To mark the recent publication of her new book聽Fray: Art and Textile Politics,聽Julia Bryan-Wilson will discuss both fine art and amateur registers of聽hand making聽in art since 1970, to unveil crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles鈥攈igh and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.聽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.聽A scholar and a critic, Bryan-Wilson has written articles that have appeared in聽Afterall,听Art Bulletin,听Art Journal,听Artforum,听Bookforum,听Camera Obscura,听differences,听Frieze,听Grey Room,听October,听Parkett, the聽Journal of Modern Craft,听Oxford Art Journal,听TDR: The Drama Review, and many other venues.聽Bryan-Wilson is the author of聽Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era聽and, with Glenn Adamson,听Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing.
Helena Reckitt聽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聽Art Papers,听C Magazine,听New York Arts Magazine,听Art Asia Pacific,听frieze, and the聽Times Higher Education Supplement, for the academic periodicals聽Art Journal,听Reading Room, and the聽Journal of Curatorial Studies, and for books聽published by Routledge, Manchester University Press, Liverpool University Press, the University of Minnesota Press, Calvert 22,听and聽the Whitechapel Gallery.
After the lecture Julia will be joined in聽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 鈥淢odernities: Architecture, Design, Theory鈥 seminar series.