Fiber, Textile, and Weaving Arts Commons^™

The Terminology Of Soft Furnishings In Ancient Babylonia, Greece, And Rome: A Comparative Approach, Dimitra Andrianou, Elena Miramontes, Louise Quillien

Textile Crossroads: Exploring European Clothing, Identity, and Culture across Millennia

Various kinds of textiles were used to furnish domestic spaces in Antiquity, such as curtains, covers, hangings, pillows, cushions, mattresses, rugs, tapestries, tablecloths, and towels. These objects have practical and everyday functions, they embellish and add to daily comfort in the house and speak to the owner’s prosperity. Being made of perishable materials, furnishings have, on the whole, not survived in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome. Apart from a few excavated pieces of textiles found in tombs, our information comes primarily from written testimonia and iconography.

It is thus essential to consider soft furnishings in their own right, in order …

Textiles, Dress And Politics: A Diachronic Perspective Through The Case Studies Of Ancient Rome And Medieval Iceland, Meghan Korten, Zofia Kaczmarek

Textile Crossroads: Exploring European Clothing, Identity, and Culture across Millennia

People dress for more than just aesthetic reasons. Over the centuries, dress became a sign of human civilization, allowing us to identify the origin, gender, and status of the wearer. Textiles and clothing influence our body, posture, movements, and the way we are perceived by society. Textiles are also a tool used by people to further their agenda, that is why they found their place in the political life of many ancient and modern societies.

According to Michel Foucault, power can be understood as a set of activities influencing the life of the other: It provokes, forbids, or permits, but …

Estrategias Posibles Para La Protección De Las Memorias Y Patrimonios Textiles De La Región Huasteca De México, Claudia Rocha Valverde

IX Jornadas Internacionales de Textiles Precolombinos y Amerindianos / 9th International Conference on PreColumbian and Amerindian Textiles, Museo delle Culture, Milan, 2022

México es un país que cuenta con importantes saberes históricos que han implicado el uso, intercambio y confección de sistemas indumentarios de poderoso valor simbólico y estético relacionado a cosmovisiones indígenas. Este tipo de saberes colectivos guardan una serie de conocimientos tecnológicos, además de complejos repertorios figurativos entre otros. Más allá de su compleja riqueza estética, los textiles tradicionales implican procesos de vida en los que las agentes primordiales han sido las mujeres a lo largo de la historia. En los últimos tres años de manera sistemática en México se han exhibido casos de plagio de elementos textiles que evidencian …

Strands Of Repair: Textile Treasures As Sustainable Pathways To Reconnect With The Lost Past, Sareekah Agarwaal, Ruby Kashyap Sood

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Textiles, fundamental to all human experiences, are meaning-laden objects that possess a remarkable ability to evoke emotions and memories, serving as powerful mnemonic devices.

Almost everyone experiences unplanned encounters with textiles in their lifetime and in different contexts. Hence, most every piece is loaded with personal, cultural, or historical data, fostering a deep emotional connection between the owner and the object. Consequently, these textiles are cared for, preserved, and often repurposed. But not much literature exists on how textiles and their stories can be used to augment the understanding of the identity of an individual, a group, a region, or …

Negro Cloth: African American Textile Design History, Karen Baker

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Negro cloth is American history. Filled with the contributions to free and enslaved African Americans, this history has gone untold. Even within the narratives and historical archives on African Americans' history with cotton, this conversation goes beyond suffering, pain, and separation. The research reveals how African Americans contributed to indigo and cotton agriculture, weaving, and manufacturing from 1745 to 1865. The historical and narrative research has revealed the buried history of African American textile history, the American Civil War in Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project. The narratives reveal that enslaved African Americans were weavers who carded, spun, dyed, and …

Inhabiting Numbers: Weaving, Polyphony, And Embodied Mathematics, Kristine Barrett

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Inhabiting Numbers: Polyphony as Woven Sound explores connections between vocal polyphony and textile practices, specifically weaving and spinning. Rather than consider music and weaving as separate from one another, the following paper presents the ways in which they are deeply intertwined and mutually constitutive forms of cultural expression. The technical modes of thinking produced through repetition inherent in both—particularly as practices utilizing complex mathematical structures—produce ways of thinking unique to each. Through practice, I suggest these technical modes of making transit across different materials and mediums—in both explicit and implicit ways. The music created through the interweaving of multiple voices …

