Art Practice Commons^™

Glitched Metaphors: Dysfunction In Hand-Woven Digital Jacquard, Gabe Duggan

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

This presentation demonstrates various ways in which the TC1 has supported my work’s exploration of tension, balance, and precarity. By embracing and pushing expectations of traditional fiber work, these weavings question inequalities within contemporary performances of gender and exhibitions of power. My work on the TC1/TC2 digital jacquard loom has been primarily tethered to one specific machine with which I have shared a personal past and future for just over a decade. Through this technology I have built and negated tension, challenging a broad range of power dynamics. My work with this TC1 seeks to exploit and balance this technology …

Schoolgirl Embroideries & Black Girlhood In Antebellum Philadelphia, Kelli Racine Coles

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Embroideries stitched by girls at schools for Black children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are rare finds in the antiques world. The few embroideries likely stitched by Black schoolgirls that do survive often offer historical evidence in the form of the names of their makers’ schools stitched onto their embroideries. Yet there is little scholarship on these embroideries or the education these schoolgirls were pursuing while creating their samplers. In scholarship using material culture as primary evidence, these embroideries provide valuable clues about the lives of Black girls in northern cities during the antebellum period. My work examines the …

A Tale Of Two Sisters: Invisibility, Marginalization And Renown In A 20th Century Textile Arts Revitalization Movement In New Mexico, Suzanne P. Macaulay

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

While this presentation does not address oppression in the global textile industry and injustices to leagues of anonymous enslaved women workers, it does raise questions about the vicissitudes of fame and obscurity of two women relative to artistic creation and textile arts revitalization efforts. This is the story of two Varos sisters, who married two Graves brothers, and lived in Carson, New Mexico. In the early 1930s Frances and Sophie Graves with their extended families repaired Spanish colonial textiles for the Santa Fe market. At some point they began to recreate traditional Spanish colonial-type colcha embroideries from recycled materials salvaged …

Signed In Silk And Silver: Examining An Eighteenth-Century Torah Ark Curtain And Its Maker, Genevieve Cortinovis, Miriam Murphy

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Around 1755, Simhah Viterbo (c. 1739-1779) completed a luxurious Torah ark curtain, or parokhet, in Ancona, an important port city on Italy’s Adriatic coast. The base fabric, a bright blue silk satin, is appliqued with gold and silver guipure embroidery, vellum sections covered with metal-wrapped threads, spiral wound wires, and flattened strips of metal. Paillettes punctuate the Hebrew inscription, which runs across the curtain’s lower edge. The central grotesque composition, a series of stacked, diapered cartouches in the vein of Daniel Marot (1661-1752), fans out towards the enclosed borders. Florist flowers—blousy carnations, roses, and campanula—delicately embroidered in blush-colored silk threads, …

Shared Provenance: Investigating Safavid-Mughal Cultural Exchange Through Luxury Silks In The Sixteenth And Seventeenth Centuries, Nazanin Hedayat Munroe

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

When examining silk textiles attributed to the early modern Persianate world, there is always some uncertainty as to whether they were produced in Safavid Iran or Mughal India. The confusion is warranted: the two courts share many of the same ideas, images, and even family connections, creating a broad cultural overlap. This becomes apparent in the arts from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, as politics and patronage prompted the migration of key Safavid artists, including weavers, from Iran to Mughal India. As Persian painting was developed in the royal atelier, luxury silks were also produced with Safavid techniques.

Examining these imported …

Plants In The Tapestry (Literally), Ann H. Peters, Adriana Soldi S.

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Among our studies of ancient Peruvian textiles created in tapestry technique, we have come across some surprising elements, both in the warp and the weft. Andean textiles created over the past 10,000 years have been preserved in certain locations along the Pacific desert coast. They are usually preserved in the cloth bundles that protect and adorn the dead, and composed of fibers from native cotton varieties of Amazonian ancestry, the hair of highland ancestors of today’s llama and alpaca, maguey leaves from the mid-valley canyons, and reeds from coastal marshes. Garment forms, techniques and imagery can indicate textiles produced in …

Kenyan Basketry (Ciondo) By Women From Central And Eastern Kenya, Mercy Wanduara

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Kenyan baskets commonly known as kiondo/kyondo (s)/ciondo (p) are made by women in different parts of Kenya mainly as utilitarian items for carrying goods around. The baskets are made using traditional/indigenous fibers that are readily available near where people live. The fibers may be from plant stems of shrubs, barks of trees, or banana fibers. The fibers are manually harvested, processed (spun), dyed, and woven into baskets. Dye stuffs are produced locally from natural sources such as mud (brown), leaves from specific plants (green), tree barks (red and brown), and charcoal (black), among other sources. Even though basketry is …

A Compared Study Of Miao Embroidery And Ancient Chinese Embroidery: The Cultural And Historical Significances, Tomoko Torimaru

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Miao people of Guizhou province, China, use two different types of chain stitch. One is a standard chain stitch similar to the Western style. The other one, which I termed “ancient” chain stitch, is distinctly different in execution and appearance, and it is a technique that only Miao practice currently.

