i

THE NEW POLITICS OF

THE HANDMADE
ii

ii
iii

THE NEW POLITICS OF

THE HANDMADE
Craft, Art and Design

Edited by
Anthea Black and
Nicole Burisch
iv

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2021

© Editorial content and introductions, Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, 2021
© Individual chapters, their authors, 2021

Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension

of this copyright page.

Cover design by Louise Dugdale

Cover image: Shinique Smith, Bale Variant No. 0021 (Christmas), 2011–2017, courtesy of the
artist and SAS Studio

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Black, Anthea, editor. | Burisch, Nicole, 1980– editor.
Title: The new politics of the handmade: craft, art and design /
edited by Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch.
Description: London; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020011227 (print) | LCCN 2020011228 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781784538248 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788316552 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781788316569 (epub) | ISBN 9781788316576 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Handicraft–Political aspects. | Handicraft–Economic aspects.
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Research for this book was supported by Ontario Arts Council – Conseil des Arts de L’Ontario,
Canada Council for the Arts – Conseil des arts du Canada, and The Center for Craft.
v

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements xi
List of Contributors xiii

Introduction 1
Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch

1 From craftivism to craftwashing 13

Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch

2 Ethical fashion, craft and the new spirit of global

capitalism 33
Elke Gaugele

3 Selven O’Keef Jarmon: Beading across geographies 51

Nicole Burisch

4 The making of many hands: Artisanal production and

neighbourhood redevelopment in contemporary socially
engaged art 61
Noni Brynjolson

5 That looks like work: The total aesthetics of handcraft 79

Shannon R. Stratton

6 Craft as property as liberalism as problem 97

Leopold Kowolik
vi

7 Zahner Metals: Architectural fabrication and craft labour 117

Peggy Deamer

8 Capitalizing on community: The makerspace

phenomenon 125
Diana Sherlock

9 Morehshin Allahyari: On Material Speculation 147

Alexis Anais Avedisian and Anna Khachiyan

10 From molten plastic to polished mahogany: Bricolage and

scarcity in 1990s Cuban art 155
Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano

11 Things needed made 171

Nasrin Himada

12 Secret stash: Textiles, hoarding, collecting, accumulation

and craft 181
Kirsty Robertson

13 Shinique Smith: Lines that bind 199

Julia Bryan-Wilson

14 Margarita Cabrera: Landscapes of nepantla 207

Laura August

15 The sovereign stitch: Rereading embroidery as a critical

feminist decolonial text 217
Ellyn Walker

16 Ursula Johnson: Weaving histories and Netukulimk in

L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian) and other works 239
Heather Anderson

17 ‘The Black craftsman situation’: A critical conversation

about race and craft 249
Sonya Clark, Wesley Clark, Bibiana Obler, Mary Savig, Joyce J. Scott
and Namita Gupta Wiggers

Index 267

vi Contents
vii

ILLUSTRATIONS

All images courtesy of the artist or designer unless otherwise noted. Every effort
has been made by the authors and editors to obtain copyright permissions for all
the illustrations which appear in this book. If any proper acknowledgement has not
been made, copyright holders are invited to inform the publisher of the oversight.

1.1 Snurk. ‘To grab the attention of people and press, Erik slept under the
Le-Clochard duvet cover in the middle of Dam square in Amsterdam.’ The
Netherlands, 2008. Le-Clochard, 2008, cotton. Photo credit (top): Theo van
der Laan. Photo (bottom): Ram van Meel. Copyright: Snurk 21
1.2 Citizens of Craft, 2015. Maker: Joe Han Lee, Courage, 2012. Photo: Joe Han
Lee. Copyright 2015 Ontario Crafts Council (operating as Craft Ontario).
Citizens of Craft is an unregistered trademark of Ontario Crafts Council 25
2.1 ‘Designer Vivienne Westwood walks on the catwalk by Vivienne Westwood
Red Label on day 3 of London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2013, at the
British Foreign & Commonwealth Office,’ 16 September 2012, London,
England. Photo: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images 34
2.2 Monsoon/Accessorize Artisan Welfare Programme. Courtesy: Monsoon/
Accessorize 37
2.3 Women in Burkina Faso process cotton to make yarn for weaving.
Courtesy: Ethical Fashion Initiative 40
2.4 Juergen Teller, Vivienne, Vivienne Westwood campaign, Autumn Winter
2011, Nairobi, 2011. Courtesy: Juergen Teller 41
3.1 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, 360 Degrees Vanishing, 2019. Photo: Alex Barber.
Courtesy: Art League Houston 52
3.2 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, 360 Degrees Vanishing, 2014, artist’s concept
drawing. Courtesy: Selven O’Keef Jarmon 54
3.3 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, 360 Degrees Vanishing, beaders working at Art
League Houston, Houston, Texas, 2015. Photo: Peter Gershon 55
4.1 Theaster Gates, Soul Manufacturing Corporation, The Spirit of Utopia, 2013,
installation view. Photo: Timothy Soar 63
viii

4.2 Project Row Houses, Third Ward, Houston, Texas, September 2015.
Photo: Noni Brynjolson 67
4.3 Craft table and fall celebration for Ethiopian New Year, Trans.lation, Dallas,
Texas, September 2015. Photo: Lizbeth de Santiago 71
5.1 Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long, Nick Olson & Lilah Horwitz: Makers,
2012, video still, Half-Cut Tea.com. Courtesy: Matt Glass and Jordan
Wayne Long 84
5.2 Rebecca Purcell, J. Morgan Puett and Jeffrey Jenkins in collaboration,
HumanUfactorY(ng) Workstyles: The Labor Portraits of Mildred’s Lane.
Cheryl Edwards: Digestion Choreographer, Paul Barlow: Master of Applied
Complexity and J Morgan Puett, Ambassador of Entanglements, 2014.
Photo: Jeffrey Jenkins 91
6.1 Carol McNicoll, Freedom and Democracy, 2011, ceramic, wire, found
objects. Photo: Philip Sayer. Courtesy: Marsden Woo Gallery, London 98
6.2 Carrie Reichardt and The Treatment Rooms Collective, History is a
Weapon, 2014, ceramic intervention, Victoria and Albert Museum.
Photo: Peter Riches 104
6.3 Carrie Reichardt with Nick Reynolds, Mary Bamber, 2011, printed ceramic,
glass tiles and mixed media. Courtesy: Carrie Reichardt 105
6.4 Gord Peteran, Secret Weapon, 2011, violin cases, hand planes, velvet, 24ʺ
w × 8ʺ d × 5ʺ h. Courtesy: Gord Peteran 110
7.1 Copper facade installation at De Young Museum, San Francisco, 2004.
Courtesy: A. Zahner Company 118
7.2 Copper facade installation at De Young Museum, San Francisco, 2004.
Courtesy: A. Zahner Company 119
8.1 TechShop, Makerbot, Joseph Schell, 2015. Courtesy: TechShop 131
8.2 Fab Lab Berlin, i3, 2016. Courtesy: Fab Lab Berlin 138
8.3 Fab Lab Berlin, Workshop, 2016. Courtesy: Fab Lab Berlin 138
8.4 Fab Lab Berlin, Samples, 2016. Courtesy: Fab Lab Berlin 141
9.1 Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS, Eagle King, 2016, clear
resin, flash drives and memory cards. Courtesy: Morehshin Allahyari 148
9.2 Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS, Lamassu, 2016, clear resin,
flash drives and memory cards. Courtesy: Morehshin Allahyari 149
9.3 Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS, Marten, 2016, clear resin,
flash drives and memory cards. Courtesy: Morehshin Allahyari 150
9.4 Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke with sound design by
Andrea Young, The 3D Additivist Manifesto, 2015, video essay, still
Courtesy: Morehshin Allahyari 152
10.1 Los Carpinteros, Vanite, 1994, wood, marble, oil painting. Courtesy: The
Farber Collection 160
10.2 Gabinete Ordo Amoris, Sofá provisional, 1995. Courtesy: Ernesto
Oroza 163

