The Common Thread: Representations of Women Through Textiles and Crafts
This exhibition uses items exclusively from The Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s (BCMA) permanent collection to look at how craft and textile culture acts as a common thread that connects women across time and space. Additionally, the exhibition looks to highlight the important roles textiles have played and still continue to play in many of the world’s cultures and societies. All while putting a spotlight on the important yet often overlooked work done historically by women in the production of textiles.
The exhibition is divided into three sub-sections that when put together will attempt to tell the story’s of women and of textiles in art and culture as they relate to each other:
First, in the Production and Gender section, the exhibition focuses particularly on how historically the production of textiles has been gendered as feminine and how that gendering has influenced the ways in which we might think of textiles to this day.
Second, in the Commodification and Power section, we will look at representations of women by male artists focusing on how the artist uses textiles in ways that objectify, commodify, and idealize women.
Third, and finally, in the “Craftivism” and Reclamation section, we will take a look at works by contemporary woman artists and think about how they have reclaimed textile as well as craft culture and elevated it into the high art sphere.
