Art Practice Commons^™

The Aegean Wool Economies Of The Bronze Age, Marie-Louise Nosch

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper will explore the importance of wool in the emergence of complex societies during the Bronze Age in the Aegean. The 2nd millennium BC Aegean witnesses the emergence of a highly particular system of wool economy, beginning with the Minoan and followed by the Mycenaean centralized palace economies with strict administration of flocks, herders, wool, and textile production by thousands of women and children. This system monitors annual production targets and surplus production, and production strategies ensuring that the palaces’ needs are met. Textile production is the largest sector of the palace economy and employs the highest number of …

Textile Art: Connecting The Virtual And Material In My Work, Janice Lessman-Moss

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

As a textile artist in the 21st century, I continue to aspire to make art objects that are unique and timely, characteristic of my individual sensibility and experience. Using the latest digital tools - including the TC1(2) Single Thread Control loom - I strive to animate my woven forms through material interaction and a distinctive touch built on a foundation of research and practice - based in digital and hand craft.

In my weavings I explore relationships of abstract systems created with traditional and innovative textile coloring techniques, material contrasts, and the generative processing of the computer and digital loom. …

Traditional Textile Design For Social Innovation Toward Sustainability In Japan, Yuko Fukatsu

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Japanese local textiles are too traditional to fit in our time, however they are all earth-friendly materials those of which are significant for the sustainable society in our future. In this paper, possibilities of re-designing traditional textiles made of natural fiber are explored with local weavers at Okinawa and Nagano in Japan. Talking with craftsmen from local communities I realized that not only current issues of textile techniques and products but also those of local communities and environment should be discussed and solved at the same time.

Also, I realized that activities and creativities of young generations are necessary to …

The Fabric For A City: Development Of Textile Materials During The Urbanization Period In Mediterranean Europe, Margarita Gleba

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Ancient literary sources indicate that, by the beginning of the Common Era, different textile types and qualities were available to Roman consumers and many of the best fibres were produced in Italy, from where they spread throughout the Roman Empire in the form of sheep, raw materials or finished textiles. The variety observed during the Roman times reflects a long period of evolution, based on selective breeding and cultivation, as well as development of new and more effective processing, spinning and weaving technologies. Recent investigations demonstrate that major changes in fibre development and processing took place in the Mediterranean Europe …

Conversations Between A Foreign Designer And Traditional Textile Artisans In India: Design Collaborations From The Artisan’S Perspective, Deborah Emmett

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Contemporary textile designers are part of a cultural shift that has brought into the mainstream a sense of ecological and social responsibility. Some are challenging the way the textile industry is conducted, questioning the existing business models. International media coverage has exposed the poor and unsafe working conditions of many of the people employed in this industry, cruelly demonstrated by the collapse in April 2013 of Rana Plaza, a garment manufacturing complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where 1127 workers died. This awareness has developed a social consciousness in many design communities, and as a result the development of ethical design practices. …

Communicating Textiles Within And Beyond Museum Walls: New Directions, Dinah Eastop

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Innovation in the past, present and future will be considered by reference to an extraordinary but little known collection: the textiles and dress preserved in the Board of Trade Representations and Registers of Designs, 1839-1991. This set of records is held at The National Archives [of the UK government] and contains records of nearly 3 million designs, registered by proprietors worldwide (but mostly UK and mainland Europe). Innovation in the past will demonstrated by this registration scheme which encouraged investment in design by enabling copyright control over both ornamental and useful designs, for many materials and products. Recognising design as …

Adinkra And Kente Cloth In History, Law, And Life, Boatema Boateng

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Adinkra and kente cloth have changed significantly in the course of their history first as markers of Asante royal power and then of Ghanaian cultural distinction. Once handmade and reserved for the exclusive use of the Asante ruler, cheap mass-produced reproductions now proliferate in Ghanaian markets. In attempting to use intellectual property law to regulate their appropriation, the Ghanaian state has set the conditions for further changes in these fabrics, their designs, and their sources of authority. This paper examines the implications of changing political and regulatory contexts for the past present and future meanings of adinkra and kente cloth …

