Crafting Community

Introduction

This special issue on the theme of Crafting Community was inspired by the recent proliferation of public and participatory projects in contemporary fiber. We have been watching as more and more artists turn to textile techniques such as knitting, crochet, sewing, quilting, beading, and weaving, in projects that emphasize collaboration, viewer participation, and the performance of making. Whether bringing people together in physical or digital spaces or both, artists are mobilizing textiles to spur interpersonal dialog and exchange, and to educate, build community, and advocate for social change. Their projects create social bonds and foster new types of community, some fleeting and temporary, and others more long term and durational.

This themed issue aims to explore a range of cross-temporal and cross-disciplinary interpretations of crafting community. We invited theorists, art historians, artists, and cultural workers to reflect on the theme of crafting community across artistic production, fashion, and museological and exhibition practices. Their contributions explore case studies from the 1970s to today, in the United States, Canada, Britain, Japan, Mexico, and the Interwebs. This extended Introduction seeks to contextualize the articles that comprise this volume, and to link recent developments in fiber to both larger shifts in the art world on the one hand, and to historical precedents specific to textiles on the other. It is our assertion as editors that the prevalence of collaborative and participatory, performative, and publicly sited approaches in fiber today, are connected to earlier strategies deployed by craftspeople, designers, curators, activists, and of course—artists. Our focus here is on projects that take place in public spaces, that create social space and foster social bonds, and that rely on strategies of performance, viewer participation, and/or collaboration.

These developments in contemporary fiber come at a time when fiber and craft are increasingly accepted and embraced by the art world. As Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock (1981), Jenni Sorkin (2003), Elissa Auther (2010) and others have demonstrated, museums and galleries have historically been hostile environments for the display of craft and textile-based arts. However, the past decade—and the past few years in particular—have seen a dramatic increase in the exhibition of fiber and craft in a wide variety of prominent museums and galleries. Take, for example, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which included Sheila Hicks’s monumental fiber sculptures and Lisa Anne Auerbach’s whimsically political knitted sweaters. Textiles featured heavily in major 2014–2015 exhibition projects by artist Richard Tuttle—a longtime collector of textiles from all around the world. His commissioned fabric sculpture for I Don’t Know: The Weave of Textile Language was installed in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, while a career survey exhibited under the same title at the Whitechapel Gallery focused on the importance of textiles in the artist’s work.¹

Fiber’s substantial contributions to sculpture were recently acknowledged and celebrated in a major travelling exhibition, Fiber: Sculpture 1960‒Present, curated by Jenelle Porter. The exhibition traced a contemporary history of the use of fiber in sculpture, emphasizing its use as a material for dimensional and conceptual expression, and reinforcing what artists, scholars, and curators of fiber have insisted on since the 1960s. Similarly, the exhibition Thread Lines, curated by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow at the Drawing Center in New York in 2014, traced material and conceptual affiliations between fiber and drawing extending back to the 1960s. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, emphasized fiber in a 2015 series of concurrent exhibitions under the rubric Toward Textiles, a massive endeavor that featured Material Fix, a major curated historical and contemporary survey of the field, together with solo exhibition projects by artists including Joan Livingstone, Ann Hamilton, and Ebony G. Patterson.

More generally, textile techniques such as knitting, crochet, and sewing have been experiencing a dramatic resurgence.² “Craft has become the new cool,” wrote Janis Jefferies recently (2011: 224), with this resurgence in mind—a trajectory also explored in a recent essay by historian Maria Elena Buszek on the substantial presence of fiber and craft in contemporary art (2014). What’s more, today, artists not always associated with craft or textiles such as Ghada Amer, Tracy Emin, Polly Apfelbaum, and Liza Lou, and including those enjoying a great deal of critical acclaim such as Tuttle, Michelle Grabner, Grayson Perry, Jim Drain, Theaster Gates, and William J. O’Brien, are using tapestry, embroidery, knitting, beading, ceramics, wood work and other forms of craft to make work celebrated at the heights of the art world. While we applaud this shift, we surmise that the embrace of craft and fiber stems at least in part from their increasing use by male artists, and we remain cognizant that many important women artists who have spent decades working with fiber materials remain under-recognized.

