There seems to be a strange, unspoken idea floating around in 21st-century discourse that history, or at least meaningful history, began around the year 1700 – or 1800, or in the most egregious cases, sometime in the interwar period of the 1920s. Before the supposed dawn of scientific reasoning in the Enlightenment, our common imagination would suggest that the unwashed masses muddled about in the darkness of their ignorance, utterly oblivious to even the most obvious axioms of shared human dignity and the richness of individual experience. While historians struggle constantly to disillusion us of such a conception, there remains a startling – and quite frankly, annoying – trend among popular media of believing that, in every way, life has never been better than it is right now.
It would be easy, then, for me to tell you that global suffrage movements, anti-tradition narratives in the postwar years, and swiftly evolving progressive ideals birthed yet another victory for women in the form of the mid-century fiber movement – where the work of women’s hands is at last taken seriously. And to be sure, we have been graced with the incredible talents of numerous fiber artists in the last several decades, such as Lenore Tawney and Helena Hernmarck. With all due deference to their particular genius in the realms of color, texture, and composition – all of which have worked wonders to translate the world of textiles to the fine art sphere – theirs is not the story I would like to tell.
Because, to put it bluntly, I do not think we are better off now than we have ever been before; in fact, I would argue that the rise of the modern fiber movement indicts our society at least as much as it informs it. It is not necessary – or at least it should not be necessary – to elevate textiles to “high art” for them to be taken seriously. To evaluate them by the tired, competitive framework of Renaissance exceptionalism may even be to miss the point entirely.
When I began contemplating how to structure this article, I initially planned to take you on a walk through a few historical examples of textile art, culminating in an examination of the current state of the space. My goal was to explain, via the evolution of the craft, how its value had been translated for a postmodern audience. I do prefer, when possible, to work within our Zeitgeist rather than to critique it. You could call it my ironic way of rebelling against deconstructionism.
But then I kept thinking, and I realized that the stark juxtaposition of the recent evolution of textile arts (from craft to fine art) with their millennia-long, storied history is indicative of a problem I’ve been mulling over quite a bit recently. Textile art does not require the art world to simply become more inclusive – i.e., to “allow” traditionally women’s work to stand alongside other lauded masterpieces. It is instead an invitation to re-envision art entirely through the lens of an unbroken lineage of women who, whether they were acknowledged or not (and, indeed, they often were), created art birthed out of their own careful observation, meticulous craftsmanship, and, above all, deep love for the world around them and the people in it.
One of my favorite stories of a textile artist comes from a very unexpected source: a Roman Catholic saint. While the usual idea of a female saint is a pious nun, hands wrapped delicately in prayer and eyes raised to heaven (or maybe Joan of Arc, if you have more adventurous sensibilities), St. Zélie Martin was a laywoman living in 1800s France. She is best known for being mother to St. Thérèse of Lisieux, one of the most important Catholic figures of the last several hundred years. During her relatively short life before she died of breast cancer in her forties, she was an incredibly successful businesswoman who specialized in Alençon lace. So successful was she that her husband had to quit his own job to help her run the operation. She developed her own patterns – many examples of which survive to this day – and had a network of clients who admired and respected her craftsmanship. She employed several women, passing on her skills and helping them to elevate their situation amid the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution.
Zélie’s name is not enshrined in history because of her lace, nor did she see it as the focal point of her life. It was a task she took up initially out of necessity to help provide for her family in a dual-income household. What is so exciting to me about her artistic journey is how fully she embodies the experience of countless generations of women who lived in the time before the radio, TV, and Internet slowly hemmed in the boundaries of our lives, shrinking the “real world” as surely as it expanded opportunities for fame and notoriety. Though her work may not hang in museums (at least not outside the realm of Catholic devotion), it was daily seen and felt and worn by the people who mattered to her. It enriched the lives of those she encountered – both figuratively and literally.
On a different yet related side of the spectrum would be women like Harriet Powers. Born into slavery in 1837, Powers was emancipated at the end of the Civil War along with her family. During their struggle to raise money to survive in the hostile environment of the American South, Powers used her spare time and skills as a seamstress to design richly narrative quilts such as the “Bible Quilt,” which depicts scenes from both the Old and New Testaments. While at least one artist recognized Powers’ talent right away at the 1886 Athens Cotton Fair, it took more time for her art world to acknowledge her – nor, did it seem, was Powers interested in earning their approval. She did not even want to sell her work, only doing so in the end because her family’s financial situation had grown so dire. We are lucky her work has survived under the care of collectors and museums; her commitment to hope and beauty in the face of a challenging life is certainly worth celebrating. That said, to reduce her work to a triumph over racism, in which a disadvantaged woman managed to achieve the heights of international acclaim, is to miss the more profound passion and imaginative drive of a woman who delighted in stories and the act of creation, whose art was first and foremost a triumph for herself, embodying love for her culture, her values, and her life.
None of this is to say that textile art shouldn’t be considered art. No, there is no “should” or “shouldn’t” in the matter; textiles have the same artistic capacity as graphite, paint, clay, or marble. They are, definitionally, a medium for creativity. It is only a question of whether our definition of the “art world” is broad enough to encompass an entire history of textile pieces that may not even be looking for our attention. If we consider the spirit of craftsmanship in the most elevated sense, could this not be an even purer commitment to art?
Paradoxically, it may be for exactly this reason – and not somehow to “legitimize” the medium – that it is such a good thing that there are women (and men) who pursue textiles as what we would deem a “fine art.” There are women like Anni Albers, a German-Jewish woman who trained in the Bauhaus throughout the 1920s and early 1930s until the Nazis shut it down, whose tapestries reflect a mind at once innovative and emotive, insightful and attentive to history.
There are also women like Barbara Bushey, who much more recently served as a guide and mentor to me as I have learned to navigate the world of art and art history (I hope she will forgive me for naming her here). Her textile art was confounding when I first encountered it as a young college student. I was (somewhat regrettably) convinced at the time that Caravaggio and Bernini deserved both the first and last word in the artistic sphere. Over time, though, her work has revealed itself as an expression of, as she says, “what is hidden and what is revealed.” To me, it is also an incarnation of her attitude of receptivity to a wide variety of inspiration and experiences, including many I have not heard of but which her pieces make me want to learn more about. (Will there be an article coming soon on bojagi and furoshiki? Quite possibly.)
What the artists of the fiber movement – and those who engage with it, those who reject it, those who have never heard of it, and those who once picked up crocheting as a hobby but never got past the stage of making infinite chains until they finally gave up and went back to their sketchbooks – demonstrate is how destructive and ultimately useless of an errand it can be to evaluate different media as “better” or “worse” based on their reception or perceived similarities to any one particular form or “level.” One day, the standard will change, as it has again and again over the centuries. The world will keep turning, and what was once considered the height of beauty will be relegated to an incomprehensible footnote at the bottom of a sad doctoral candidate’s dissertation. Will it be less art then than it is now? Will it, like the textiles of women of ages past, be less worthy of praise because those who made it have been lost to time – or even more scandalously, because many of them were content to be so? Must something be “taken seriously” by the world for it to be serious, solemn, sacred? I, for one, hope not.
Originally published in MutualArt Magazine on October 30, 2024.
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