To mark the recent publication of her new book Fray: Art and Textile Politics, Julia Bryan-Wilson will discuss both fine art and amateur registers of hand making in art since 1970, to unveil crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be.
Julia Bryan-Wilson is Professor of modern and contemporary art and director of the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley. A scholar and a critic, Bryan-Wilson has written articles that have appeared in Afterall, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Artforum, Bookforum, Camera Obscura, differences, Frieze, Grey Room, October, Parkett, the Journal of Modern Craft, Oxford Art Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, and many other venues. Bryan-Wilson is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era and, with Glenn Adamson, Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing.
Helena Reckitt is Reader in Curating at Goldsmiths College, London. She was previously Senior Curator of Programmes, the Power Plant, Toronto. She has written for magazines including Art Papers, C Magazine, New York Arts Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, frieze, and the Times Higher Education Supplement, for the academic periodicals Art Journal, Reading Room, and the Journal of Curatorial Studies, and for books published by Routledge, Manchester University Press, Liverpool University Press, the University of Minnesota Press, Calvert 22, and the Whitechapel Gallery.
After the lecture Julia will be joined in conversation with Helena Reckitt (Goldsmiths, London), followed by a Q&A with the audience.
This event is sponsored by the Centre for American Art and is part of the “Modernities: Architecture, Design, Theory” seminar series.