viii List of Illustrations

ix

11.1 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Objects of Khiam, 2000.

Courtesy: The artists. Photo: Alfredo Rubio, Two Suns in a Sunset at the
Sharjah Art Foundation, 2016 175
11.2 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Objects of Khiam, 2000.
Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Alfredo Rubio, Two Suns in a Sunset at the
Sharjah Art Foundation, 2016 176
12.1 Allyson Mitchell, Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism,
detail, installation, Toronto Alternative Art Fair International, Gladstone
Hotel, Toronto, Ontario, April 2006. Photo: Cat O’Neil 182
12.2 Policemen locating the body of Langley Collyer, Collyer Brothers’ house,
1947, New York Public Library. Courtesy: Getty Images 186
13.1 Shinique Smith, Bale Variant No. 0022, 2012, vintage fabric, clothing,
blankets, ribbon, rope, and wood, 90 × 30 × 30 inches. Courtesy: Shinique
Smith and The Sandy and Jack Guthman Collection, Chicago. Photo: Eric
Wolfe. 200
13.2 Shinique Smith, Soul Elsewhere, 2013, artist’s clothing, ballpoint ink, poly-
fil and rope, 38 1/2 × 18 × 14 inches. Courtesy: Shinique Smith and SAS
Studio, Private Collection. Photo: Eric Wolfe 203
13.3 Shinique Smith, Granny Square, 2013, acrylic, spray paint, vintage crochet
baby blanket on wood panel, 48 × 48 × 2 1/4 inches. Courtesy: Shinique
Smith and SAS Studio. Photo: Jason Mandella 204
14.1 Margarita Cabrera in collaboration with Candelaria Cabrera, Space in
Between – Nopal, 2010, border patrol uniform fabric, copper wire, thread
and terracotta pot. © Margarita Cabrera/VAGA at Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen 209
14.2 Margarita Cabrera, Nopal detail, 2010, border patrol uniform fabric, copper
wire, thread and terracotta pot. © Margarita Cabrera/VAGA at Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen 210
14.3 Margarita Cabrera, Sabila, 2010, border patrol uniform fabric, copper wire,
thread and terracotta pot. © Margarita Cabrera/VAGA at Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen 211
14.4 Margarita Cabrera, Sabila detail, 2010, border patrol uniform fabric,
copper wire, thread and terracotta pot. © Margarita Cabrera/VAGA at
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen 212
15.1 Violeta Morales, Sala de Torturas (Chamber of Torture), 1996. Photo: John
Wiggins. From the private collection of Marjorie Agosín 221
15.2 Blouse, Huipil, San Andreas Larainzar or Magdalenas, Chiapas, Mexico,
Tzotzil Maya, cotton, wool, mid-twentieth century. Opekar/Webster
Collection, T94.0982. Courtesy: Textile Museum of Canada 226
15.3 Woman weaving huipil, 1999, mural, Oventic caracole, Chiapas, Mexico.
Photo: Ellyn Walker, 2015 227

List of Illustrations ix
x

15.4 Christi Belcourt, Walking with Our Sisters, installation at Carleton

University Art Gallery, 2015. Photo: Leah Snyder 231
16.1 Ursula Johnson, Male Dis-enfranchised, L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian),
2014, performance organized by Carleton University Art Gallery as part
of Making Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art.
Photo: Justin Wonnacott 240
16.2 Ursula Johnson, Male Dis-enfranchised, L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian),
2014, performance organized by Carleton University Art Gallery as part
of Making Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art.
Photo: Justin Wonnacott 243
16.3 Ursula Johnson, Museological Grand Hall, 2014, 12 etched Plexiglas
vitrines of varying dimensions, installation detail from Mi’kwite’tmn
(Do you remember) at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, 2014.
Photo: Steve Farmer 244
17.1 Allen Fannin to Francis Merritt, 19 January 1972. Francis Sumner Merritt
papers, 1903–1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Page 1 250
17.2 Allen Fannin to Francis Merritt, 19 January 1972. Francis Sumner Merritt
papers, 1903–1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Page 2 251
17.3 Allen Fannin to Francis Merritt, 19 January 1972. Francis Sumner Merritt
papers, 1903–1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Page 3 252
17.4 Sonya Clark, The Hair Craft Project, 2013, featuring hairstylists Kamala
Bhagat, Dionne James Eggleston, Marsha Johnson, Chaunda King, Anita
Hill Moses, Nasirah Muhammad, Jameika and Jasmine Pollard, Ingrid
Riley, Ife Robinson, Natasha Superville and Jamilah Williams. Collection of
the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Photo: Naoko Wowsugi 255
17.5 Wesley Clark, My Big Black America, 2015, stain, spray paint, latex,
salvaged wood. Courtesy: Wesley Clark. 257
17.6 Joyce J. Scott, Buddha (Fire & Water), 2013, hand-blown Murano
glass processes with beads, wire, and thread. Photo: Mike Koryta.
Courtesy: Goya Contemporary, collection of NMAAHC Smithsonian
Institution 264