Yet fiber continues to be mobilized in politicized examinations of gender. Today, a new generation of transgender and gender non-conforming artists including L.J. Roberts, Wolfie E. Rawk, Ben Cuevas, and Emmett Ramstad are turning to fiber to create community and explore non-binary gender expressions. As scholar Jeanne Vaccaro asserts, “The labor of making transgender identity is handmade: collective—made with and across bodies, objects, and forces of power” (2014: 96).

One also finds a growing number of exhibition strategies that privilege public participation and active community involvement. Recent exhibitions and curatorial projects that emphasize the collaborative, durational, and performative aspects of fiber and craft include Gestures of Resistance, curated by Shannon Stratton and Judith Leemann at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft in 2010; Hand+Made, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2010; Anne Wilson: Local Industry, curated by Chris Molinski at the Knoxville Museum of Art in 2010; Laurie Herrick: Weaving Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, and Object Focus: The Bowl, both curated by Namita Gupta Wiggers at the Portland Museum of Contemporary Craft in 2011 and 2013, respectively; and Social Fabric, curated by Anuradha Vikram for the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles in 2013. Similarly, the Denver Art Museum hosted parallel activities such as a drop-in quilting bee and a natural dye garden as part of its 2013 exhibit, Spun: Adventures in Textiles.

Yet public participation has become something of a trend in museum culture more generally, thanks to social media, funding imperatives, and the pressure to attract younger and more diverse audiences. Maker spaces—prevalent in DIY, open source and hacker communities—are popping up in institutional environments in an effort to provide viewers with hands-on experiences of art making.³ Notably, The Possible (2014), guest curated by David Wilson at the Berkeley Art Museum, reconfigured the galleries into workspaces for ceramics, dyeing, printmaking, and sound recording, involving collaborations between over 100 artists and members of the public.

We argue that one of the most profound recent developments in the field of contemporary fiber is a substantial shift in site from private space to public space, away from the domestic sphere, and into public sites such as cafés, pubs and bars, storefronts, galleries, public transportation, the streets, and cyberspace. What is more, knitting, sewing, crochet, and even weaving in public spaces is most often undertaken by groups of individuals, marking a parallel shift from away from the individual maker. We contend that these public, collective types of making also have a performative bent, transforming public spaces into shared, dynamic, communal social space. Art historian Alla Myzelev calls this the claiming of public space “for more intimate relations” (2009: 157), reinforcing the notion of textiles as social fabric.

Fiber’s recent mobilization in the public realm includes a wide-range of participatory interventions. Carole Frances Lung (AKA Frau Fiber), for example, takes her bicycle powered sewing machine out into the streets of Los Angeles and other urban centers, providing an opportunity to raise public awareness about the abuses of the global garment industry, together with instruction in mending and making one’s own clothes. Self-described action weaver Travis Meinholf weaves in public spaces using customized, handmade looms. The looms must be attached to trees, bodies, or other structures and require the collective participation of viewers to function properly, thereby linking them in a temporary social bond. Margarita Cabrera organizes participatory sewing workshops to explore issues of immigration, identity, and community along the US-Mexico border, drawing attention to the ways in which the border has served to separate families and communities. Anne Wilson, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Coral Short, and Teresa Margolles are but a few of the many artists who are turning to fiber in hands-on and participatory contexts to share common experiences, exchange skills and knowledge, and build communities of shared interest. While these artists bring people together face-to-face, others such as Christi Belcourt, Cat Mazza, Magda Sayek, and Jennifer Marsh rely on crowd-sourced contributions and virtual collaborations facilitated through social media.

