In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene,
Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle
and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the
group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a
practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures,
and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a
prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of "craftivism" the
politics and social practices associated with handmaking Fray
explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about
process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic
upheaval. 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. Her
case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s including the
improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the
braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based
sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna, the small hand-sewn
tapestries depicting Pinochet's torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS
Memorial Quilt are often taken as evidence of the inherently
progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows
that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving
textiles very much "in the fray" of debates about feminized labor,
protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth
and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in
many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history
book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking
at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils 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.
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