Fiber, Textile, and Weaving Arts Commons^™

Looking At The Past And Current Status Of Kenya’S Clothing And Textiles, Mercy V.W. Wanduara

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper analyzes and documents traditional textiles and clothing of the Kenyan people before and after independence in 1963. The paper is based on desk top research and face to face interviews from senior Kenyan citizens who are familiar with Kenyan traditions. An analysis of some of the available Kenya’s indigenous textile fiber plants is made and from which a textile craft basket is made. Kenya’s textile and clothing industry has undergone tremendous changes from pre-colonial era (before 1963) to date. Traditionally Kenyans donned clothing made out locally available materials; namely plants and animal skin. Color for these materials was …

The Lévite Dress: Untangling The Cultural Influences Of Eighteenth-Century French Fashion, Kendra Van Cleave

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, France saw a massive vogue for women’s clothing styles that, while adhering to the fundamental norms of French dress, were directly influenced by Ottoman clothing. One of the most popular of these was the levite, a dress that was introduced in the late 1770s and continued in popularity through the late 1780s. Inspired by costumes worn in a staging of Racine’s play “Athalie,” which is set in the ancient Biblical era, the levite initially mimicked the lines of Middle Eastern caftans. Over time, the style developed into at least three different variations, …

The Global Influence Of China And Europe On Local Japanese Tapestries Mainly From The 19th Through Early 20th Centuries, Masako Yoshida

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In general, Japanese culture has developed under the influence of foreign cultures, and textiles are no exception. In this presentation, I will focus on tapestries from the 19^th century (the late Edo period) to the early 20^th century (the Showa period), and discuss how Japanese tapestries achieved their original expression under the influence of Chinese and European tapestries. The Japanese began to seriously produce tapestry weaving around the end of the Edo period, but in the beginning, they just copied Chinese and European tapestries. Regarding these early productions, little research has been accomplished yet. In this presentation, I …

Mashru Redux: From The Calico Museum In Ahmedabad To A Loom In The Great Plains, Wendy R. Weiss

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

A zigzag line of resist dye characterizes a fabric called Mashru. It was produced in several different geographic locations; however, this paper discusses examples from India and my efforts to reconstruct patterns that have not been actively produced in this century. The Calico Museum in Ahmedabad is the first place I saw this style of warp resist fabric. The literature says that it was produced for Muslim clients who were not allowed to wear silk next to their skin. The word “Mashru” means “permitted” in Arabic and its Sanskrit variation “Misru” means “mixed.” A mashru fabric historically has a silk …

Cottage Industry As Social Practice: Sustainability Of Handweaving In The Post-Industrialist Era, Maggie Leininger

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

India to Appalachia: How Cottage Industries Preserve Textile Heritage examines the role of the hand weaver and the cottage industry from India to the American Craft Revival in promoting cultural identity through textiles. The migratory nature of textile production both in the pre-and post-industrial practices has long challenged the notion of a pure textile heritage for any culture. However, with the almost simultaneous appearance of Khadi production in India and the American Craft Revival of Appalachia, the allure of the homespun as a cultural asset became a mechanism to offset the impact of textile industrialization. As urban centers increased in …

The Deep Origins Of Kashmir Shawls, Their Broad Dissemination And Changing Meaning. Or Unraveling The Origins And History Of A Unique Cashmere Shawl, Joan Hart

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Emulation is constant in all forms of art. Debates have arisen regarding the nature of this imitation by Europeans of indigenous Kashmir shawls. The intrinsic Kashmiri aspect was the weave itself: nowhere else was a double interlock tapestry twill technique used. The unique fabric originated in Tibet: pashmina from the underbelly of the mountain goat. The shawl was strong, lightweight, and warm. The earliest Kashmir shawls were simple in design: the double long shawls and moon shawls. The earliest shawls had simple motifs, single floral blooms. By the end of the eighteenth century, this motif was compounded to many blooms …

Mind’S Eye And Embodied Weaving: Simultaneous Contrasts Of Hue In Isluga Textiles, Northern Chile, Penelope Dransart

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This article examines the use of hue in textiles woven during the twentieth century in Isluga, a bilingual Aymara/Spanish-speaking community of herders of llamas, alpacas and sheep in the highlands of northern Chile. It pays tribute to the weaving skills of Natividad Castro Challapa and other weavers of her generation, born early in the twentieth century. Aniline dyes were already known to them but, in the course of their lives, they witnessed increasing amounts of industrially manufactured, pre-dyed acrylic yarns arriving in the community. The article explores how weavers incorporated these brightly hued yarns in their textiles to form accents …