Other collaborative and crowd-sourced projects bring people together to draw attention to specific issues and call for social justice. These include Indigenous quilter Alice Williams’ Living Healing Quilt Project, created for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada with the goal of encouraging conversation and healing for Indigenous survivors of the country’s genocidal residential school system; artist Lashawnda Crowe Storm’s Lynch Quilts Project exploring the history of lynching and the legacy of racial violence in the United States; and FORCE Collective’s Monument Quilt, a collection of hundreds of quilt panels contributed by survivors of rape and sexual assault. A very different project by Ele Carpenter seeks to raise awareness of intellectual property and open source information through the creation of a massive embroidered and quilted HTML hexagram.

These various projects take place in real space and online, where the public and interactive capabilities of Web 2.0—blogs, web rings, social media—have been harnessed to create vibrant communities of textile makers that are at once local, virtual, and international in scope (Minahan and Wolfram Cox 2007: 6). It is not an exaggeration to say that the Interwebs have played a central role in moving textiles from the private to the public sphere. What is more, the Interwebs and social media have offered immeasurable opportunities for connection, through massive online communities of knitters, sewers, and textile artists such as Ravelry and Craftster, as well as opportunities to market craft goods through marketplace sites such as Etsy and Big Cartel. It would appear that access to online communications is essential to encouraging such interventionist, collaborative practices.⁴

This represents a substantial shift “away from that of the solitary artist, towards that of co-learner, facilitator, social transformer” working with fiber and craft (Loveday-Edwards 2011: 145). There is no question, then, that contemporary artists are using textiles to create a range of participatory, politically- and socially-motivated art. But what it is about the current moment that encourages this kind of production? Might we also find historical precedents for these kinds of maneuvers and interventions?

Craft and the Desire for Social Connection

Many scholars observe a substantial shift in social structures in Western societies, and the United States in particular, over the past 40 years. Sociologist Richard Sennett (2012) notes that Western values promote self-sufficiency and autonomy over collaboration; for him the loss of cooperation skills began in the workplace during industrialization, and has been drastically exacerbated under advanced capitalism. Artist Stephan Micheletto-Blouin asserts that capitalism “established the primacy of individual rights and responsibilities as well as establishing individual self-interest as the prime motivator of relations” (2011: 19), while art historian Grant Kester (2004) observes a shift in American social policy since the 1980s, away from the ideals of assistance and the common good that emerged during the New Deal era, to an increased focus on self-sufficiency and the individual. Kester (2004) further asserts that the rise of social conservatism has led to the dramatic erosion of state-sponsored social programs and services, a point echoed by curator Nina Montmann, who observes, “The pressure of personal responsibility thus creates further uncertainties as to the relations between the individual and the community” (2009: 12). For sociologist Robert D. Putnam (2000), suburban life, changes in work and family structure, and the increased prevalence of televisions and computers have led to a substantial reduction in social bonds; Americans are becoming increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and democratic structures, and fewer Americans now belong to social clubs and groups than ever before. For psychologist Sherry Turkle (2011), a ubiquitous reliance on communications technologies and social media is disrupting our ability to form and maintain more traditional, face-to-face social connections.

Yet where some theorists chart a breakdown in social relationships, others see in this the catalyst for the emergence of art practices aimed specifically at suturing those social bonds. Grant Kester (2004) and cultural theorists Christian Kravagna (1999) and Nikos Papastergiadis (2009) connect contemporary social conditions to the emergence of social and participatory art practices that stress increased connections and social change. As Kester asserts, “collective solidarity and community have never been more important” (2004: 130). He and Kravagna and Papastergiadis connect changing social conditions to a recent collaborative turn in contemporary art, as dramatic changes to our social structures spur a desire for increased social connection. According to these theorists and others, artists are inventing “new ways of being in common” (Basualdo and Laddaga 2009: 22), evidenced by the recent proliferation of collaborative and participatory projects, as well as the emergence of social practice—a hybrid field combining art, grassroots community organizing, critical ethnography, sociology, architecture, social entrepreneurship, and activism.⁵ We agree, finding parallel practices in contemporary textiles, where many of the strategies discussed here also emerged in response to demanualization, economic globalization, and passive screen culture (Bryan-Wilson 2011; Gauntlett 2011; Robertson 2010; Vinebaum 2015).