Highland Complementary-Warp Weaving And The Lima Style In The Central Coast Of Peru, Ca. 200-650 C.E., Sophie Desrosiers

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

For more than a century, the geometric interlocking fish or snake designs appearing on Lima style artifacts - painted ceramics and walls, engraved gourds and wooden sculptures - have been considered as reproduction of designs created through textile means. An analysis of their characteristics shows that they fit well with designs obtained with weaving techniques still practiced today in the Peruvian highlands. This discovery allows reconstruction of the models of the interlocking designs. Then, comparing the reconstructed models with the small group of textiles with similar designs excavated in Lima sites, it becomes possible to understand better the mechanism at …

Biennial Symposium Program: New Directions: Examining The Past, Creating The Future, Los Angeles, California, September 10–14, 2014

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Schedule with speaker and program information. 14 pages.

2014 Biennial Symposium: New Directions: Examining The Past, Creating The Future (Website Home-Page)

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Brief statement, Organizers, Officers, Chairs, Hosts, & editors.
With links.

Blanket Statements, Issue 116, Summer 2014

Blanket Statements: News Publication of the American Quilt Study Group

Blanket Statements, Issue 116, Summer 2014

A Language In Becoming, Camille C. Hawbaker

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Words as I have known them are evolving concepts in the landscape of human language, where the meanings of words are interwoven with layers of history and culture. The boundaries of language are defined by words, and around the edges are instinctive sounds that precede and exceed meaning. These sounds are an interrupting force that unsettles the linguistic structure. We often use them for expression in the form of sobs, grunts, moans, murmurs, chants, obscenities and exclamations. They appear in times of spontaneous emotion that words cannot convey. They can also be used purposely, poetically, “…to shatter [one’s] judging consciousness …

A Collection: Simulations Of The Home, Liana M. Owad

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

The collection of objects of which a home is comprised changes and grows over time. We inherit furniture and accumulate these pieces to create our own particular atmosphere of home. Our furniture and belongings range from handmade articles to store bought manufactured items. These items we live with everyday perform several different roles. A dining room table does not only have the function of serving food, but is also embedded with the memories of many family dinner conversations. Objects in the home have this layered purpose of utilitarian function and placeholder for memories.

After moving away from home, I drew …

Blanket Statements, Issue 115, Spring 2014

Blanket Statements: News Publication of the American Quilt Study Group

Blanket Statements, Issue 115, Spring 2014

Abstracts And Presenter Biographies From 14th Biennial

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Coast Salish Spinning: Looking For Twist, Finding Change, Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Coast Salish textiles from the Pacific Northwest (northwest Washington state and southwest British Columbia) are relatively rare and unknown yet are masterpieces of sophisticated weaving and spinning techniques. Coast Salish blankets and robes, and the tools used to make them, have been the subjects of a few seminal works (Gustafson 1980; Loughran-Delahunt 1996; Marr 1979; Vanderburg 1953), but other than the occasional recording of the direction of twist, the spinning characteristics of the yarn itself have not been the focus of research. This gap is curious, given the uniqueness of Coast Salish spinning tools, the corresponding techniques, and the fibres …

Needle Lace To Valley Walking: İğne Oyası As Landscape Ornamentation, Olivia Valentine

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In 2012-13, I lived and worked in Turkey, researching the traditional needle lace edging of İğne Oyası and creating relationships between this textile edge, the contemporary urban fabric, and the rural landscape of Turkey. In this paper, I will speak about my time in Turkey, presenting my research into the traditional needle lace edge of oya and my studio production, where I used my research to create this needle lace edge at new scales and in new materials and contexts.