Handwoven Drawings, Lynn Bennett Carpenter

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In my Handwoven Drawings series, I developed an innovative method that unifies drawing and weaving. I draw and paint on the surface of soft wood, hand cut the wood into thin strips, and then weave the painted strips back together on a floor loom. The Handwoven Drawings teeter between drawing and textile and beg categorization. The drawing on wood could be thought of as traditional cartoons that instead of guiding a tapestry become the textile itself. The horizontal cuts across the wood articulate lines of weft undulating across the work creating a new sensibility within a woven structure and a …

Chiapas Maya Project - Weaving Community, Lori Benson, Helena Rojas Lopez

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Chiapas Maya Project (CMP), https://chiapasmayaproject.org/, was conceived in 2018 to create a virtual archive of the material culture of the Highland Maya of Chiapas, Mexico. The archive includes objects, images, recordings, and written records documenting a rapidly changing culture. Over time, it has become a more comprehensive project, connecting museum collections, weaving cooperatives, collectives, weavers, artists, intellectual property specialists, and academics. The partners and friends involved with the project focus on conversing and documenting - digitizing collections, if they have them.

What is the most critical information that should be searchable? How do the communities want to access …

Plying Together Knowledges: Revitalization Of Indigenous Textile Knowledge Through Language, Jennifer Byram, Eveline Battiest Steele

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

When studying textiles for which few records exist, where does one turn? For archaeologists studying textiles in non-ideal preservation contexts, the approach often turns to indirect sources of evidence. This paper presents a research project conducted between a textile artist and archaeologist, Jennifer Byram and a basket weaver and Choctaw first-speaker, Eveline Steele, from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. They approached research into Southeastern United States Indigenous textiles by drawing on Choctaw language documents from the 19th century to elucidate past textile knowledge. In doing so, the project has brought forth knowledge about weaving processes and material preparation that is …

Weaving Community: The Manual Loom As Metaphor For Rupture And Repair, Farrah Cato, Prerana Choudhury

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The manual loom anchors women’s community and creative life in rural Assam. We explore this apparatus by extending definitions of the ‘digital’ and reconsidering the loom’s role as metaphor for both (dis)rupture and repair within the culturally diverse and bioculturally rooted lives of indigenous women in Assam. Our methods are based primarily on participatory research, community living, and slow travel undertaken by Prerana to remote parts of this northeastern state of India, juxtaposed with Farrah’s practical and theoretical approaches to technology. United by the recognition of how significant women’s lived histories and material production are, we reconsider the loom’s liminal …

The Touch And Breath Of Cloth: Folding And Unfolding Bedsheets With María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Theresa Downing

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Spoken Softly with Mama (1998) is an immersive installation she created to commune with her enslaved Nigerian ancestors and extended family in Cuba, when she was living in the U.S. but separated from family due to the embargo. A monumental work in the artist’s oeuvre with slave ship motifs, glass clothes irons, ironing boards, video projection, and sound, the dream-like installation transmits Campos-Pons’ thoughts like a letter written in cotton and silk. The installation centers her female family members, who worked as domestic laborers, with portraits projected or printed upon the means of their employment: bedsheets and …

Draped In History: Unveiling Vijayanagar's Social Tapestry Through Lepakshi Portrayals, Ashima Gupta, Dimple Bahl, Vandana Bhandari

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Veerabhadra Temple in Lepakshi, Andhra Pradesh, India has some of the finest mural paintings created during the Vijayanagar Empire, one of South India’s most powerful dynasties in the 16th century. This paper will look at one of the frescoes depicting the costumes worn by the people during that time period. The artists generally recreate current trends and the world as they see around them. In Lepakshi, painters expressed a strong interest in depicting contemporary dresses, jewelry, hairdos, and so on, which mirrored not only the prevailing fashion trends of the time but also the socio-cultural fabric of the Vijayanagar …

Queen Victoria, The Sultan And The Adventurer: Weaving Strands Of The History Of The Kashmir Shawl, Joan Hart

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Tipu Sultan, William Moorcroft, and Queen Victoria owned Kashmir shawls from Kashmir, India dating from 1780 to 1880. Rare provenance for these shawls reveals the troubled strands of Kashmir production and the shifting political fate of the Kashmiri people.