The Social Lives of Textiles

On the one hand, the recent public and participatory turn in fiber can be understood as part of a more pronounced shift toward collaborative and participatory approaches in contemporary art. On the other hand, textiles have always operated at the intersection of individual practice and group activity. While we chart a move from private to public, and from the individual to the collective, we remain aware of the extensive social histories of textiles.

Textiles are embedded with social meanings, and they serve to bring people together and to foster social bonds. Textiles are passed down from one generation to another, connecting us to our families and communities, while the transmission of skills such as weaving and dyeing from parent to child also help to strengthen family bonds (Gordon 2011). Cloth is easily transportable and can connect us to place, even those to which we cannot easily return. Textiles connect us to group identities through the use of pattern and design, embellishment and adornment, color, and the wearing of distinctive garments and dress (Gordon 2011).

Textiles have longstanding histories of collective making; there is evidence of collectively produced cloth extending as far back as the Neolithic and early Bronze Ages. As curator M. Anna Fariello observes, “Throughout history and up into the Middle Ages, the making of any object was centered in a cottage industry” (2011: 26). Shared work also strengthens group cohesion and fosters social bonds; today, communities on every continent continue to come together to print, dye, weave, spin, bead, plait, quilt, and sew collectively.

What is more, as cultural theorist Milada Burcikova asserts, historically “craft has been a vehicle to think about self-sufficiency, self-empowerment, communal experience and happiness in work, as well as a tool for fighting poverty and oppression” (2011: 8). The history of craft is replete with projects that could also fall under the rubric of today’s social and participatory practices; the work of Ethel Mairet, William Morris, Bernard Leech, Phoebe Traquair, and the Deerfield Society are among the numerous historical precedents that attest to histories of collaboration and community-building in textiles and craft.

Craft and Connection

Many of today’s participatory and collaborative projects emphasize skills sharing and instruction; for this reason, the numerous hands-on craft education initiatives established in the United States and Britain around the turn of the twentieth century are of particular relevance to us. The British and American Arts and Crafts movements sought to valorize and revitalize hand making, advocating hands-on craft education. Craft education was incorporated into the American education system during the second half of the nineteenth century, and in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. Around that time, craft education was also incorporated into urban and rural settlement houses alike in the United States. Hands-on craft education philosophies were enshrined in the many American craft schools established in the early twentieth century—including Black Mountain College, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Penland School of Crafts, and Cranbrook Academy of Art—and that continue to thrive today. Hands-on craft education was supported by federal legislation during the Depression era and in the wake of World War II, spurring both the American Craft Revival and the studio craft movement.⁶

Making things together helps to foster social bonds, and we see connections between these historical examples of hands-on craft education and socially engaged projects by the contemporary fiber artists who turn to skills sharing and instruction as integral parts of their projects. In addition to showing people how to make and do textiles, artists are using skills instruction to foster dialog and discussion across socio-economic and cultural differences. For example, Robin Love has taught commuters to spin wool on the subway in New York City, creating new and unexpected interactions in a highly culturally diverse urban setting. Allison Smith organizes skills exchange events featuring a broad range of textile and craft techniques, many of them emphasizing the creation of community among American war veterans and between veterans and ordinary citizens. Michael Swaine’s decade-long public mending project on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District has helped to foster a greater sense of community and belonging in one of the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city. Nadia Myre turned to instruction in traditional Indigenous beadwork in an effort to bring people to together to critique colonial laws that continue to impact First Nations people in Canada. Aram Han Sifuentes is using sewing instruction to help immigrants to the United States share knowledge required to pass their citizenship exams, creating community among new residents across cultures and geographies. In all of these various projects, hands-on instruction and skills sharing are used to create works of art but also, to build “community-based activity and relationships” (Black and Burisch 2011: 212).