x List of Illustrations
xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T
he editors would like to express their appreciation to the contributors
included in The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design for
their hard work and exciting scholarship. Thank you to the artists, galleries
and institutions that granted permission for the reproduction of artworks. We
are grateful to our many colleagues who have long encouraged and inspired
our efforts, particularly Sandra Alfoldy (1969–2019), Maria Elena Buszek, Amy
Gogarty, Jamelie Hassan, Leopold Kowolik, Judith Leemann, Elaine Cheasley
Paterson, Mireille Perron, Kirsty Robertson, Jennifer Salahub, Erik Scollon, Diana
Sherlock, Shannon R. Stratton, Kelly Thompson, Laura Vickerson, and Namita
Gupta Wiggers, and to Pablo Rodriguez and Caitlynn Fairbarns who provided
essential editing and image permission support. Thank you to our many colleagues
and students at the Core Program/Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The National
Gallery of Canada, OCAD University and California College of the Arts.
We are grateful to our original editor Philippa Brewster at I.B. Tauris for her
enthusiasm for the project, offering to publish this volume just days after seeing us
present at Subversive Stitch Revisited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and to our
editors at Bloomsbury for carrying the project to completion. We remain inspired
and thankful to the Subversive Stitch Revisited conference organizers, as well as
Lisa Vinebaum, Ruth Scheuing, Ingrid Bachmann, Janna Hiemstra, Kathleen
Morris and Lynne Heller for their invitations to present at the Textile Society of
America Symposium 2012 and Craft Ontario’s Crafting Sustainability conference.
The editors both wish to acknowledge generous research support from the
Canada Council for the Arts Grants to Critics and Curators program; Lisa Whorle
and the Ontario Arts Council Craft Connections program; and the Center for
Craft Research Fund. We appreciate their commitments to recognize the academic
and artistic labour of all the writers and artists who contributed to this project.
Finally, the contributors each thank the many colleagues, institutions,
conferences and publications that supported their research. Heather Anderson
acknowledges the OAC’s Craft Projects: Research and Development program and
Carleton University Art Gallery. Anthea Black acknowledges the Vermont Studio
Center grants to artists and writers’ program, and Janice Black Stewart and Murray
xii

Stewart (1949–2018). Noni Brynjolson received support from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council and the Manitoba Arts Council. Nicole Burisch
extends her thanks to her family and friends, especially Heather Davis, Mikhel
Proulx and Olya Zarapina, as well as the support of residencies at Artexte and
Est-Nord-Est. Elke Gaugele wishes to thank the Clean Clothes Campaign, Austria
and ITC Ethical Fashion Initiative, Geneva. Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano
is grateful to Ernesto Oroza, as well as Francis Acea, Diango Hernández, René
Francisco Rodríguez and Los Carpinteros. Diana Sherlock thanks Peter Boyd,
David Bynoe, Andrew Calvo, Hayley Erza, Kerry Harmer, Shannon and Marie
Hoover, Byron Hynes, Wolf Jeschonnek, Janet Mader, Rene Martin, Steven Pilz
and Krišjānis Rijnieks. Ellyn Walker would like to acknowledge the work of all
authors, artists and communities her text engages with – for, without their work,
her own work would not be possible. She wishes to recognize the generous
support, collaboration and feminist dialogue offered by Anthea Black and Nicole
Burisch in shaping this text. Ellyn also gives thanks to her family, Dot Tuer, and
the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics whose 2013 residency in
Chiapas, Mexico, enabled her the opportunity to do unique fieldwork related to
this research.
The Editors would also like to acknowledge the groundbreaking work of
Canadian craft scholar and historian Sandra Alfoldy (1969–2019), whose career
and dedication to the field was an inspiration to all of us. Alfoldy’s unpublished
manuscript Craftwashing: The Uses and Abuses of Craft in Popular Culture was
unfinished at the time of her tragic passing, and would have been a significant
contribution to contemporary craft studies and an important complement to the
ideas explored in this publication.
Thank you to Janice Helland for her support in citing Sandra’s research. Please
see: Janice Helland, ‘Sandra Alfoldy (August 1, 1969–February 24, 2019): a
Reflection,’ The Journal of Modern Craft, 12:2 (2019), 141–5.

xii Acknowledgements
xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Heather Anderson is Curator at the Carleton University Art Gallery, where she
integrates an artist-centred approach to research within a university environment.
Her exhibitions include Making Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in
Contemporary Art (2014), Linda Sormin: Fierce Passengers (2018) and Re: Working
Together/Re: Travailler ensemble (2019). Combining her art school training (BFA,
Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, 1998) with an interdisciplinary MA
in women’s studies (with a thesis on feminist performance art from Dalhousie
University and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada, 2003) and
curatorial training (École du Magasin International Curatorial Training Program,
2004–5), along with experience as Assistant Curator in Contemporary Art and
Modern Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada (2006–12), Heather seeks
to engage the social, political and emotional complexities of experiences through
aesthetic encounters across a range of media and approaches.

Laura August, PhD, is a writer and curator based in Guatemala City and Houston,
Texas. Her writing has been published in various international journals, artist
monographs and exhibition catalogues. August is a recipient of the Creative
Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her writing about
Central America, and she served as Critic-in-Residence at the Core Program at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from 2016 to 2018. In 2018, August co-curated the
Paiz Biennial, and her curatorial projects have included work at artist-run spaces,
galleries, museums and universities in the United States and Central America. She
is founding director of Yvonne, a residential project space in Guatemala City that
has hosted artists, writers, and anthropologists whose work is embedded in that
place. August is currently at work on a book-length essay about mud, corn and
historical violence in the Americas.

Alexis Anais Avedisian is a researcher invested in topics such as social media

theory, surveillance capitalism and internet art. After finishing graduate school at
New York University Steinhardt, she began working as communications manager
for the NYC Media Lab, a consortium of technology and digital studies programs
xiv

at universities including NYU, Columbia and the New School. She holds an MA
from NYU Steinhardt.

Anthea Black is a Canadian artist, writer and cultural worker based in Oakland
and Toronto. Her studio work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, the
Netherlands, France and Norway and her writing has been published in Making
Otherwise: Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art, Bordercrossings,
No More Potlucks and FUSE Magazine; and with Nicole Burisch in The Craft
Reader (2010) and Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (2011). She is
co-editor of HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design
Education with Shamina Chherawala, designer and co-publisher of The HIV
Howler: Transmitting Art and Activism with Jessica Whitbread, and curator of
Super String, Pleasure Craft, and No Place: Queer Geographies on Screen. She was
faculty at OCAD University from 2012 to 2017 and is an Assistant Professor of
Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Doris and Clarence Professor of Modern and

Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of
Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017), which won the Association for the Study of
the Arts of the Present Book Prize, the Frank Mather Jewett Award and the Robert
Motherwell Book Award. She co-curated the exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: About to
Happen, and in 2019 was appointed adjunct curator of contemporary art at the
Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil.