Common Sense & Pin Money: The Material Culture And Legacy Of Lula Annie Butler 1909-2009, Robin Michel Caudell

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

“Common Sense and Pin Money: The Material Culture and Legacy of Lula Annie Butler 1909-2009” examines local/global contexts of the late Mrs. Butler’s found quilts, her “make do” ethos, which made a way out of no way decades before recycle, re-purpose and green were hash tags. A lifelong Preston, Maryland resident and domestic worker, Mrs. Butler’s household was outfitted with quilts, tablecloths, aprons, pillows, and shopping bags she created from fabric-sample books and fabric remnants obtained from the late Mrs. Sarah Covey, her longest employer, who operated a drapery and upholstery business in Federalsburg, Maryland. Mrs. Butler’s artistic impulse-vibrant, improvisational, …

Yours, Mine & Ours: Beyond Appropriation, Suzi Ballenger, Charlotte Hamlin

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

As textile makers and researchers, we value the indigenous cultural wealth represented in the extraordinary array of textiles available to us through current worldwide channels. For millennia, textiles have been an effective vehicle for cultural intersection and exchange; traditions, materials, motifs, techniques, words, and beliefs are adopted, extended, and enriched by the meeting of peoples. Increasingly-and particularly with the advent of “fast fashion”-textile styles and motifs are being widely appreciated, and subsequently appropriated, without acknowledgement or compensation to the culture from which they derived. Is it possible to create productive collaboration across cultures without exhausting or dispossessing the custodians of …

The Fabric Of War: Wool And Local Land Wars In A Global Context, Madelyn Shaw, Trish Fitzsimons

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

During the nineteenth century, exponential growth in sheep pastoralism in Australia and New Zealand, and in less predictable locales such as the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and Rapanui (Easter Island), fueled the alienation of Indigenous peoples from their lands. The sheep and their wool, at the heart of these ‘grass wars,’ fed a global industry that supported another kind of war – the mass, cold climate warfare characterizing the century between the Crimean and Korean wars. Not until the second quarter of the nineteenth century did mechanization and factory organization affect wool production, as assiduous Australasian sheep husbandry bred wool staples …

Abstracts Of Papers: Textile Society Of America 16th Biennial Symposium

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Abstracts of 175 papers:

Monisha Ahmed — The Kashmir / Cashmere Shawl – Tradition and Transformation

Philis Alvic — Eliza Calvert Hall, The Handwoven Coverlet Book, and Collecting Coverlet Patterns in Early Twentieth Century Appalachia

Sarah Amarica — Global Threads: Histories of Labour and Cloth in Ann Hamilton and Ibrahim Mahama’s Installation Art

Lynne Anderson — Schoolgirl Embroideries: Integrating Indigenous Motifs, Materials, and Text

Jennifer Angus — Education through Co-Design

Margaret Olugbemisola Areo and Adebowale Biodun Areo — Egungun: Concept, Content and the Dynamic Contextual Manifestations of Yoruba Ancestors Masquerade

Alison Ariss — Wrapped in Wool: Coast Salish wool weaving, …

Milingimbi Artists Partnerships, Louise Hamby

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Aboriginal women artists who live on the island of Milingimbi in eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia have had a long engagement with people outside of the community. This began with the arrival of Macassan traders over 400 years ago who came primarily in search of trepang. They brought new things and ideas with them; some became absorbed into the lifestyle of the local people. One item in particular is most relevant to the Deep Local and those operating outside of it. The praus that brought the Macassans to Arnhem Land were powered by sails. The Arnhem …

Kasb-E-Hunar (Skilled Enclave), Adil Iqbal

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Kasb-e-Hunar (Skilled Enclave) is a sensory film showing a visual documentation of Shu (woolen cloth) making a short interviews with an elderly artisan community for the village of Madaklasht. It invites the audience to engage with the past and present and seeks to provoke conversations about the future and the responsibilities we have, given past mistakes. The film was made over three weeks of anthropological fieldwork in Shishi Koh Valley, Chitral, Northern Pakistan. The film investigates the cultural significance of woolen craft skills, exploring memories relating to handiwork, and the challenges of globalization. It shows the value of traditional skills …