As such, many of the projects discussed in this Introduction also connect back to traditional quilting, sewing, knitting, and beading circles. Historically, textile “bees” and sewing circles were organized out of economic necessity and the need to pool and share resources. Based in thrift, bees provided a space for conversation and community formation. They brought people together, breaking social and cultural forms of isolation, and fostering dialog, mutual support, and collaboration.

Feminist Histories

We also remain cognizant of the germinal role played by feminism in fiber history. Many of the recent projects described in this Introduction are indebted to 1970s and 1980s feminist artists and activists who turned to craft and textile-work to critique the patriarchal system. Questioning the phallocentric and abstract expressionist-dominated art world from which the era’s feminist art departed, feminist artists such as Su Richardson, Kate Walker, Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and Faith Ringgold used “domestic” crafts such as crochet, knitting, and embroidery to question their dismissal by the traditional art world and their relegation to the domestic sphere. Together with theorists Lucy Lippard, Roszika Parker, Griselda Pollock, and others, they sought to unsettle the ease with which expectations of domesticity and child rearing were imposed on female artists, thereby politicizing the division between private and public (Robertson 2010).⁷ As Janis Jefferies asserts, “The decorative, craft and the domestic became challenging ideas that women in the fine arts could engage through work involving textiles” (2008: 43). These developments are also eloquently examined by Elissa Auther (2010) in her influential text, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art.

A closer look at the history of fiber and social change reveals that textiles have often been mobilized as a part of feminist activist organizing. British suffragists appropriated women’s domestic embroidery skills to more militant ends (Harris 1988), creating over 150 hand embroidered and appliquéd suffrage banners between 1908 and 1913, a key period for pro-suffrage activity. Suffrage groups organized hands-on skills instruction in drawing, banner making and design, and the banners were collectively designed, stitched, appliquéd, and assembled by hundreds of women (Tickner 1987). From 1981 through 2000, anti-war activists at the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, located outside the former Royal Air Force Base in Berkshire, UK, used knitting as a protest tactic: a precursor to knit bombing, they knit into the fences surrounding the base as a protest tactic and strategy for laying claim to contested space.⁸

While craft and textile work have been used to draw attention to issues of oppression and exploitation, they are also associated with ideals of utopian labor that often obscure real, exploitative, and gendered conditions of production.⁹ The devaluation of women’s hand-labor has undergirded many supposedly utopian projects. Notably, while William Morris held progressive opinions on gender equality, he nevertheless felt that while women were suited to “domestic” arts such as embroidery, they were incapable of producing “the fine and delicate work” demanded of building, weaving, tapestry, and (remarkably) cooking (Kinna 2007: 186). Consequently, women in the British Arts and Crafts movement were relegated to embroidering designs most often created by men. Similarly, as Sigrid Weltge-Wortmann (1998) has pointed out, while the Bauhaus was in theory egalitarian, women were ultimately relegated to its textile workshops.

One might also point to the continued undervaluation of handwork even as it is monetized. While sites such as Etsy and Big Cartel have provided important opportunities for the marketing and sale of handmade goods, they are also firmly entrenched in a neoliberal ethos of individuality, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurship, often extracting labor at a rate far below a living wage (Tokumitsu 2014). While their (mostly female) makers might have a passion for making, “doing what you love,” often brings with it immense consequences, including a breakdown in the traditional separation between work and leisure, binge cycles of working, few (if any) benefits or insurance, and immense precarity (Tokumitsu 2014). These issues lie outside the scope of this text, however, we would be remiss to paint an exclusively positive picture without highlighting some of the ways in which egalitarian and participatory objectives can provide little more than feel good opportunities, thereby masking real issues of exploitation, access, and privilege.¹¹

Exploring Crafting Community

While not all of the articles included in this volume make specific reference to the historical precedents and contemporary developments in textiles discussed in our Introduction, for us as editors, they are strongly rooted in past traditions as well as current practice in the field. In an effort to present a diverse range of voices on the theme of crafting community, this volume presents extended and shorter articles exploring notions of the crafting community across a range of curatorial, institutional, group, and individual art and design projects.