Noni Brynjolson, PhD, researches socially engaged art practices in US cities

that respond to uneven urban development through experimental forms of
community building. She is interested in looking at how artists address the politics
of housing and gentrification, as well as the informal practices that emerge within
these projects. Noni is a member of the editorial collective of FIELD: A Journal of
Socially Engaged Art Criticism, and her writing has been published in FIELD as
well as in Hyperallergic, Akimbo, Geist and Craft Journal. She is Assistant Professor
of Art History at the University of Indianapolis.

Nicole Burisch is a Canadian critic and curator. Her research with Anthea Black is
included in The Craft Reader (2010) and Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary
Art (2011). Her writing has appeared in periodicals No More Potlucks, FUSE
Magazine, dpi: Feminist Journal of Art and Digital Culture, Textile: The Journal of
Cloth and Culture, Cahiers métiers d’art-Craft Journal and in numerous exhibition
catalogues. Burisch was a 2014–2016 Core Fellow Critic-in-Residence with the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and is Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art at the
National Gallery of Canada.

xiv LIST OF Contributors

xv

Sonya Clark is a Professor of Art at Amherst College in Massachusetts. From

2006 to 2017, she served as Chair of the Craft and Material Studies Department at
Virginia Commonwealth University and received the university’s highest award,
the Commonwealth Professorship. Clark has exhibited in over 350 museums
and galleries worldwide, and her work is in the permanent collections of the
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Museum of
Women in the Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Art and Virginia Museum of Fine
Art, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pollock-
Krasner Grant, the Grand Juror’s Award at Art Prize for the Hair Craft Project, a
Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a
Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, an American Academy in Rome Affiliated Fellowship,
an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a United States Artist Fellowship and Black
Rock Senegal Residency.

Wesley Clark was born in Washington, DC, and currently resides in Hyattsville,
MD. He received his BFA in painting from Syracuse University and MFA from
the George Washington University where he was awarded the Morris Lewis
Fellowship. Clark’s works can be found in permanent collections such as the
Asheville Art Museum in North Carolina and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He’s
been commissioned by the American Alliance of Museums to create a temporary
public artwork which has led to several public artworks in the Washington, DC,
area. Clark infuses social and political criticisms into his mixed media wood
assemblages, merging the historical with the contemporary, to speak on issues
faced by Blacks in America. As part of Clark’s practice, he regularly mentors young
artists and apprentices, providing the hands-on experience of a professional art
practice and entrepreneurship as an owner of an art installation company.

Peggy Deamer is Professor Emeritus of Architecture at Yale University. She

is a principal in the firm of Deamer Studio and formerly, Deamer + Phillips,
Architects. She received a BArch. from Cooper Union and a PhD from Princeton
University. Articles by Deamer have appeared in Assemblage, Praxis, Log, Perspecta
and Harvard Design Magazine. She is the editor of The Millennium House (2004);
Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present (2014); and The Architect as
Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design (2015).
She is co-editor of Building in the Future: Recasting Architectural Labor (2010)
and Re-Reading Perspecta (2004). She is the founding member of the Architecture
Lobby, a group advocating for the value of architectural design and labour. Her
current research explores the relationship between subjectivity, design and labour
in the current economy.

Elke Gaugele, PhD, is a writer, curator and Professor of Fashion and Styles at the
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Chair of a design studio program at the Institute

LIST OF Contributors xv
xvi

for Education in the Arts. She has held positions at the University of Cologne,
Goldsmiths University and as the Maria-Goeppert Mayer Guest Professor in
Lower Saxony. Her recent work as international researcher, lecturer and author
focuses on the epistemologies of fashion and design, on gender, biopolitics and
aesthetic politics, on postcolonial approaches in fashion and design studies. She is
the co-editor of Craftista! Handarbeit als Aktivismus (2011), The Aesthetic Politics
of Fashion (2014), and Fashion and Postcolonial Critique (2019).

Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer, curator and editor from Tio’tia:ke

(Montréal), in Kanien’kehá:ka territory. Nasrin’s writing has appeared in Canadian
Art, C Magazine, Critical Signals and The Funambulist, among others. Most
recently, Nasrin co-curated a time-based, video art exhibition entitled deep-time
construction at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Other recent
projects include For Many Returns, a series designed and developed as a way to
explore the possibilities of art writing as a kind of performative gesture. Since its
debut at Dazibao in Montréal, it has toured across Canada, the United States and
Europe. Nasrin has been the co-editor of several contemporary arts magazines and
journals, including the online platform Contemptorary.

Anna Khachiyan is a writer living in New York. She writes about architecture
and technology as means of exploring the psychology of neoliberalism. Her work
has appeared in Artwrit, Art in America, Hopes&Fears and Metropolis. Anna has a
master’s degree in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Leopold Kowolik has degrees in History and Art History from the University of
Chicago and the University of Edinburgh. He has worked in public and private
galleries in the United States, the UK and Canada and from 2011 to 2019, he was the
Editor in Chief of Studio Magazine. Kowolik has written for The Journal of Modern
Craft, Craft Research, The Journal of William Morris Studies and Ornamentum. He
teaches histories and theories of art, design and craft at Sheridan College, Ontario,
and is currently working on a PhD in the program of Social and Political Thought
at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Bibiana Obler is Associate Professor of Art History at George Washington

University. Her book, Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and
Taeuber (2014), investigates the role of artist couples in the emergence of abstract
art. Her second monograph, tentatively entitled Anti-Craft, examines relations
between art and craft in the late twentieth century. Obler recently made her first
foray into curating; with Phyllis Rosenzweig, she co-curated Fast Fashion / Slow
Art and co-edited the accompanying catalogue (2019). Organized for the Bowdoin
College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, the exhibition opened first at the
Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, Washington, DC.

xvi LIST OF Contributors

xvi

Kirsty Robertson is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Museum

Studies at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on activism, visual
culture and changing economies. She has published widely on these topics,
including the recent book Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Museums, Culture
(2019). Since 2008, she has worked on textiles, the textile industry and textile-
based arts, writing about textiles and technology, craftivism and petrotextiles.
Robertson has an ongoing interest in critical museum studies and is starting a
project focused on small-scale collections that work against traditional museum
formats. Her co-edited volumes Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture, and Activism
in Canada and Negotiations in a Vacant Lot were released in 2011 and 2014, and
her tri-authored volume Putting IP in Its Place: Rights Discourse, Creativity and the
Everyday was published in 2013.

