Women, Textiles, And Craft
Nearly all cultures and societies rely on textile goods, whether for clothing, domestic use, art, religion, or other purposes. The chances are high that you have yourself interacted with some sort of textile-related object in the last few hours. Simply take a look around the space that surrounds you, and you are likely to find some sort of product that has been made with textiles — perhaps a rug, a couch, some bed sheets, or even clothes. That being said, it is safe to say that textiles are omnipresent in and crucial to the way we live our lives. And yet, how often do we ever stop to wonder about how these objects are made, or about the long history that they carry in their very fibers? In this exhibition, we will look at just that.
We will see how the historically slow and labor-intensive production of many objects that we might now take for granted, such as quilts, articles of clothing, and other fabrics, has traditionally fallen under the category of women’s work. While keeping this in mind, we will also consider how the ways in which artists’ negative depictions of women might have been associated with women’s connection to textiles, and how these depictions through textiles often stifled or controlled women’s identities. Finally, we will think back to the idea of women’s work and see how many women artists have taken up the slow and laborious medium of the textile as a way to bring attention to the work historically done by women while asserting — or rather reclaiming — their own identities and degrees of agency in the process.