Numerous examples of fine chain stitch embroidery have been excavated from archeological sites in China, including the Jiangling Mashan No.1 Chu Tomb, Jingzhou, Hubei, Warring States period (770–221 BC) and the Mawangdui No.1 Tomb, Changsha, Hunan, Western Han period (206 BC–AD 8). These extant embroideries clearly illustrate a unique …

Of Prophets, Caterpillars, And Silver: Job And The Origin-Story Of Sericulture In The Early Modern Islamic World, Nader Sayadi

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Similar to most pre-modern guilds and crafts around the world, the silk craft had origin-stories and patron saints to provide its practitioners with “historical” background and institutional heredity. In the early modern Safavid era— as discussed in a rare silk-weaving treatise in Persian titled The Treatise of Silk-Weaving and Grasping the Grip of the Shuttle (Resāleh-e yeh Shaʿrbāfi va Gereftan-e Qabzeh-e yeh Māku) dated October 18, 1606—the origin-story of sericulture and silk-weaving has been woven into the Biblical/Qur’anic narrative of Job (Ayyoub). The contemporary Ottoman futuwwatnama literature gives similar narratives; however, the story of Job in the Bible and Qur’an, …

Tameji Ueno: A Living National Treasure Of Kyoto Textiles, Keiko Okamoto

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

When the Japanese word yūzen is translated into English, it is hard to find an exact expression, as yūzen is used to describe both “hand-painted dyeing on textiles” and a “look-alike style of prints.” Yūzen is the unique aspect of Japanese “motif dyeing” in which the pre-modern hand-painted method survives when printing methods are used for mass production.

The Ueno family from Kyoto devoted themselves to design and manufacture of high-end hand-painted yūzen dyeing since the early twentieth century.

This paper will follow the Ueno family’s one hundred years of contributions to kimono textile development along with its applications and …

An Uncommon Ammunition Case: Interpreting “Transitional” Textiles And Social Worlds In Nineteenth-Century Tlingit Alaska, Laura J. Allen

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Overlooked objects in museum collections can reveal complex social relationships behind well-known textile forms. A tattered woven case for ammunition cartridges, collected in southern Alaska in the late nineteenth century, presents such an opportunity. Part of the vast Tlingit collection at the American Museum of Natural History, the ammunition bag has been little documented and displayed compared to other highly esteemed indigenous naaxein or Chilkat weavings of the region. The piece is unusual in that the maker combined two weaving styles—not only figural motifs characteristic of Chilkat weaving, but also geometric patterns reminiscent of its stylistic and technical precursor called …

Optics In Art: Ways Of Seeing, Christian J. Baker

P-12 Lesson Plans

In this lesson, which relies on art from the ZMA Collection and the exhibition it's your world for the moment displayed in fall 2020, students will learn about the basic mechanics of the eye and its similarities to the camera, explore the history of the camera obscura and its use in art and early photography, learn about perspective as a principle of photography, and learn to relay information on major artists by way of their relationship or impact on photography as an artistic medium.

Between Craft And Design: Lucienne Day And Eszter Haraszty, Kevin Kosbab

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Lucienne Day and Eszter Haraszty were leaders in both the design and business of mid-century textiles, Day through prominent commissions with Heal Fabrics and other firms in Britain, and Haraszty as director of Knoll’s textile division in the United States. Later, each designer turned from design for commercial production toward needlework-derived textile art, but their attitudes and methods were strikingly different. Both designers’ commercial work is well documented in scholarly design literature (Day’s especially), but their needlework is relatively neglected. This paper will shed deserved light on their textile art at a time when the studio craft movement was solidifying, …

Arpilleras The Vessels Of Chile’S Resistance, Soledad Fátima Muñoz

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Most historians locate the beginning of the Chilean military government after the coup d’etat, which overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende, on September 11, 1973. However, I would like to focus on the ideological background that preceded this era through the investigation of arpilleras and their relationship to Western academic institutions in the making and writing of history—more specifically, to the University of Chicago as the “Ideological State Apparatus” responsible for the implementation of neoliberalism in Chile.