Mary Savig is the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at the Smithsonian American
Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery. She was previously Curator of Manuscripts
at the Archives of American Art, where she curated What Is Feminist Art? as
part of the Smithsonian American Women History Initiative and Ephemeral
and Eternal: The Archive of Lenore Tawney as part of the Mirror of the Universe
exhibitions series at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She is author of Pen
to Paper: Artist’s Handwritten Letters from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American
Art (2016), Handmade Holiday Cards from 20th Century Artists (2011), and Artful
Cats: Discoveries from the Archives of American Art (2019). She holds an MA in art
history from the George Washington University and a PhD in American Studies
from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Dr Joyce J. Scott, MacArthur Fellow, is best known for her figurative sculpture
and jewellery using bead weaving techniques, as well as blown glass and found
objects. She earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, her MFA
from the Instituto Allende in Mexico, and was conferred honorary doctorates
from MICA and California College of the Arts. As an African American, feminist
artist, Scott unapologetically confronts diverse and difficult themes as her subjects,
which include race, misogyny, sexuality, stereotypes, gender inequality, economic
disparity, history, politics, rape and discrimination. Scott’s work is included
in many important private and public museum collections worldwide, and she
has been the recipient of countless commissions, grants, awards, and prestigious
honours from institutions including the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, American Craft
Council, National Living Treasure Award, Lifetime Achievement Award from the
Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Mary Sawyers Imboden Baker Award, New York
University Fellowship and the Smithsonian Visionary Artist Award.

LIST OF Contributors xvii

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Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano is Project Director at the Institute for Studies
on Latin American Art (ISLAA). She is an art historian specializing in modern
and contemporary art from Latin America and the Caribbean, and her current
research focuses on discourses of intellectual and manual labour in Cuban art.
Blanca received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Her most recent work as an independent curator includes the 2017 exhibition
Bitter Bites: Tracing the Fruit Market in the Global South at Cuchifritos Gallery in
New York.

Diana Sherlock is a Canadian independent curator, writer and educator. Current

curatorial projects include Mary Shannon Will: People, Places and Things (Nickle
Galleries, Calgary), co-authored curatorial assessments for the City of Calgary and
City of Edmonton public art collections, and the development of an art strategy
for the Calgary Cancer Center with CMCK Public Art. Recent projects include:
New Maps of Paradise (2016) with Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton (Nickle
Galleries, Calgary); and In the making (2014–15) (Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary
and Kenderdine College Art Galleries, Saskatoon). Sherlock has published over
80 texts in gallery catalogues and contemporary art journals internationally. She
is the volume editor for Rita McKeough: Works, a monograph on this Canadian
artist’s performances and installations. Sherlock is currently developing a mid-
career monograph about the work of Vancouver-born, Berlin-based artist Larissa
Fassler. Sherlock teaches at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary.

Shannon R. Stratton works in contemporary art and craft – curating, writing,

teaching and building frameworks and platforms for cultural production and
presentation. She co-founded and was the executive director of Threewalls, an
artist-focused, Chicago-based non-profit from 2003 to 2015. With Threewalls
she launched PHONEBOOK with Green Lantern Press, and the Hand-in-
Glove Conference for grass-roots arts organizing, which lead to the founding of
Commonfield. Her other projects include: Fearful Symmetries, the first retrospective
of the work of Faith Wilding and Gestures of Resistance: Craft, Performance, and
the Politics of Slowness with Judith Leemann (Museum of Contemporary Craft,
Portland, Oregon, 2010). From 2015 to 2019 she was the Chief Curator at the
Museum of Arts and Design, New York. She is currently Executive Director of
Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, Michigan.

Ellyn Walker is a visual culture scholar and contemporary arts curator based in
Toronto. Her work explores the politics of cultural production, representation
and inclusion in the arts, and within visual culture more broadly. Collectively,
her work is informed by Black feminist thought, Indigenous epistemologies, anti-
colonial practices, critical settler studies and anti-racist methodologies; and draws

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upon intersectional approaches and interdisciplinary frameworks. Ellyn’s writing

has been widely published, in the Journal of Curatorial Studies; Public Journal: Art,
Culture, Ideas; Prefix Photo Magazine; and Inuit Art Quarterly. She contributed
original book chapters to the recent anthologies Desire Change: Contemporary
Feminist Art in Canada (2017) and Sonny Assu: A Selective History (2018). Ellyn is
currently a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University.

Namita Gupta Wiggers is a writer, curator and educator based in Portland, OR.
Wiggers serves as the Director of the MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson
College, NC, the first and only low-residency graduate program focused on craft
histories and theory. She is the Director and Co-Founder of Critical Craft Forum,
an online platform for dialogue and exchange. From 2004 to 2012, Wiggers
served as Curator, and later as Director and Chief Curator (2012–14) at the
Museum of Contemporary Craft, incorporated into the Center for Art & Culture,
Pacific Northwest College of Art since 2016. She serves on the board of trustees
of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and on the editorial boards of Garland
magazine and Norwegian Crafts. Wiggers served as the Exhibition Reviews Editor
for The Journal of Modern Craft (2014–18). She is the editor of the forthcoming
Companion on Contemporary Craft and collaborates with Benjamin Lignel on an
ongoing research project on gender and jewellery.

LIST OF Contributors xix

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xx
1

INTRODUCTION
Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch

The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design takes on contemporary
craft as a sphere of political action and debate. It responds to the last two decades of
craft activism, which leveraged the aesthetics and values of handmaking to convey
messages of political agency and optimism, collective organizing and anti-capitalist
and antiglobalization critique. We begin with the premise that the increased
circulation of craft, art and design within current economic, environmental and
social contexts demands new modes of craft criticism and scholarship. Our aim is
to use this book to have deeper conversations on the stakes for politicized making
and thinking about craft, as it is intertwined with art, design and the flows of
production-consumption in a transnational and global context.
To this end, we have assembled a group of authors and artists who are
critically rethinking the role of the handmade across thirty years of artistic
production, from the early 1990s to the present. This span of time is concurrent
with the rise of neoliberal capitalism and a fundamental shift in the way we
consume, communicate, live and work. As the demands on our labour, time and
bodies have become increasingly shaped by the ‘absoluteness of availability’1
under late capitalism, so too has the role of craft in day-to-day life transformed.
Craft in a global context is now mobile, flexible, available on-demand, highly
desirable and ready-to-use. Craft is a meaningful shorthand, a sign, a symbol, a
representational system that flows across multiple sites of knowledge and cultural
production. Craft is found not only in materials and objects, nor simply in the
processes or actions of making, but also in the qualities and experiences of the
handmade as it conveys and challenges emotive, cultural, political or economic
values. This publication also acknowledges and builds upon craft theory as a
field of inquiry that is intimately tied to materiality, and to the making and
use of objects. This makes craft particularly well-suited to addressing topics of
labour and economics and leads us to read craft not only through aesthetic or
cultural frameworks, but to insist that it is embedded within broader social and
economic structures.
2