Several contributors reflect on issues of institutional space, viewer participation, and the potential benefits and pitfalls of community building within museological space. Critical writer and curator Nicole Burisch looks at the craft object, finding in performance studies a compelling way to read “dematerialized” craft practices within the larger context of recent exhibitions that seek to put craft’s performative potential on display, while eradicating traditional boundaries among objects, artists, and viewers. Artist Mackenzie Kelly-Frère considers his public weaving project and performance at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon. As artist in residence there, he negotiated the presence and impact of the audience on his daily weaving practice, in a context that unsettled his relationship to his studio practice. Cultural worker Ana Paula Fuentes, the former Director of the Museo Textil de Oaxaca (Textile Museum of Oaxaca) in Mexico, reflects on the institution’s grassroots community mandate of actively involving local textile artisans in all of the museum’s programming activities, thereby shedding light on the potential for an institution to actively function as a social space for creation and public engagement.

The social histories of textiles and craft discussed earlier resonate in texts by artist Rowland Ricketts and art historian Stephanie Anderson. Both consider how artists incorporate and adapt past traditions while creating new opportunities for sociality and community through participatory crafting. Ricketts documents two of his projects with traditional Japanese indigo growing and dyeing, one a growing and harvesting project that seeks to bolster small-scale regional development and foster community bonds in Bloomington, Indiana; and the other, cross-cultural textile installations created with community members in Tokushima, Japan. In Anderson’s discussion of Walking with our Sisters, a crowd-sourced project that gathers hundreds of traditionally beaded moccasins created to call attention to the more than 1200 disappeared and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, we find a community that forms through a Facebook group that brings together (mostly) women across a vast geographical and intercultural territory.

Textile theorist Janis Jefferies provides a case study of British artist Su Richardson’s knit works, exploring domesticity and gender roles of the 1970s, as connected to feminist consciousness raising and community building at the time. She notes that similar feminist politics might continue to influence contemporary textile and craft practices today, notably DIY craft and craftivism, connecting strategies of feminist organizing of the 1970s to today’s digital networks. Jefferies asks the important question of whether 1970s feminist practices remain significant to contemporary iterations of collaborative and politicized textiles, or has their impact been largely overshadowed and forgotten?

Art historian Nicole Archer returns to the object, or specifically an object—a pubikini created by the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich just days before his death. Archer uses the pubikini to (queerly) read the tension between material(ity) and fashion, or between the public face of a well-known garment and the private face of its designer, or, alternately, between the public face of the fashion industry and the hidden backdrop of desire, capitalism, and consumption. Her contribution explores Gernreich’s subversive interest in reshaping fashion silhouettes as part of a larger attempt to reshape the social fabric.

The Craft Mystery Cult’s contribution proposes digitally networked spaces as spaces for creative collaboration. Their collectively authored text reflects on their collaborative artistic practice across geographical space, and their reliance on digital technologies as tools for sustained collaboration. The collective proposes virtual and digital space as significant sites for cooperative craft production.

Finally, the process of editing and producing this special issue was itself collaborative, and this Introduction collaboratively written—a method that involved the exchange of information across physical and digital space in the form of binary code, emails, file sharing, and Skype conversations. The issue therefore embodies some of the public and cooperative modes of production that we seek to unpack in these very pages. This issue is the product of shared editorial interests and shared research across our own specialist spheres of art making, curating, and critical writing, offering a model of academic collaboration that is non-hierarchical, non-competitive, and rewarding.

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.

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]

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.