Art and Materials Conservation Commons^™

“Meshed With A Million Veins”: Seafaring Networks & The Norfolk Sampler, Joanne Martin Lukacher

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The title of this article is taken from a line of a poem by the 19th-century Georgia poet Sidney Lanier and is presented as an homage to the location of the 2016 TSA conference. “And the marsh is meshed with a million veins” is Lanier’s description of “The Marshes of Glynn” in his poem of the same name, Glynn being one of the Atlantic coastal counties south of Savannah. I have taken this alliterative evocation of the sinuous verge of land and sea as a metaphorical point of embarkation for a discussion of the distinctive needlework of another, more distant, …

The Power Of Color: Anatolian Kilims, Sumru Belger Krody

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The kilims of Anatolia are great contemplative and minimalist works of art as stated by a kilim enthusiast.1 Created by women who had a magnificent eye for design and an awesome sense of color, these textiles are prized for the purity and harmony of their color, the integrity of their powerful overall design, their masterfully controlled weave structure, and their fine texture. The kilims are large tapestry-woven textiles. The visually stunning and colorful Anatolian kilims communicate the aesthetic choices of the village and nomadic women who created them. Yet, while invested with such artistry, Anatolian kilims first and foremost were …

For What It’S Worth: The French Knot As A Basic Trade Commodity, Jeana Eve Klein

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

For nearly twenty years, my primary studio production has been in the form of mixed media quilts. These quilts draw—both visually and conceptually—on the abandoned houses that color the landscape of my North Carolina mountain home. They are constructed using traditional quilting techniques married with digital processes and acrylic paint—a hybrid product that lands at the intersection of fibers, photography, painting and digital media. Although their conceptual purpose is to investigate the narrative past, present and future of these homes and their values, the questions with which I am most often quizzed at exhibitions focus purely on time and technique: …

Here And There, Now, Sandra Heffernan

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

A textile installation shaped by traditional embroidery, geographical differences, technology and novel natural dye is the focus of this paper. ‘Through the globe’ [Através do globo] is the result of a six week artist in residency at Contextile 2016 in Guimarães, Portugal.1 It builds upon environmental pest invasive weed dye research, interprets ‘traditional’ embroidery illustrating the poetics of place.2 The essence of Guimarães embroidery provides the narrative along the fourteen metre length and is the physical embodiment of the antipodal link between and Wellington, New Zealand. The challenge offered by Contextile 2016 was to collaborate with Oficina embroiderers to learn, …

Some National Goods In 1871: The Rebozo, Marta Turok

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The history of rebozos and jaspe (ikat) in Mexico still presents many enigmas and fertile field for research. Public and private collections in Mexican and foreign museums preserve a variety of rebozos from the mid-18th through the 20th centuries. However, it has been complicated to correlate these extant pieces with exact places of production and dates. Other sources such as written accounts and images focus mostly on their social uses, sometimes places of production or sale are merely mentioned yet techniques and designs are the information least dealt with. Virginia Davis mentions this problem while analyzing the Frederick Church collection …

The Merchants And The Dyers: The Rise Of A Dyeing Service Industry In Massachusetts And New York 1800-1850, Linda Jean Thorsen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Histories of dyeing in the United States have tended to emphasize home craft processes, early textile manufacturing, or the growth of synthetic dyes. But in the first decades of the nineteenth century, a vibrant independent dyeing service industry emerged in U.S. port cities. Using natural dyes, working with a variety of fibers, colors, and finishing processes, and developing sophisticated skills and equipment, these dyers served import merchants, retailers, elite households, and businesses such as hotels. They received cloth, garments, or home furnishings, cleaned, bleached, and/or dyed them, and then returned them “like new.” To satisfy customers, these businesses had to …

Artist At Sea: Codes And Cargo, Kelly Thompson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The themes of land, labor and the port resonate for me and particularly in recent voyage experiences and digital weaving research, which I will attempt to bring together in this talk. These activities converge in new and evolving artwork, generating more questions than answers on the relationships between digital and analog materiality. Trades routes, and the movement of people and goods through ports, notions of networks, flow, circulation, has parallels and resonance with our contemporary digital systems and also, correlations with political issues, namely power and control. The Container Shipping world is fascinating to drop in on, a world so …