This brief introduction presents the texts in this volume, suggesting links
between them and providing prompts for how they might be read together.
Some of the authors in this book examine the links between material practices,
progressive politics and social change; and they advocate for the ongoing potential
for craft to address and creatively respond to pressing social and political issues.
Others take a more critical stance to ask how craft might be reflective of, or even
complicit in, aspects of late capitalism such as overconsumption, precarious labour,
austerity measures and hyper-individualism. By bringing these texts together, our
intention is to continue troubling the idea that craft is definitively aligned with
any particular ideology or political philosophy. Rather, we build upon recent
scholarship that advocates for craft as the basis for critical inquiry,2 entwined
‘in the fray’ of amateur and professional ways of making,3 ‘the ultimate service
discipline, [with] its utopian and communal values both politically alluring and
easily appropriated’,4 ‘a methodology’5 for reading and understanding other fields
of practice or ‘vulnerable to manipulation and capable of being manipulative’.6 Craft
theory and practice are not inherently progressive, but through closer readings, we
can examine objects as intricate knots of political meaning and subjectivity that are
shaped by many (often opposing, or contradictory) forces. Our contributors thus
draw from design, art, museum studies, fashion, architecture and critical race and
post/decolonial theories, to build on craft discourse and the politics of making.
This book is indebted to the scholarship of Elissa Auther, Julia Bryan-Wilson,
Maria Elena Buszek, Namita Gupta Wiggers, Judith Leemann, Kirsty Robertson
and Shannon R. Stratton, and many others whose ongoing work on craftivism
and craft politics has shaped our own thinking about these fields as responsive,
intersectional, dense and always ripe for criticism.
Our contribution, ‘From craftivism to craftwashing’ (Chapter 1), directly
follows this introduction in presenting the themes that guide The New Politics of
the Handmade. In it, we update our text ‘Craft Hard Die Free: Radical Curatorial
Strategies for Craftivism’7 to look closer at the emergence of craftivism and indie
craft through the early 2000s and trace how these ‘movements’ became aligned
with radical politics and revolution. Focusing on the recent marketing and
consumption of craft in contemporary art, craft fairs, museums and advertising,
we critically examine how craft now functions as a sign of good affect and moral
purity. We use the term craftwashing to describe the use of craft as a marketing
ploy that performs political and social engagement while obscuring ethical,
environmental and labour issues in the chain of production.
The reach of craftwashing is further addressed by Elke Gaugele in ‘Ethical
fashion, craft and the new spirit of global capitalism’ (Chapter 2), which traces
the ‘ethical turn’ in fashion through UN global governance strategies, non-
governmental organizations and sustainable fashion initiatives. Gaugele applies
work by sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello on the ‘spirit’ of capitalism,
and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on human rights cultures to

2 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

3

critique marketing claims and charitable initiatives - from Vivienne Westwood’s

Ethical Fashion Africa Collection, to those of ‘fast-fashion’ companies like H&M.
Gaugele shows how these campaigns link fashion and aid to perpetuate a form of
‘cultural colonialism’, where luxury fashion labels capitalize on the aesthetic and
moral associations of the ‘authentically’ handmade.
Just as the global fashion industry’s initiatives use craft as a development tool,
artists, museums, curators and educational departments have recognized the
potential of craft (and especially crafting) for public programming initiatives,
interactive exhibitions, performances and urban redevelopment. Often, these kinds
of programs emphasize craft’s accessibility, teachability and usefulness as a tool or
prop for collaborative actions or projects.8 The demand for craft-as-social-practice
to ‘gently’ drive social justice initiatives relates to broader moves within museums
that include ‘social media, funding imperatives, and the pressure to attract younger
and more diverse audiences’.9 Amid this shift to social and experiential forms of
culture-making, the value of craft has moved beyond objects and towards the
actions of makers and the exchange of economic and social capital.10
In the first of six artist profiles, ‘Selven O’Keef Jarmon: Beading across geographies’
(Chapter 3), Nicole Burisch writes about artist Selven O’Keef Jarmon and his
collaboration with South African beaders to create a large-scale public artwork in
Houston, Texas. Linking this project to other relational and social craft projects,
Burisch frames beading as a cross-cultural and temporal practice to examine how
so-called traditional craft practices and materials circulate within a globalized
contemporary (art) economy. Her writing highlights our aim for all the texts
in The New Politics of the Handmade to chart the circulation of materials and
techniques across broad geopolitical spaces and histories, while also urging for
careful attention to local contexts.
Noni Brynjolson’s ‘The making of many hands: Artisanal production and
neighborhood redevelopment in contemporary socially engaged art’ (Chapter 4),
considers the tensions between community engagement and economic
redevelopment in artist-initiated projects Soul Manufacturing Corporation by
Theaster Gates, and Project Row Houses and Trans.lation by Rick Lowe. She
focuses on large-scale community works as spaces of self-determination for
local residents, particularly in Black, Latinx and immigrant neighbourhoods.
Brynjolson also negotiates the economic and social impacts of neighbourhood
gentrification and tourism, which are accelerated as social capital accrues around
artist-community projects, and engages larger conversations on the relationships
between art and activism.
Shannon R. Stratton offers an experiential report on lifestyle crafting in North
America in ‘That looks like work: The total aesthetics of handcraft’ (Chapter 5).
She traverses between the takeout-food counter in Chicago, Half Cut Tea’s
romantic YouTube artist profiles and the highly aestheticized rural retreat of artist
J. Morgan Puett’s Mildred’s Lane project. Stratton identifies a new circulatory