Tinctorial Cartographies: Plant, Dye & Place, Anna Heywood-Jones

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

We live in a plant-dominated biosphere, and yet the relevance and meaning of vegetal life, beyond its contribution to human existence, is rarely considered. This way of thinking has led us to see nature as external to ourselves, as “other,” as that mysterious realm beyond the human sphere of being. As in visual culture, plant life possesses signifiers and coded meanings in its contextual configurations. Botanical literacy offers insight into environmental, sociocultural, and historical narratives of place, as the forests and herbaceous margins of our communities speak of complex past, a parallel history of survival and adaptation. Plants and textiles, …

Radical Access: Textiles And Museums, Michele Hardy, Joanne Schmidt

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This presentation discusses recent initiatives at Glenbow and Nickle Galleries that endeavor to provide new, radical levels of access to textile collections as a means to build community and affect creativity. While locking textiles away in environmentally controlled rooms and minimizing handling are useful methods for preservation, they are less effective in building vibrant communities or creating future relevance form museum collections. This paper, building on Hemming’s post-colonial textile theory, as well as Onciul’s theories on decolonizing engagement, challenge the apparent dichotomy between access and preservation. It argues that preservation without radical access, without shared community meaning making, without respecting …

Weaving Authenticity: Artesanías Or The Art Of The Textile In Chiapas, Mexico [Poster], Addison Nace

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In Chiapas, Mexico textiles live in different institutions from the market to the museum. In these spaces tourists, art professionals, and weavers manifest their varying perspectives of the authenticity of textiles. I examine the construction of authenticity through these spaces. In the museum, textiles become authentic because they represent a vision of an idyllic past. The authenticity created by the market is entangled in the acts of production by weaving cooperatives and consumption by tourists. Weavers see their work in intertwined thread with identity, culture, art, and economic necessity. Tourists often fetishize the handmade and cultural ties of the objects, …

Embroidering Paradise: Suzanis As A Place Of Creative Agency And Acculturation For Uzbek Women In 19th Century Bukhara, Shannon Ludington

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Central Asian women have long been a point of fascination, written and sung about by others. Exoticized as an oriental “other,” there are many legends but only few historic details known, and then recorded not by themselves but by foreign men. A number of excellent books on women in Uzbekistan under the Soviet Union, and on Uzbek craft and culture in general have been published but most authors conclude there simply is not enough evidence to say anything more about Uzbek women from their own perspective before Soviet times. In Embroidering Paradise: Suzanis as a Place of Creative Agency and …

Occam’S Razor: Origins Of A Classical Turkish Carpet Design?, Sumru Belger Krody

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This case study will explore the origins of a Turkish carpet design by discussing a thirteenth century Mamluk textile cover in The Textile Museum’s collection. Seemingly little connected textile types help us understand how textile motifs and designs moved from one to another, from one to another type, from one culture to another, from one part of the world to another, and from one period to another through the old trade routes. Examining these factors and looking beyond a single type of textile are of paramount importance for understanding and evaluating textile design traditions. The first section of the paper …

Ties That Bind: Finding Meaning In The Making Of Sacred Textiles, Janet Pollock

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

I was a novice weaver when I began constructing a Rakusua-Buddhist ceremonial garment-as an initiation into a spiritual community in my hometown. Years later, in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, I was drawn to an early 19^th century Tallit Katan, a ritual silk undergarment that had been made for a Jewish poet who later converted to Christianity. I had just inherited my father-in-law’s prized collection of silk neckties. He was a troubled man who had embraced his faith late in life. Those ties became the weft for three works-a handwoven tallit, a woven timeline, and a small keepsake for …

The Untold Story Of Inuit Printed Fabrics From Kinngait Studios, Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, Canada, Roxane Shaughnessy, Anna Richard

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Textile Museum of Canada holds a collection of close to 200 printed fabrics designed by Inuit artists at Kinngait Studios in Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Nunavut, Canada in the 1950s and 1960s. The pieces are owned by the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (WBEC) and are on longterm loan to the Museum. Building on centuries-old Inuit graphic traditions, printmaking was introduced in Kinngait in 1957 as part of a larger initiative to encourage handicraft production for sale in the Canadian south. By the 1960s, the studio had a number of Inuit artists who contributed to the Kinngait Studios’ print program which …