Tipu Sultan is a hero in India, having conducted successful military campaigns against the British East India Company (1782-1799). Tipu gave a valuable Kashmir shawl to a captive British surgeon in 1784, probably the earliest shawl to enter Britain. Revealing a rare moment when the fate of India was not yet sealed for the British, Tipu still had empathy by honoring …

‘Within The Reach Of Everyone’: Tracing The Global Strands Of Herrman, Sternbach & Co.’S 1880s Imitation Furs, Laura Johnson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Long before faux furs became trendy, vegan-friendly materials, weavers and textile designers in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe developed a range of woven goods that offered the haptic qualities of animal pelts. Surprisingly, given their popularity, little research has focused on imitation fur production and consumption at the turn of the twentieth century and its earlier roots. This paper traces the strands linking a group of textile samples donated by New York merchant H. Herrman, Sternbach & Co. in 1884 to (what is today) the Smithsonian National Museum of American History through connecting threads of global production, innovation, and consumption. …

“Muy Curiosa Y Muy Diestra”: Bobbin Lace Making In Eighteenth-Century Mexico, Elena Kanagy-Loux

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Although bobbin lace was introduced in Mexico through colonization, its local styling—both through making and end use—was by no means a facsimile of its Spanish origins. The appreciation for this “curious and skilled” trimming grew from a long Indigenous history of valuing skilled textile production in the Americas, and lace was quickly interpreted in new ways. Grounded in extant 18th-century objects such as metallic bobbin lace fragments and colchas (or coverlets) with polychrome wool bobbin lace edgings, this project poses the question: what untold stories of the lives of women and girls can these objects reveal? And can this method …

Dung Dkar Cloak: Exploring Soft Interfaces For Sonic Interactions, Judit Eszter Kárpáti, Esteban De La Torre

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The importance of crossmodal interaction within the contemporary cultural, technological and scientific panorama has evidently gained significant attention due to its remarkable advantages in creating a meaningful, interwoven, and integrated experience. The use and recontextualization of textiles in such exploratory quest into the human senses has proven to be critical. Computational science, algorithmic logic and digital devices have always been rooted and closely interwoven with textile crafts and practices. Recent technological advancements have further combined technology and textile, generating interactive textile surfaces, constructing endless possibilities for multisensorial experiences. In this presentation we will examine how we can weave a sensitive …

Incursive Heritage: Socio-Digital Mediations Of Mediterranean, Maria Ida De Ioanni

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Drawing upon the ongoing research endeavors within my doctoral program, this paper articulates a dual objective. Firstly, it undertakes the recognition and systematic delineation of collaborative repositories hosted on social media platforms, which serve to revitalize and perpetuate textile traditions through the curation of oral histories and diverse forms of visiotextual materials. The focal point of this inquiry encompasses social media accounts that reconfigure and contest prevailing heritage narratives by foregrounding hitherto marginalized personal and communal accounts surrounding textiles and fabrics. Functioning as dynamic digital repositories, these accounts subvert conventional heritage discourses by not only archiving and structuring knowledge but …

Copyright For Imitations: Looking At The Registered Design Book Of William Stirling & Sons, Isabel Monseau

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The design and production of printed cotton in the United Kingdom underwent great changes through the nineteenth century. However as the industry grew, many manufacturers became concerned about a perceived decline in the quality of textile design. An attempt made to regulate this industry, the Copyright of Design Act of 1842, proposed to improve the quality of British production by enabling designers and proprietors to register their textile designs and thus prohibit other firms from pirating those original designs.

Yet imitations were crucial to the development and success of Britain’s cotton printing industry. By the 1870s, up to 60% of …

Textiles, Memory, And Cultural Crossroads: A Personal Journey Through Material Practice, Ai Kijima

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

extiles, Memory, and Cultural Crossroads: A Personal Journey Through Material Practice

Henri De Châtillon (1906-1972): A French Milliner In Mexico City, Celine Khawam

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Several designers who made significant contributions to Paris fashions throughout the 1930s have disappeared from the record of fashion history. Among them was French milliner Henri Frank Hutchinson, alias Henri de Châtillon (1906-1972), who was celebrated for his innovative hats, accessories, and dresses. He fled his native France with the outbreak of World War II. He then settled in Mexico City in 1942, where he opened his millinery salon on Paseo de la Reforma, the capital’s broad boulevard. He was part of the numerous French émigrés (immigrants) who had found refuge in the United States and Latin America during wartime, …