Dressing The Leader, Dressing The Ancestor: The Longue Durée In The South Central Andes, Ann H. Peters

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

The preservation and adornment of the dead in the South Central Andes can be traced over some twelve thousand years. The potential for preservation of human bodies and fine textiles in desert sands and high altitude caves contributed to a continuing social and political role of the dead in the lives of the living. Colonial period documents describe well-dressed mortuary bundles that participated in public ritual and could be cited as proof of heritage and validation of social leadership. However, the nature of social and political ancestry and its relationship to power change over time with the development of large-scale …

An American Textile Company To The Trade: The Corporate History And Textile Collection Highlights Of Kravet Inc., Deborah E. Kraak

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Historic textiles “live” in museums and private collections, carefully stored for research and exhibition. Those in the archives of furnishing fabric companies live in a different way: reinterpreted for the consumer, either in exact reproductions or more loosely in fabrics that adapt historic motifs or are inspired by them.1 One of the largest and most important collections of historic American and European printed fabrics belongs to Kravet Inc., an American textile company to the trade based in Bethpage, New York. More than 52,000 historic textile documents belong to Kravet through its own holdings and the archives of the textile firms …

The Secrets Of Alorese ‘Silk’ Yarn: Kolon Susu, Triangle Trade And Underwater Women In Eastern Indonesia1, Emilie Wellfelt

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Eastern Indonesia is known for a great variety of textiles. One part of the region that has been largely overlooked in the literature is textiles of the Alor archipelago. However, the literature does recognise and speculate about the unusual silky character of some Alorese cloths that have entered Western museum collections. Based on fieldwork among weavers in the village Uma Pura, situated on a small island in the Pantar strait, this paper reveals the secret behind the characteristic shiny finish of the ‘silk’ sarongs from Alor. Ruled by necessity rather than choice weavers used to mix cotton with fibres from …

Conversationa And Encounter, Belinda Von Mengrsen

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Textile artists often use items of traditional textile material culture as sites for primary research or encounter within their conceptual and physical practice. This research practice is, however, far more than aesthetic or visual analysis: rather, it allows for the observation of that border territory in which a new work of art begins and ends—the very place from which the ideas come—and also of how influences are layered, and evolve within our psyche. Ruth Hadlow, has described the use of traditional West-Timorese woven textiles as “a ‘tool’ with which to think?” (Hadlow, 2013). Through such tools, primary research may operate …

A Fragmented Treasure On Display: The Turfan Textile Collection And The Humboldt Forum, Mariachiara Gasparini

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

In the summer 2012, thanks to the Department of Central Asian Art of the museum and the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) at the British Library in London, UK, the so-called Turfan textile collection--gathered during the last century Prussian Turfan Royal Expeditions in the Tarim Basin--held in the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin, Germany, was finally microscopically analyzed and digitized. Except for a couple of pieces taken into account in previous studies as examples of comparison, the collection as a whole (ca. 350 pieces) has not enjoyed particular attention from scholars in the fields of Chinese or Central Asian art …

Threads Of Feeling: Embroidering Craftivism To Protest The Disappearances And Deaths In The “War On Drugs” In Mexico, Maureen Daly Goggin

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Since 2006, at least 130,000 men, women, and children have been killed and another 27,000 have disappeared in the “War on Drugs” in Mexico. This violence affects all “socio-economic levels [who are being] plagued by kidnapping, extortion and murder.” Many connected to those who have gone missing or died have been demanding that authorities locate their loved ones. Frustrated with the lack of action, a Mexican activist group of artists called Fuentes Rojas Red Fountains came together in January 2011 to “raise the visibility for the victims of the US-Mexico Drug War” by, among other things, dying fountains red. Later …

Blanket Statements, Issue 118, Winter 2014–2015

Blanket Statements: News Publication of the American Quilt Study Group

Blanket Statements, Issue 118, Winter 2014–2015

Uncoverings: The Research Papers Of The American Quilt Study Group, Volume 35 (2014), Lynne Zacek Bassett, Nancy C. Bavor, Joyce D. Hammond, Marin F. Hanson, Laurel Horton, Christine E. Humphrey

