Art and Materials Conservation Commons^™

Blanket Statements, Issue 145, Fall 2020

Blanket Statements: News Publication of the American Quilt Study Group

Blanket Statements, Issue 145, Fall 2020

Freedom Quilt: Collective Patchwork In Post-Communist Hungary, Christalena Hughmanick

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The paper investigates the democratic and social values of patchwork quilting through its culture of open-source pattern sharing and communal group work – using The Freedom Quilt Hungary project as a primary example. I facilitated a social engagement artwork, developed in 2019 on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the end of Socialist rule in Hungary in 1989. This change resulted in new laws, allowing for the formation of the Hungarian Patchwork Guild (HPG), with whom I worked closely to create the work. It provided members of this group and the public with a platform to define individual notions …

Prejudiced Commodities: Understanding Knowledge Transfer From India To Britain Through Printed And Painted Calicoes, 1720-1780, Aditi Khare

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The eighteenth-century trade in calico between Europe and India was a function of global textile manufacture, exchange, and consumption on multiple levels. This trade had several political, cultural, and economic consequences— the most important of which, I suggest, was the transfer of useful knowledge from artisanal oral textile traditions in India to the receptive, commercial, and nascent cotton printing industry in Europe.

This paper explores the contribution of Indian cotton printing knowledge towards the development of Europe’s cotton industry and, consequently, its dissemination through European knowledge networks. In particular, the largely overlooked chemical knowledge pertaining to dyes and mordants responsible …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

Colcha Circle: A Stitch In Northern New Mexico Culture, Olimpia Newman, Rebecca Abrams

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Colcha embroidery is folk art, characteristic of northern New Mexico history, traditions, and a form of cultural expression that has not been researched and documented sufficiently. It has been practiced in private homes and small circles as a result of commissions or economic development programs, as has also been the case in the San Luis Valley, Colorado. Despite the exposure offered by local markets and demonstrations during events in New Mexico, the embroidery is in many ways an unknown technique, even to the next generation.

This video captures a candid discussion among eleven colcha artists, some of whom are entering …

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 …

Hidden Stories/Human Lives: Proceedings Of The Textile Society Of America 17th Biennial Symposium, October 15-17, 2020--Full Program With Abstracts & Bios

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The theme Hidden Stories/Human Lives presents opportunities to reveal complex and hidden stories of global textile making and coincides with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Yet, just as the voices of women of color, marginalized by the suffrage movement, are only now being recognized, the stories of the many human lives that have contributed—directly and indirectly—to textile making, including enslaved people, immigrant entrepreneurs, and industrial laborers, remain untold. With this symposium, we hope to get “behind the curtain” to explore the wider human network engaged in textile production, bringing to light hidden stories …

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 …

Lady In Blue The Technical Study And Treatment Of A Portrait Of A Woman, Rachel Childers

Art Conservation Master's Projects

Technical analysis and conservation treatment were conducted on an oil on canvas Portrait of Madonna by an unknown artist. Both non-invasive analysis and invasive analysis including sampling was carried out to assist in the interpretation of artist technique and identify materials present. The primary goal of this project was to determine a suitable treatment protocol and provide an indication of artists materials used. The materials identification helped inform the treatment during treatment, specifically during varnish reduction and blanching mitigation. While the painting had several condition issues, extensive blanching was analyzed in more detail. Imaging and analytical techniques included ultraviolet and …

Rigging Stereoscopic Reality: The Fabrication That Enthused, Amused, Confused, And Provoked An Era, Clara Livy Bailin

Art Conservation Master's Projects

Stereo viewing captured the Victorian imagination with a shocking intensity. It infiltrated all levels of society, changed the manner in which scientists and philosophers understood human perception, and contributed to medicine and entertainment in ways we are still discovering today. Though it is largely considered a toy, the context for the machine at the center of this study is broad, complex, and has led to an unending and ongoing series of questions.

