Museum Studies Commons^™

Mexican Ikat And Transatlantic Trade, Alejandro B. De Avila

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The earliest text known so far in the Americas was engraved on a potsherd found in Chiapa de Corzo in southern Mexico that has been dated to around 300 years before our era. The script appears to represent a language in the Mixe-Zoquean family (which developed historically along the Isthmus of Tehuantepec), and it has been proposed that the inscription on the clay reads as follows: “The pleated cloth got dyed. The thing that is made of pleated cloth has been cut.”1 If this interpretation holds true, the text must refer to a textile that was patterned by means of …

America’S Indigo Obsession: From Colonial Plantations To Contemporary Diy Ethos, Sonja Dahl

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This research project is, as the title implies, quite broad. It has grown from stories shared generously with me by many of indigo’s proponents today, as well as the stories compiled in the historical and ethnographic research of scholars such as Andrea Feeser1 and Jenny Balfour Paul.2 This paper was originally written for oration, and what I offer here is a transcript of this talk as performed at the Textile Society of America’s 2016 symposium, Land, Labor and the Port in Savannah, GA, October 2016. It is an open reflection on some of the stories and broader themes I’ve encountered …

New Tools In The Box: Traditional Methods, Contemporary Materials And New Techniques On The Atlantic Coast A Round Table Discussion, Memory Holloway, Laurie Carlson Steger

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on the new interest in fiber arts, with the claim that this interest has seen a revival in the hands of contemporary artists exploring bold new forms. “The emergence of fiber art,” states Glenn Adamson, director of New York’s Museum of Art and Design, “is not just the reappraisal of an historic textile movement, rather a much more broad-based interest.”1 The fiber artists on this roundtable addressed two topics related to this broad-based interest, one on formal experimentation, the other on their geographic placement as artists on the Atlantic coast, particularly in and around …

Field To Bag, Bag To Field: Feedbag Production And Distribution In Rural America, Heather R. Buechler

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

sack- noun a large bag made of a strong material such as burlap, thick paper, or plastic, used for storing and carrying goods.[English Oxford Living Dictionaries.com,]

A popular object among collectors of agricultural ephemera, the printed agricultural sack—both textile and paper—used for the distribution of agricultural goods, is an object with a rich history. Previous research published on these ephemeral objects has typically examined their use and reuse in American households as clothing, quilts, and other domestic goods, or their significance in the World War I Belgian War Relief under the Herbert Hoover administration. This paper poses approaches to the …

Bombay To Bauhaus: Design Influences In Churchill Weavers Textiles From 1922-1949, Sarah Stopenhagen Broomfield

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Churchill Weavers, a nationally known handweaving center founded in 1922 in the Cumberland foothills in Berea, Kentucky, created a marketing niche by promoting the Modernist look in its textile products. Modernist textiles focused on woven structure, texture, yarn and fabric properties as the major design elements. Bauhaus artists codified and disseminated a theory of modern textiles as Europe rebuilt in the interwar period, while in America Modernist textiles were commodified as a marketing trend in early 20th century consumerism. Eleanor Churchill, co-owner and the company’s first designer was influenced by textile designs from India, from Modernist textiles, and from Swedish …

Transnational Influences On Louisiana Samplers: Traditions, Teachers, Techniques, And Text, Lynne Anderson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Louisiana’s early history is colored with multinational interests and domination by a succession of nations speaking diverse languages. Although “discovered” by the Spanish in the 1600s, the French were the first to colonize the area, founding New Orleans in 1718 with financial support (and administrative control) from the Company of the Indies. New Orleans became Louisiana’s colonial capital in 1721. Most of the earliest immigrants to Louisiana were either French military personnel or French Canadian adventurers and traders. Their number was augmented by the forced immigration of criminals, prostitutes, and those incarcerated in French workhouses. By all accounts this made …

“The British Are Coming! A Contraband Cloth Tsunami Flows Over Maya Handicrafts And Homespun In The Kingdom Of Guatemala, 1760-1820”, Heather J. Chiero

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Latin America today has a lower perceived place on the global scale of development in comparison to other Western regions, however incorrect that assumption may be. And, Central American nations, in particular, seemingly fulfill that notion. One might ask, why did the nations of Middle America not become industrialized at an earlier point in their histories? If those nations had at their disposal adequate land, natural resources, and labor, as well as ports for exit for their products, why did they not advance in the 18th and 19th centuries alongside other northern hemispheric nations? This research paper investigates the thriving …

The Legacy Of Yarn Dyed Cotton Lungis Of Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu: A Case Study, Vasantha M. Dr.