INTRODUCTION 3
4

regime of curated lifestyle imagery that draws from and overlaps with craft and
contemporary art practices, and examines how ‘narrated handcraftedness’ signals
and exaggerates the political power of the consumer. The products and projects
Stratton describes channel qualities of slowness, authenticity, sensibility, passion
and ultimately, a desire for unalienated labour made visible through skill or its
representations.
In Chapter 6, ‘Craft as property as liberalism as problem’, Leopold Kowolik
evokes craft as a bourgeois character, somewhat unaware of its own pretensions
as it perpetuates a philosophical lineage and economic position that is not critical
of neoliberal capitalism nor counter to it, but rendered from the same beginnings.
Kowolik charges that craft theorists and makers often rely on inherited misreadings
of John Locke’s ideas of liberalism and property without questioning their political
roots. Tracing this history, he cautions against casual understandings of personal
property and the individual ‘right to create’, just as his text clears the space for new
formations and critical positions for craft in relation to capital.
In the second artist profile, ‘Zahner Metals: architectural fabrication and craft
labour’ (Chapter 7), Peggy Deamer considers how new technologies influence
architectural fabrication, by focusing on the skilled workers who manufactured
copper cladding for architects Herzog and de Meuron’s DeYoung Museum
in San Francisco. She proposes that acknowledging craft, digital skill and the
collaboration between architect-fabricator can refocus the field towards a more
ethical understanding of labour that also reconciles historic craft/design divides.
Deamer’s text adds to global dialogues on exploitative labour within art and
architecture, such as those of The Architecture Lobby’s stance for a more socially
responsible field,11 or GULF Labor’s advocacy for the migrant workers building
the Guggenheim’s international franchises.12
In ‘Capitalizing on community: The makerspace phenomenon’ (Chapter 8),
Diana Sherlock considers the rise of makerspaces, through case studies including
small grassroots collectives and large corporate-driven models in Calgary, San
Francisco and Berlin. She describes how these spaces leverage social, intellectual
and financial capital, thus reshaping public and private economic models for
accessing resources for making. Sherlock is critical of the maker movement’s
‘optimistic rhetoric’ of individual creativity and shared space, and of the true cost-
benefit to creative communities. She argues that such social-entrepreneurial and
micro-economic models can accelerate capitalism’s reach and negative effects. She
shows how the call to ‘Make. Just make.’13 cannot be divorced from the realities of
expanding carbon footprints, urban gentrification, overproduction and divestment
of public funding for public services.
Alexis Anais Avedisian and Anna Khachiyan’s ‘Morehshin Allahyari: On
Material Speculation’ (Chapter 9), offers a counterpoint to the glut of objects
produced in makerspaces in their consideration of Material Speculation: ISIS
(2015–2016) by Iranian-American artist Morehshin Allahyari. In the third artist

4 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

5

profile, they describe Allahyari’s 3D-printed versions of antiquities destroyed by

ISIS in Iraq. They call her work an ‘archival methodology’ that transforms and
preserves material knowledge and lost artefacts through open-source and cross-
disciplinary research. In Allahyari’s work, both plastic (the ultimate material of the
Anthropocene) and petrochemicals ‘retain the aura of a biomorphic prehistory’,
and are just as deeply connected to the earth as materials like metal, clay and fibre.
She poses digital craft technologies as tools of resistance and repair that can shift
understandings of value and cultural heritage in a time of war, destruction and the
aggressive privatization of intellectual property.
Deamer, Sherlock, Avedisian and Khachiyan trace the development of craft-
based knowledge through digital production within architecture, makerspaces and
contemporary art. In this focus, knowledge is produced and redefined not only by
the hand of an individual craftsperson, but often by large cross-disciplinary teams
and collaborators guided by new materials and tools. However, a focus on materials
and their production reminds us that it is no longer possible to ‘continue bad habits
of thinking that allow humans to conceive of objects … as distinct from the processes
of their emergence and decay’.14 In light of the urgent need to address the causes and
consequences of climate change and environmental catastrophe, it is time to ask how
the craft and design fields account for their participation in overwhelming material
excess and destructive extractivism. Though outside the scope of this volume, we are
interested in how rereading craft politics within material culture could connect to
emergent theories of the Anthropocene. What are the stakes for contemporary craft
theory in a world brimming with stuff, when we consider making across geological
time, and within the irreversible impact of our human epoch on this earth? The next
group of essays builds on these themes of (over)consumption and material scarcity,
ingenuity and reuse, connecting craft and materiality to survival.
In Chapter 10, ‘From molten plastic to polished mahogany: Bricolage and
scarcity in 1990s Cuban art’, Blanca Serrano Ortiz De Solórzano traces shifts in
Cuban art during the ‘Special Period’: a time of austerity measures that followed
the dissolution of the Soviet Union. She examines how extreme material scarcity
shaped everyday uses and adaptations of objects and domestic spaces, and in turn,
how this ‘provisional’ aesthetic influenced artists and designers. Her reading of
projects by collectives Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica, Los Carpinteros and
Gabinete Ordo Amoris considers their incorporation of bricolage, DIY and craft
methods as a direct response to the economic and political conditions of the
revolutionary project. Rachel Weiss has described the work of Los Carpinteros
as a ‘re-estimation of artisanal value’,15 and Serrano further articulates how the
creative reuse of objects was both encouraged as a patriotic return to traditional
Cuban ways of life, and an irreverent approach to the intended uses for everyday
materials, their material properties and histories.
Nasrin Himada continues to pare back the runaway romanticism of the
handmade in ‘Things needed made’ (Chapter 11), to focus instead on what is truly

INTRODUCTION 5
6

essential for life: that which enables survival. Himada engages in a close reading
of the documentary film Khiam (2000–2007), which shows the testimonies of six
former prisoners as they describe the objects they made inside Lebanon’s infamous
Israeli-run torture prison. This writing bears witness to the images and objects
that are produced with the most ingenious spark of necessity – a sewing needle
made from an orange peel, a pencil made from a staple – the practical and creative
impulse which gives life. Himada’s text addresses how the gross injustices of the
carceral settler state are amplified by technologies as large as prisons and can be
resisted by very small gestures of making.
In ‘Secret stash: Textiles, hoarding, collecting, accumulation and craft’
(Chapter 12), Kirsty Robertson writes on extreme textile hoarding as a symptom
of late capitalist excess. Robertson counters the recent pathologization of hoarding
as a mental illness to suggest instead that it is a coping response to the conditions
of overconsumption. Robertson draws together the recycled textile work of
queer-feminist artist Allyson Mitchell, the transfer and acquisition of an artist’s
disorganized estate, the early hoard of the famous Collyer Brothers and the
discussion boards of online craft communities. She considers the typical consumer
cycles of ‘purchase, discard, replace’ to illustrate how the actions and collections
of hoarders, crafters and artists both deviate from and intervene into capitalism,
sometimes usefully and sometimes destructively.
The fourth artist profile resonates with Robertson’s efforts to understand the
sheer volume of textile objects and clothing that are produced and distributed
around the globe. In this text, Julia Bryan-Wilson describes Shinique Smith’s Bale
Variant series and Soul Elsewhere in ‘Shinique Smith: Lines that bind’ (Chapter
13). These works powerfully connect a range of affective meanings between Black
bodily experience, the global circulation of textiles, thrift, survival, intimacy and
waste. Smith’s (un)monumental accumulations link African American traditions
of textile making and contemporary abstraction with conditions of ‘contingency’16
and making-do. This formal resonance with artists such as Mitchell and her use
of discarded textiles, similarly addresses the ‘cultural and economic meanings of
cloth as it circulates between markets and bodies’.
While some of the texts above draw postcolonial discourses into relation with
contemporary craft, the next section considers practices that directly respond to
and resist ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. Capitalism functions through a
series of ‘technologies of colonialism’17 that structure and consolidate white access
to resources, land, state power and cultural expression. The ‘invention’18 and ‘use’
of craft (as both a word and a category of classification) have been concurrent
with colonial expansion, and integral to building empires, industries and national
identities.19 Notions of authenticity in craft practice are not only central to the
construction of craft as virtuous and politically conscious; craft’s perceived
authenticity is also underscored by the complex legacies of cultural imperialism,
appropriation and fetishization of Indigenous cultural work as rare, ‘untainted by