A Morenada Dance Costume: An Example Of The Interconnection Of The Americas, Spain And Africa, Nancy B. Rosoff

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper will explore the interconnection of the Americas, Spain and Africa as exemplified by a 19th century festival costume in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, worn for the Moreno or Morenada, a dance developed after Spain’s conquest and colonization of the Inca Empire in the 16th century. Two other costumes were also examined, one in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and the other in the collection of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore in La Paz, Bolivia. Today, the Moreno or Morenada is one of the most popular dances …

Velvet And Patronage: The Origin And Historical Background Of Ottoman And Italian Velvets, Sumiyo Okumura Dr.

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Velvets are one of the most luxurious textile materials and were frequently used in furnishings and costumes in the Middle East, Europe and Asia in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. Owing to many valuable studies on Ottoman and Italian velvets as well as Chinese and Byzantine velvets, we have learned the techniques and designs of velvet weaves, and how they were consumed. However, it is not well-known where and when velvets were started to be woven. The study will shed light on this question and focus on the origin, the historical background and development of velvet weaving, examining historical sources …

Non-Specific: Ubiquity, Invisible Labor And The Moving Blanket, Callen Zimmerman

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

“A textile is not simply a binary system of spun, twisted or spliced fibres, but first and foremost a result of complex interactions between resources, technology and society.” Eva Anderson Strand The crash of metal on asphalt as the back of a truck lowers its lift, a grunt of exertion, a buoyant step on the platform, the shuffling of work boots in calculated motion, the crumbled sigh of fabric folding falling on itself. This observed situation is typical to the daily ins and outs of the moving blanket, a complicated dance to aid objects of importance in transit. Even if …

From Function To Fashion To A Contemporary Art Process, Journey’S Within A Fisherman’S Rib Jumper, Christine Wiltshier

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper investigates a number of journeys discovered within a fisherman’s rib jumper. The thread of each journey was unravelled whilst considering the notion, Could a process of unmaking become a form of making. This question framed a process lead studio research that centred on haptic experimentation. The vehicle chosen to investigate this question was that of the unravelling of a knitted garment. Along side a studio investigation, a number of threads were followed that connect a 1980’s fashion garment with historic coastal fishing economies in the United Kingdom. Connections were also unravelled between the machine construction of the garment …

Sumptuary Synergy: British Imperialism Through The Tartan And Slave Trades, David Loranger, Eulanda A. Sanders

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Sumptuary laws have been a useful tool for various national powers in regulating subjects and to promote class differentiation and business interests. The genesis of this study was one such law, entitled the South Carolina Negro Act of 1735, stipulating that slave garments could only be made of low-quality textiles. These fabrics were reflective of slaves living in chattel environments, thus also representing a slave’s status in society. This law forbade slaves from wearing “any sort of garment or apparel whatsoever, finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse …

Veiled In Ignorance And Clothed In Reason: Jimmie Durham’S 2014 Exhibition Traces And Shiny Evidence, Andrea Feeser

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In the 2014 London exhibition “Traces and Shiny Evidence,” Jimmie Durham showed on one floor brightly colored oil barrels, car parts, pcv pipes, and reproduction animal skeletons covered with or leaking ooze that shimmered with rainbow hues. On a floor one level up, Durham exhibited wall size drawing-prints he made by throwing stuffed animals coated with charcoal at very large pieces of paper. In the video that recorded Durham making the drawing-prints, the artist wears a workman’s vest labeled “Steiner. Maison de la Paix.” A video that is featured in the exhibition itself shows Durham in a business suit seated …

Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press And Fluxus, Meghan A. Dellacrosse

Theses and Dissertations

"Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press and Fluxus," positions Knowles’ Big Book (1966) as a case study of historical methodology and interdisciplinary artistic practice in the post-war period. This comprehensive analysis of Big Book, a work of art no longer extant, contextualizes its publisher, Something Else Press through Dick Higgins’ concept of “intermedia,” and important lesser-known junctures relevant to Fluxus and the group’s leader George Maciunas are illuminated. Knowles' early and lesser-known silkscreen paintings are also examined.