The Alexander Becker’s “sweetheart stereocard viewer arrived without documentation or purchase information. It had been in the owner’s family for over thirty years, twenty-five of which it spent …

A Comparative Study Of The Production And Treatment Of Wooden And Paper Bookboards To Inform The Treatment Of Two Books, Oa Sjoblom

Art Conservation Master's Projects

The production and treatment of wooden and paper book boards was explored through research and treatment of two bindings: the Strasbourg Bible from 1734, a binding with wooden boards with a split front board; and Peter B. Porter’s letterbook from 1814, a binding with paper boards with losses and weakening of the board. Primary sources such as bookbinding and boardmaking manuals were reviewed to understand the production of the two types of boards. To guide treatment, a literature review of historic and recent relevant conservation treatments was conducted. The board treatments performed were guided by this research, and focused of …

The Conservation Treatment And Technical Examination Of Joseph Piccillo’S Wall Painting L. J. M. #5, Anna Ersenkal

Art Conservation Master's Projects

Joseph Piccillo’s Wall Painting L. J. M. #5, (ca. 1965) is a large mixed media painting on canvas (dimensions) owned by the Nichols School in Buffalo, NY. Due to its poor condition, it was brought to the Garman Art Conservation Program for technical analysis and treatment. Imaging and scientific analysis was used to identify the variety of materials present in the largescale mixed-media painting. An artist interview was conducted to learn about Piccillo’s style throughout his career and acquire more information related to the materials and construction of the painting. Overall, the painting was in poor condition, with the …

The Conservation Treatment And Technical Analysis Of A 20th Century Painting By Haitian Artist J.E. Gourgue, Melissa Amundsen

Art Conservation Master's Projects

This project describes the conservation treatment and technical analysis of a painting on Masonite with an unknown title by Haitian artist Jacques-Enguerrand Gourgue. Imaging and scientific analysis aided in the identification of the artist’s materials which informed the treatment of this fragile painting. Prior to treatment, the piece exhibited severe flaking, widespread losses, and loose paint fragments resting on the surface, requiring it to be stored horizontally. Following treatment, the painting is now in stable condition, can once again be exhibited vertically and is aesthetically suitable for display. Background research briefly discusses the artist’s background, affiliations, and imagery.

The Conservation Treatment Of A 19th-Century Scottish Pastel On Paper, Perrine Le Saux

Art Conservation Master's Projects

A framed 19th century Scottish pastel portrait on paper, severely damaged after a fall, was admitted to the Garman Art Conservation Department at Buffalo State College for examination, research, and treatment. Conservation photography helped in documenting and understanding the extent of the damage. Research helped to reinforce the attribution of the drawing to Sir Daniel MacNee and to learn more about the man in the portrait: Robert Maxwell Jr. The drawing was torn significantly in its wood strainer as a result of the original glazing breaking and has suffered loss of media due in part to abrasion. The support …

Considerations Of The Conservation Treatment Of Profil: A Pochoir Print By Georges Braque, Grace Walters

Art Conservation Master's Projects

Georges Braque was a prolific creator in many mediums. Throughout his oeuvre, rapport and an attention to surface are essential components of his artistic style. These are both found in Profil, a collotype and pochoir print that is part of a larger portfolio: Espaces – 13 Dessins, Lavis, Aquarelles created in 1957. Diagnostic imaging, materials analyses using scanning X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) and spectrophotometry, and comparative examination of two other editions of Profil revealed that extensive light damage and exposure to moisture had resulted in damages that interfered with the original rapport and surface quality of the print. An initial aqueous …

Blanket Statements, Issue 144, Summer 2020

Blanket Statements: News Publication of the American Quilt Study Group

Blanket Statements, Issue 144, Summer 2020

The Persistence Of Hope In The Art Of Donald Keefe, Donald Keefe, Bonnie Dwyer

Faculty Works

Artist Donald Keefe is interviewed about his work and artistic development. His artwork Untitled Construct No. 4 is featured on the front cover of the magazine issue, and through out the interview section, pgs. 70-77. A biography and artist statement is also included in the inside cover of the publication. Other artworks featured are Mythos, Waiting, Consolation, Out-of-Work Horse, Revival, Autumn 2, Alone (Not Alone), and The Inauspicious Present No. 2.