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Woven cotton textiles of India are ancient, diverse, and steeped in tradition, an amalgam of different ethnic influences, much like reflection of the country itself. Having had the advantage of possessing a unique raw material for more than 5000 years of recorded history, she has been a benefactress of her rich cotton textile heritage to the entire world. In a world where the trends are dictated by the mass producers and the consumers no longer make out the difference between the hand crafted and the machine made, it is a miracle that these textile traditions have been persistently passed on …

Drawloom Velvet: Exploring A Centuries Old Tradition, Wendy Landry

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Since 1986, I have been pursuing my passionate interest in handwoven velvet, both practically and academically. By velvet, I mean extra-warp pile, rather than weft-woven types of pile, such as weft-looping or knotting. Simple, monochrome plain velvets have been woven since the early Coptic period, requiring only simple looms and two simple warp tensioning systems, one for the foundation cloth and another for the pile warp.1 (On the basis of such a simple set-up, early velvet figuration could be created through the following colour effects using: (a) striped pile warp; (b) ikat/chiné (spaced dyed) pile warp; (c) painted or printed …

"Knit A Bit For Our First Line Of Defense": Emotional Labor, Knitters, And Comforts For Soldiers During The First World War, Rebecca Keyel

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

During the First World War, American women were encouraged to support national defense by conserving food, sewing clothes for refugees, and knitting comforts for servicemen sent abroad to fight. Groups like the Navy League and the Red Cross promoted knitting for the troops as a necessity for the security of the home front, and for the comfort of servicemen abroad. By the end of the war, knitters had hand-knit millions of garments to send to servicemen, an act of compliance that supported an overseas war--one that had aroused bitter resistance only a few years before. Defense knitters knit in private, …

The Story And The Stitch., Alice Kettle

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper explores my work and the connection between stories and stitching. It seeks to find meaningfulness and purpose in these narratives and activities and see how they are a reflection of everyday encounters. It asks if there are mnemonic properties to stitching and stories that can offer ways to understand and transform actual experience and to represent the past by making it physical and continuous. Tim Ingold uses this textile vocabulary to present its close connection with story telling; “To tell a story then, is to relate, in narrative the occurrences of the past, retracing a path through the …

Performance, Adaptation, Identity: Cantonese Opera Costumes In Vancouver, Canada, Jean L. Kares

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Photographs of the 1936 Vancouver Jubilee Parade show Chinese men and women wearing Cantonese opera costumes that appear to be similar, if not identical, to ones in the collection of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. In this highly public forum, they portray the role of “Chineseness” for the non-Chinese audience, reference the power of temple festival dramas, and assert their presence and aspiration to be accepted by mainstream society. By reconfiguring costumes for public display, Chinese immigrants employed material culture in a strategy of performance, adaptation, and identity. This connects to matters still pertinent today: …

Imperial Versus Local Perceptions Of Indian Textiles, Donald Clay Clay Johnson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London brought together arts and crafts from around the world particularly those produced in the British empire. The great popularity of the exhibition documented how much people in Britain delighted in seeing the huge diversity of artistic expression from around the world. The following decades witnessed similar exhibitions in various European cities as well as contained the growth and development of museums. While Indian textiles had long fascinated people in Britain and had been eagerly purchased, museum holdings in both India and Britain of these distinctive fabrics have remained minimal. British collecting activities and …

Resilient Threads Telling Our Stories Hilos Resilientes Cosiendo Nuestras Historias, Carolina Paz Gana, Lynne M. Jenkins

