To mark the recent publication of her new bookFray: Art and Textile Politics,Julia Bryan-Wilson will discuss both fine art and amateur registers ofhand makingin 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 inAfterall,Art Bulletin,Art Journal,Artforum,Bookforum,Camera Obscura,differences,Frieze,Grey Room,October,Parkett, ٳJournal of Modern Craft,Oxford Art Journal,TDR: The Drama Review, and many other venues.Bryan-Wilson is the author ofArt Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Eraand, with Glenn Adamson,Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing.
Helena Reckittis Reader in Curating at Goldsmiths College, London. She was previously Senior Curator of Programmes, the Power Plant, Toronto. She has written for magazines includingArt Papers,C Magazine,New York Arts Magazine,Art Asia Pacific,frieze, and ٳTimes Higher Education Supplement, for the academic periodicalsArt Journal,Reading Room, and ٳJournal of Curatorial Studies, and for bookspublished by Routledge, Manchester University Press, Liverpool University Press, the University of Minnesota Press, Calvert 22,andthe Whitechapel Gallery.
After the lecture Julia will be joined inconversation 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.