research, Kelli Racine Barnes examines embroideries made by three Black schoolgirls in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia: Mary D’Silver, Adaline Harris, and Olevia Rebecca Parker. Although the embroideries made by Black schoolgirls have been largely ignored in textile scholarship, Barnes reveals their significance as documents of Black lives from which little other material or archival evidence has survived. These embroideries offer insight into the formation of Black American girlhood identities before Emancipation and shed light on the early education of Black American girls, the schools they attended, and the organizations and individuals who supported these educational institutions. In examining the materiality and textual content of these embroideries and the socio-historical contexts in which they were created, Barnes helps to illuminate the presence, voices, and lived experiences of makers long obscured from history.
Transdisciplinary weaver John Paul Morabito combines anecdotes from art history, stories of their immigrant family, and reflections on Queerness to create a deeply personal ontology of tapestry. In this article, Morabito focuses particularly on their current project, Magnificat, which reimagines Italian Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child as digitally woven tapestries. While the flamboyant colors, fake gold, and sparkling embellishments of these tapestries manifest a campy opulence that can be read as “Queer,” Morabito emphasizes that these aspects also reflect the aesthetic sensibilities of Italian immigrant culture. Madonna and Child paintings by the Renaissance masters are icons of a heritage that has marginalized Morabito, the Queer child of an Italian American family, but through their creative reenvisioning the artist mediates tensions between ethnicity, Queerness, and the sacred and reclaims this cultural legacy.
Ọmọlará Williams McCallister and Valeska Populoh discuss the founding and development of the Natural Dye Initiative (NDI), a multi-agency project that examines the cultural and economic impacts of natural dye cultivation and use in the Baltimore area. Centering Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BI + POC), the NDI comprises academic coursework at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA); an artist-in-residence program, with related research and artistic projects; and a wide range of educational and community programming. While supporting experiential learning about the cultivation, harvesting, and processing of plants for the dyeing of cloth, the NDI acknowledges these process’s complex histories of colonization and enslavement and challenges perspectives that perpetuate colonizer narratives and white supremacy. In this practitioner study, McCallister and Populoh focus particularly on the individuals who have shaped the NDI and how their combined work has guided the project’s pedagogy, curriculum, and community. The intertwining of their goals and life stories through the NDI provides a valuable case study for community building, collective care, and inclusive educational approaches in the textile arts.
The essays in this volume celebrate the diversity and wide-ranging research interests of the Textile Society of America’s membership. The guest editors would like to thank the many TSA members who contributed to this project, including the authors; the reviewers who contributed their time and expertise in assessing the manuscripts; Beverly Gordon, Past President of TSA, and Laura Johnson, the Linda Eaton Associate Curator of Textiles at Winterthur Museum, who offered authors thoughtful commentary and suggestions; Laura Johnson and Madeleine Luckel for help with proofreading; and especially Wendy Weiss, former board member of TSA, and Nancy Powell, both editors of the Journal, who patiently guided us through the development and realization of this publication project.
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Notes on contributors
Karen Hampton
Karen Hampton is an internationally recognized conceptual fiber artist, addressing issues of colorism and kinship. Hampton's art practice is the synthesis of memory, history, time and cloth. A student of cultural relationships, she seeks to break through stereotypes and address issues related to being a woman. Using her training in the fiber arts and anthropology, she brings together the roles of the weaver, the dyer, the painter, the embroiderer, and the storyteller. Karen Hampton's artwork is held in the collections of the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, and the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii and she received the coveted Eureka Prize from the Fleishhacker Foundation in 2008. Hampton is an Assistant Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA. [email protected]
Lee Talbot
Lee Talbot is a curator at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum in Washington DC. He joined The Textile Museum in 2007, specializing in the history of East Asian textiles. He has curated numerous exhibitions and published catalogues, articles, and textbook chapters. Lee was previously curator at the Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum in Seoul, Korea. He has a B.A. from Rhodes College, an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a M.A. and M.Phil. from Bard Graduate Center. He serves on the board of The Textile Society of America. [email protected]