Arpilleras are patchwork-based textiles of narrative imagery, made with a technique of applique and embroidery on a burlap background. They are produced in …

Scandal And Imprisonment: Gold Spinners Of 17th Century England, Tricia Wilson Nguyen

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

When looking at seventeenth-century silk- and gold-embroidered jackets or heavily wrought cabinets, most people focus on the embroiderer’s skill. Instead, my interest rests with the makers of the thread used to create such luxuries—silk thread, gold thread, and silver thread. Perhaps surprisingly, many early thread makers were women, owners, and managers of home-based industries in which spinning gold and silver was their business and livelihood.

Unfortunately, the history of gold spinning in seventeenth-century England is one of “scandal and imprisonment,” with women’s prominent role neglected by history. Beginning in the 1620s, women gold spinners were thrown in jail for refusing …

Inscription, Iconography, And The Individual: A Late Antique Textile From The Harvard Art Museums In Context, Katherine M. Taronas

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

A small but distinct group of early Byzantine textiles from Egypt (dating between the fourth and sixth centuries) uses woven words and textual symbols for their primary decoration. Ornamented with bold letterforms created in brilliant colors, these objects are all inscribed with personal names—the names of individual men and women for whose lives we possess no other certain evidence. Far from simple labels indicating ownership, these names are integral parts of the textiles’ design and function both as text and as image. Investigating the epigraphic nuances, iconography, styles, and formats of these textiles will allow us to make some inferences …

Alnôbakskwak: Native American Women Making Ceremonial Regalia, Vera Longtoe Sheehan

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

In the borderland between the United States and Canada stand communities of Native American people whose resilience enabled them to survive the ravages of hundreds of years of wars, eugenics, and racism that persists into the present day. These factors contributed to the decline of traditions and a subsequent period of cultural renewal and pride that has led up to several Abenaki tribes petitioning the State of Vermont for tribal Recognition. When the Recognition applications were compared, it became apparent that they had retained many of their agricultural traditions and that their cultural revitalization efforts could be extended not only …

Undocumented Migration And Political Community In Susan Meiselas's Crossings Photographs, Sarah Bassnet

Visual Arts Publications

In 1989, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) photographed irregular border crossings in southern California. At the time, it was relatively easy for undocumented migrants from Central America and Mexico to cross between ports of entry, even as there was growing pressure on American officials to address border security.1 One photograph in Meiselas’s Crossings series depicts a border patrol officer apprehending a migrant off the interstate near Oceanside (fig. 1). Two torsos fill the center of the image. The officer grasps the man’s clothing, propelling him toward the nearby vehicle. With heads cut off by the frame and backs turned, …

Book Review - Alternative Education Tutors: A Poetic Inquiry, Nicole Rallis

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

A book review of Adrian Schoone's "Constellations of Alternative Education Tutors" published in 2020 as part of the Springer Briefs in Arts-Based Educational Research book series.

Art: The Language We Use When There Is Nothing We Can Say, Peter London

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

When matters of ultimate concern are upon us, the language with which we ordinarily negotiate life reveals its limitations. At these pivotal moments of life, we spontaneously yield to tears or laughter or song or silence. At these high moments reason no longer feels sufficient, is too slow, too pedantic. In these moments we shift inexorably from walking to dancing, from speaking to singing. We rely upon song to console us, we believe in song to hold us steady, to carry us past or closer. We rely on art, these seemingly flimsy things to save us.

Co-Creation With Youth: Teaching Artistry And Art Outreach Programs, Hallie Morrison

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article shares my process and reflection as a teaching artist on a specific project with the Chicago Opera Theater (COT). An extension of my personal and professional practices that aims to provide larger painting experiences for students than they are normally provided, this project takes place in Chicago public schools through a model of Arts Partnership in which COT brings in multidisciplinary arts education. Beyond being an educational program, this school-based artistic co-creation resulted in opportunities for professional learning, intracultural bonding, and empowering moments for youth. This article includes images of the art teaching process, arts integration program tools, …

Editing My Own Drum, Adrienne Adams

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

The author examines her art and poetry practice exploring how the "Badlands" of Alberta, Canada in particular Áísínai'pi (Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park), are "the bones of the earth". She looks at the visual and linguistic poetry within them and examines her wording to decolonize her practice and learning/unlearning from the land and the cultures; Blackfoot and Settler, and peoples that inhabit it. She highlights how her process of editing a specific poem “My Own Drum” prompted and echoes an examination of her practice that leads to the writing of a new poem written during this process, revealing some of her findings. …

Conversations With Each Other: Love Songs To The Earth, Adrian M. Downey, Gonen Sagy