Landmarks For Sleepwalkers, Isaac S. Howell

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

Abstract:

In my recent work I have been interested in thinking about notions of instability. In order explore these notions, in this paper I will like to explore the relevance of postmodern literary theory and the color black in my work, as well as think about the importance of the grid as a tool for organization and ontological delineation.

I will be examining writing by Alain Robbe-Grillet, as well as art work by Mark Manders, Giorgio de Chirico, Kay Sage, and Ad Reinhardt.

The Misconception Of Knowing, The Invention Of Time; Curiosities & Introspections Of Vernacular Photography, Patricia D. Drummond

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The Misconception of Knowing, the Invention of Time; Curiosities & Introspections of Vernacular Photography is a body of work that combines photography, artist books, and alternative processes in a series of pieces that explore the synergy between the act of creating vernacular or common photography, the photograph in its many forms, and the interaction with the photographic image at all the stages of its existence. It also exists in conjunction with this written monograph, which supports and gives insight into the work. Through the use of poems, sketchbook musings, the history of photography, critical theory and social norms within photography, …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

Paiting, Lucas Page

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My work is motivated by the painting “as such” – as an inquiry into and intervention upon what constitutes a painting, how they are constructed, how they function, etc. Through an investigation of painting as a genre, both in its historical canon and contemporary forms, I deconstruct the formal and cultural elements surrounding the field. Four major axes serve as the basis for my inquiry and intervention of painting: Painting, Abstraction, Representation, Control. Taking as a point of departure the comment, “Your work is a representation of abstraction,” I aim to figure out how “the painting” (in all of its …

Labor, Vera Bauluz

CGU MFA Theses

I make sacred objects from scratch, from ready mades, from industrial materials, and sometimes from trash or recycling. I treat those objects with love and reverence to embed them with essence and soul. I propose conversations with objects exquisitely executed, that question our social order and the machine, easily understood by everybody, although still challenging our understanding of contemporary art.

The placement of the work and the lighting, as fundamental part of the installation, attempts to generate strokes of conscience that enhance human understanding and capabilities beyond a specific discourse.

Humor and sacred coexist in my installation and in my …

From The Inside Out, And Through., Dominique Ovalle

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

These photographs describe “Science” born of consumerism, hijacked by me, economically disenfranchised, or rather—temporarily embarrassed, artist. I was putzing around Malibu—my old college stomping ground, looking for free food; maybe a sample of some gourmet $5 chocolate, and all I got were these photographs.

Fragmented, Max Rebel

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis, Fragmented, outlines Rebel’s explorations with materials and techniques that led to the creation of his current work that was presented in his MFA Exhibition. Fragmented focuses on elements of abandoned and ignored structures found in both urban and rural communities. Rebel is interested in the visual characteristics directly related to manufactured landscapes that have been reshaped by neglect, specifically, surfaces that appear old and weathered. The assemblages he makes in reference to these deserted sites do not comment on specific architectural locations. Instead, they are meant to emphasize common traits found at multiple sites. By working with …

The Kanga, A Cloth That Reveals- Co-Production Of Culture In Africa And The Indian Ocean Region, Phyllis A. Ressler

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The Kanga is one of Africa's least understood textiles. As a simple cotton, colorful, hand and machine printed cloth it embodies dynamic historical co-production of culture throughout African and Indian Ocean trade networks. Exploring African mercantile trade history, the coproduction and exchange of iconography, the diverse use and meanings of the Kanga, suggests a valuable discursive role for this textile. Despite its longevity of more than 150 years, its significant role in creation of identities, and its contribution to communication through design and social meaning, the Kanga, receives limited attention in textile research. Though seen by many as a simple …

