ARTH 352 Studies in the History of Fibre Art

• Wednesdays, 8:45am-11:15am
• Online: Access through Moodle
• Instructor: Dr. Johanna Amos

As Elissa Auther has pointed out, in the 1960s and 1970s American artists working in textile-based mediums sought to legitimate fibre art as “Art” by minimising its associations with craft practice (2008). While this strategy has come under scrutiny in recent years, fibre art is often still framed apart from craft and material culture. This course seeks to trouble this distinction further by situating modern and contemporary fibre art within a broader global history of textile practice. Drawing upon methods from visual and material culture studies, this course will examine the effects of colonisation, industrialisation, and globalisation on textile production and consumption. It will use a series of focused discussions and case studies to consider how textile objects, including Coast Salish weaving and knitting, Ghanaian kente, nineteenth-century art embroidery, Ruth Asawa’s wire sculptures, and the quilts of Gee’s Bend, challenge categories—art/craft, amateur/professional, masculine/feminine—and animate debates around authenticity, cultural property and appropriation, and the place of fibre in the museum.