Uncoverings Journal

Preface by Lynne Zacek Bassett

Knockers, Pickers, Movers, and Shakers: Quilt Dealers in America, 1970-2000 by Nancy C. Bavor

Tlfaifai in Tahiti: Embracing Change by Joyce D. Hammond

"One Hundred Good Wishes Quilts": Expressions of Cross-Cultural Communication by Marin F. Hanson

Weft-Loop Woven Counterpanes in the New Republic: The Rediscovery of a Textile Legacy by Laurel Horton

Quilt Documentation Projects, 1980-1989: Exploring the Roots of an National Phenomenon by Christine E. Humphrey

Contributors

Index

Inscribed Cotton Ikat From Yemen In The Tenth Century Ce, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

More than a thousand years ago, Baghdad was capital of the Islamic empire under the Abbasid caliphs, and Yemen was a flourishing center of agriculture and trade. Among its famous products were dyestuffs, and cotton cloth with warp stripes, patterned using techniques of compression resist. As the strength of the Abbasid caliphate declined and claims to power gained hold in the provinces, regional artistic styles began to emerge. The rulers of Yemen adopted one of the prerogatives of the Abbasid caliphs, bestowing honor by rewarding their subjects with inscribed textiles called tiraz. From burial sites in Egypt, many such textiles …

Robert Hillestad, Professor And Fiber Artist, Marilyn Delong

Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design: Department Information

Dr. Hillestad has been a member of the Costume Society of America since 1978 and has participated in many annual Symposia. Dr. Hillestad has multi-faceted abilities—he is a superb design educator as well as an active fiber and apparel artist—and he integrates the two roles of educator and artist expressively, superbly, and elegantly. Dr. Hillestad is professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. In 1997, The Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery on the Lincoln Campus of the University of Nebraska was named in his honor upon recommendation of the faculty in the Department of Textiles, Clothing and Design and the …

Sinan’S Screens: Networks Of Intersecting Polygons In Ottoman Architecture, Carol Bier

Textile Research Works

An often overlooked characteristic of Sinan’s architectural production of the 16th century is the use of low screening walls and windows carved of marble with pierced openwork or tracery to let in light and allow for air circulation. Typically these screens display polygonal networks often with intersecting polygons. This paper explores aspects of these carved patterns, which have antecedents in earlier Islamic architecture, attributing particular significance to this architectural feature in the works of Sinan and three successors whom he had trained. These slabs (and their counterparts in forged iron) may be considered études, serving as opportunities for the training …

Rematerializing: Interviews With Emerging Artists About Physicality, Pattern And Textile Techniques, Caroline Hayes Charuk

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

This paper will be a presentation of emerging Bay Area artists who draw upon textile materials, forms, and processes, but who refuse the label of ‘textile artist’ in favor of a more ambiguous relationship. References to textiles may be foundational for the work, or brought in as a means to an end. The conceptual basis of their work is contained within its physicality, and they acknowledge (or knowingly set aside) histories of handwork. Each artist has a practice that necessarily slides on a line between the dematerialization of conceptual art and a rematerialization that recognizes haptic experience as indispensable and …

Maguey Hammock: A Weaving Of Resistance And Persistence In Puerto Rico, Soraya Serra Collazo

Textile Society of America: Symposium Proceedings

Textiles are primary technology to almost all societies. Puerto Rico and the Caribbean are no exceptions. There is an object that has been weaved in the region since pre-Columbian times and it is still passing through the fingers of local artisans. Hamaca, an invention of the American inhabitants,² is an indigenous voice incorporated into many languages. It was in the Caribbean, where Europeans saw its utility, and it was quickly incorporated as the best way of sleeping in their transatlantic voyages. Its production has spread throughout the world and today it is made in many countries. In Puerto Rico …