The Parenthetical Notation Method For Recording Yarn Structure, Jeffrey C. Splitstoser

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Until now, describing yarn structure has been more art than science, especially for complex yarns and cordage like those encountered at Cerrillos, a Paracas (ca. 900-100 B.C.E.) site in the Ica Valley of Peru, where yarns and cordage frequently involve multiple colors, sub-structures, and materials (e.g., Image 1). My early attempts at describing yarn structures using notation were essentially undecipherable to others. Likewise, narrative methods proved too wordy and no less confusing. (For instance, a narrative description of the structure of specimen 2001-L185-B1654- S001, a rope-like yarn pictured in Images 2 and 3, would be: Twelve Z-spun-singly-ply yarns Ztwisted with …

Samplers, Sewing And Star Quilts: Changing Federal Policies Impact Native American Education And Assimilation, Lynne Anderson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Illustrating the U.S. federal government's changing policies on the assimilation of Native American children is the role of needlework instruction in the schooling of Indian girls. Described and discussed are three examples of 19th and 20th century policy, with emphasis on the textiles resulting from those policies. Early 19th century policy supported mission schools for Indians. Learning to sew was a valued domestic skill in 19th century female education, culminating in the making of a needlework sampler. This focus was adopted in mission schools, illustrated by Christeen Baker's 1830 sampler stitched at the Choctaw Mission School in Mayhew, Mississippi. Shortly …

Exposed, Shelly Barq

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Finding Time: How It Is Made Visual Artists Newsletter, Brian Fay

Articles

FINDING TIME

Brian Fay outlines the processes and concepts underpinning his practice

Japanese Kimono Fashion Of The Early Twentieth Century, Annie Van Asche

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper examines the development of popular kimono fashion from the late 19th century through the mid-20th century. I focus on kimono worn by modem-thinking young women whose wardrobes, by the 1920's, included both new Western and recreated Japanese garments and accessories. The meisen kasuri kimono, the most popular new style of kimono among women living in the growing urban metropolitan centers, is highlighted. It covers an unprecedented historical period of rapid modernization and Westernization of Japan, which brought about societal changes that dramatically--and positively--transformed the lives of Japanese women. I begin with a historical sketch of the industrialization of …

Textiles, Scholarship, And Art Education: An Art College Perspective, Wendy Landry

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In many communities the art college is the last formal refuge of active textile-making knowledge and heritage. This location appears to value playful, risky, or challenging material explorations which might result in creative design or meaningful visual expression. This should be the best environment for cultivating adventurous students able to integrate a wide range of experience and resources towards generating new ideas for interesting contemporary textiles. It could be a good place in which to discover how textiles contribute to human experience and history, and how they are meaningful. However, I submit that this art environment is still detrimental to …

The Meaning Of Yoruba Aso Olona Is Far From Water Tight, Lisa Aronson

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

While researching the ritual meaning of cloth among the Eastern Ijo of the Niger Delta, I examined the contents of a number of family owned trunks in which were stored old and much valued cloths traded from elsewhere in Africa, Europe, and India. One type of cloth which I frequently found in these collections was one made up of three, or sometimes four, woven strips that are sewn along the salvage and decorated with supplemental weft-float design. The Eastern Ijo regard this cloth as a valuable heirloom for its trade value and for the fact that its designs evoke spiritual …

Textiles Of Sacrifice: Aztec Ritual Capes, Patricia Rieff Anawalt

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This presentation analyzes three long-gone prehispanic textiles, a feat made possible due to the peculiarities of the Aztec language, Nahuatl, and the sixteenth-century Spaniards' dedication to detailed recordkeeping. From Columbus' first voyage in 1492 to Spain's final expulsion from the Americas in the nineteenth century, the Spaniards were exemplary recorders. Fortunately, this trait was particularly evident in the decades following the 1519–1521 conquest of Mexico, a period that yielded invaluable conquistador eye-witness accounts, administrative records and missionary chronicles. It is to the latter genre that we owe the data presented in this paper.

Of all the newly-discovered peoples in the …