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Conversation is a complicated, ever-changing, and dynamic space—a space which is foundational to both education and curriculum, broadly conceived. In this article, we continue our ongoing conversion through the notion of writing love songs to the Earth and to each other. Within the conversation, Gonen shares original poetry emergent from his lived experiences, while Adrian attends to Gonen’s poetry in prosaic response. In this, the socio-political moment of the Canadian movement toward reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, we view our relationship and our conversations as speaking back to the competitive languages of diasporic space and Indigenous place through an …

Fragments Of Armenian Identity, Celeste Snowber, Marsha Nouritza Odabashian

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

We come as two artists, one a poet and dancer, Celeste Nazeli Snowber, and the other a visual artist, Marsha Nouritza Odabashian to excavate, reclaim and celebrate our Armenian identities. This offering is a collaboration of poems and visual images which sing a song deep in our bones and cells. Through colors, words, hues, and textures we hearken back to what has been in us all along. We offer it to you as a place to know that cultural identities live within the skin in all their paradox, glory and mystery.

Who’S Curating?: Situating Autohistorias-Teorías In The Archives, Leslie C. Sotomayor, Julie M. Porterfield

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

During the 2018-2019 academic year, we collaborated to facilitate a workshop for students in an Art Education course, using archival material from the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State. The course centered on diversity, pedagogy, and visual culture. Using our respective expertise in Art Education and primary source literacy, we chose the design and scope of the two-day workshop and subsequent assignment as a reflection for our passion for feminist theorizing and reimagining the academic White patriarchal canon in a predominantly White institution. As critical, feminist pedagogues, and in an effort to match the course theme, we chose …

The Verge: Networks Of Intersubjective Responding For Just Sustainability Arts Educational Research, Marna Hauk, Amanda Rachel Kippen

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Two sustainability arts scholars describe a method of data interpretation they developed for making sense of complex environmental and sustainability education research data. They “played” images and recorded a conversation in a form of arts-based intersubjective knowing. The card game process was named the Verge because of how the process promises to surface unheard voices and re-center nondominant insights and ways of knowing. It leverages Casey’s glance method with systems networks to complicate sense making in arts-based educational research. The arts scholars intermixed research data from two just sustainability education research case studies: collages from participants of a climate justice …

An Unlikely Correspondence: Gps And Body In Place, Patti Pente

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This visual essay investigates the significance of GPS technology and the human body in relation to a sense of place. Framed by posthumanism, the poetic images offer an approach to transformative education through a local site. Agency of place is key to this exploration of dynamic relationships with technology, body and the earth. As a creative performance, I executed a series of movements in a place of personal significance, and then further developed the essay through visual poetry. The research is informed by an underlying assumption that creative understanding and artistic analysis can foster deeper environmental care, and although this …

Eco-Pedagogical Wandering And Pondering In Pacific Spirit Park, Nicole Rallis

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This poetry emerges from my ongoing Ph.D. research and coursework at the University of British Columbia, where I am engaging in an a/r/tographic-walking inquiry on environmental sustainability and climate change. After moving to the unceded and ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples, now known as Vancouver, I began walking the forest trails of Pacific Spirit Park. Inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (2013) pedagogical discussions about the grammar of animacy, two-eyed ways of seeing, and childlike ways of seeing, my poems pay tribute to the plant elders and more-than-human beings guiding my learning journey. My ecopedagogical wandering and pondering align …

A Contemplative And Artful Métissage Of Inquiry And Response, Jackie Mitchell, Nicholas Phillips, Robyn Trail, Susan C. Walsh, Barbara Bickel, Wendalyn Bartley, Medwyn Mcconachy

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

In this mixed media métissage, we offer an exploration of artful and contemplative inquiry and response. We are a group of seven artist-researchers who engage with contemplative practices associated with various spiritual traditions, including spiritual feminist, Wiccan, Mi’kmaw, and Tibetan Buddhist, integral to all of which are beliefs about human interconnectedness with the energies of all sentient beings, the Earth, and beings in the spirit worlds. As artist-researchers, we engage with a range of arts disciplines including poetry, creative non-fiction, storytelling, sounding, visual art, filmmaking, and photography. Together, we invite the reader/listener/viewer--as co-creator—into the potentialities of our métissage: the narratives, …

Walking And Dwelling: Creating An Atelier In Nature, Kwang Dae (Mitsy) Chung

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This paper comprises a description of an exploration of how the author’s daily walking reflected the emergence of an a/r/tographical living inquiry that engendered a profound sense of dwelling and lingering, and a deeper understanding of the nature of artistic invitation through a pedagogical aesthetic provocation.