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Sewing is traditionally women’s work. Often characterized as homespun, even quaint, it is associated with the domestic sphere. What at first glance may appear charming belies the persuasive ways in which women work with textiles to depict apartheid in South Africa,1 identity,2 forced migration,3 grass roots activism,4 encoded messages,5 and remembrance of murdered and missing indigenous women.6 Perhaps that is why the powers that be are mostly unaware of its subversive potential, and thankfully so, as this potential remains under the radar “sew” to speak while galvanizing those at the margins. How might sewing bring women together in a circle …

Aesthetics, Economics And The Enchantment Of Cloth, Janis Jefferies, Barbara Layne

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In a changing world everyone crafts, designs and engages in making: each individual person and each collective subject, from communities to cities and regions, can define and enhance a life project. We are witnessing an unprecedented wave of social innovations, sometimes using technology and sometimes not. As these changes unfold, an expansive open set of process and practices in which new solutions are suggested and new meanings are created. Most revolutions are about energetic movement and upheavals; even if ideas take a while to become ideologies, we don’t think of them as slow events. But the phrase also makes us …

Drawing, Stitch, Translation, Archive, Janis Jefferies

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles was founded in 2002. Inspirational textiles teacher, Constance Howard, established the Collection in 1980. Constance joined Goldsmiths as a teacher in 1945 and founded the acclaimed textile courses which closed in 2008. Internationally respected, she remained involved with the College until her death in 2000, when she donated her textiles collection to the College on the basis that it would be stored in perpetuity. . It is important to note that modern, historians have relied – often of necessity – on documentary or visual sources to research textile history. We have …

Recycling Sprang, Carol James

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In this talk I would like to explore some of the evidence of sprang in history, how sprang travelled from place to place and some of the ways it was modified as it travelled. I will then suggest that sprang could be an exciting technique for the 21st century. First let me explain how this technique works. Sprang is a braiding technique. The worker winds one continuous thread around and around a frame. The worker then manipulates the threads at one end, and a mirror-image structure magically appears at the other end of the frame. Structures that lend themselves to …

Ingenious And Practical; Parallels In The Making Of Arimatsu Trade Cloth And Contemporary Designers’ Production, Ana Lisa Hedstrom

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Yoshiko Wada introduced me to shibori in1976, and for over 40 years I have worked with shibori techniques based on the concepts of Arimatsu shibori. I had been aware of the Congo trade era and often peppered Yoshiko with questions about this curious chapter in the Arimatsu history. When I saw the textiles that Yoshiko has displayed here, I became very excited. There is an old axiom that nothing is ever really new. I love to see textiles that connect to my own decision making as a dyer, and where I can totally empathize with the artisan’s hand and eye. …

Batik, Ja, Batik: Wiener Werkstätte Batik From The Los Angeles County Museum Of Art And Cotsen Textile Traces Collections, Michaela Hansen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In 1919, the Viennese cultural critic Adolf Loos addressed a newspaper column to the “ninety percent” of female artists who “call themselves that because they can batik.” Bemoaning shop windows filled with batik cloths and neckties, Loos stated: “To the modern human being…batik [is] an abomination.” Derisively likening the skill required of a batik artist to “drop[ing] a May bug into an inkwell and then let[ting] it crawl around on a prettily dyed, magnificent piece of…pongee silk,” Loos advised practitioners to seek a dry cleaner to “fix” their dye work by erasing it. “The danger is great,” he went on; …

Seafarer People And Their Textiles From Erub Arts, Torres Strait, Australia, Louise Hamby, Valerie Kirk

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

A quote from Florence Gutchen, an artist from Erub (Darnley Island) in the Torres Strait, 180 kms NE of mainland Australia, sets the scene for this document. “We hear the wind…We are seafarer people. Our livelihood depends on the sea. We are saltwater people and we are the seafarers.” The geographic location of her current home is crucial to the understanding of not only the textiles artists produce but to all of their work. Their island in the eastern part of Torres Strait plays a major part in how their identity as Erubians is expressed through textiles. This paper primarily …