6 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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civilization’, or ‘powerfully expressive representations of a pure primitive soul’.20

Craft’s separation from high art, and its consequent marginality, is foundational
to the Euro-Western art canon, devaluing works by women, people of colour and
Indigenous communities. This categorical division has led to the exclusion of these
makers from museums and galleries, or led to their misrepresentation within
them.21 However, a rising wave of cultural workers have called for repatriation
of objects, with demands for accountability and new curatorial models. As we
envision how craft can address urgent issues of our time, it is clear that Indigenous
perspectives and voices must also be recentred within contemporary craft politics.22
Writing about craft from a decolonial framework demands acknowledgement and
action to address these exclusions. For many practitioners and authors within,
this work begins by re-articulating craft as a world-making and geographically-
specific aesthetic practice that connects to the land. As Ellyn Walker describes in
her chapter, ‘The sovereign stitch: Re-reading embroidery as a critical feminist
decolonial text’ (Chapter 15), ‘renewable land-based materials, ancestral imagery
and autonomous economic models represent practices of Indigenous sovereignty’
that intervene into state, economic and museological power structures. We echo
Heather Davis’s proposition for decolonial work within feminist art practices,
‘which cannot alone adequately address everything that needs to change … but
they can provide means of imaging otherwise outside of colonial frameworks’.23 We
extend this to thinking about craft: while craft alone cannot topple such structures,
it can offer ways of knowing, imagining and critiquing that counter ongoing
colonial realities and contribute to cultural shifts.
Where Brynjolson provides a critical read on the stakes involved in pairing
craft and social practice, the fifth artist profile on ‘Margarita Cabrera: Landscapes
of nepantla’ (Chapter 14), insists on crafting together as a way to ‘challenge
systems of oppression, of mass production, of isolation, and of exclusion’. Author
Laura August contrasts the free circulation of tourists and consumer goods across
colonial borders against the US repression and incarceration of immigrants. She
reads Cabrera’s projects as shared enactments of nepantla, or in between-ness,
for border communities. Cabrera’s collaboratively sewn sculptures of cacti, made
from recycled border guard uniforms speak to the uneasy flows of people, non-
human organisms and objects across colonial landscapes. They remind us of the
life-forms and cultural traditions that lived and moved freely before the violent
imposition and maintenance of artificial borders.
In Chapter 15 Ellyn Walker asserts embroidery as an act of decolonial resistance
and everyday sovereignty that echoes across three distinct geographies in the
Americas. She considers Chilean arpilleras produced during the Pinochet
dictatorship, huipiles from Chiapas, and Walking with Our Sisters by Métis artist
Christi Belcourt to address moves from mourning to critical action and sacred
space. Recognizing the limits of Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch, Walker
offers ways to read embroidery ‘beyond the scope of settler colonialism’ and

INTRODUCTION 7
8

whiteness. She works towards new readings of embroidery at the intersections of

feminized labour, cultural tradition and Indigeneity. Walker grounds her work in
the proposal that decolonization begins with the land, and that geographically and
culturally specific practices remain vital forms of resistance.
In the final profile, ‘Ursula Johnson: Weaving histories and Netukulimk in
L’nuwelti’k (‘We Are Indian’) and other works’ (Chapter 16), Heather Anderson
discusses artist Ursula Johnson’s contemporary reworkings of Mi’kmaq basketry.
Johnson’s performances critique and mitigate the loss of Indigenous knowledge
and ways of making, centring the bodies of living people, while drawing attention
to the archaic structures and inherent violence of Canadian law in relation to
Indigenous communities. Anderson articulates that the value of Johnson’s work
is not limited to confronting the colonial present, nor in critiquing museological
classifications of Indigenous art as ‘artefact’, but also in striving for Netukulimik, or
self-sustainability, the Mi’kmaq worldview encompassing one’s relationship to the
land and surroundings.
As Black, Indigenous and artists of colour have challenged museums and
galleries to respond to calls for representation and decolonization, the politics of
inclusion have in many ways ‘failed to disturb ongoing colonial power relations’.24
Calls to re-envision exhibitions and collections, increase curatorial transparency,
and for equitable hiring practices across arts organizations and academia must
go hand-in-hand with unsettling the historical divisions between craft, art and
design. This book is driven by a desire to reshape contemporary craft discourse –
there is still much work to be done in studios, classrooms, and scholarship alike.
The book concludes with ‘ “The Black craftsman situation”: A critical
conversation about race and craft’ (Chapter 17), hosted by Namita Gupta Wiggers,
Bibiana Obler and Mary Savig for the Critical Craft Forum. This conversation
begins with the 1972 correspondence between weaver Allen Fannin and Director
Francis Sumner Merrit of the Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and continues
to include contemporary makers Sonya Clark, Wesley Clark and Joyce J. Scott,
who unanimously trouble and reject the boundaries between craft, generational
knowledge, daily life and artmaking. This crucial dialogue on race and craft is
‘a contribution to shifting the course’; debating questions, terms and exclusions
of craft education and theory, with a renewed call to see race at the centre of the
American craft story, rather than on its margins.
With The New Politics of the Handmade, it is our hope that readers gain
expanded understandings of craft and contemporary craft theory as political,
economic, environmental and social processes. It represents a call to practitioners
and theorists to continue building more self-reflexive and critical readings of craft’s
political dimensions, and aims to bring attention to the role of the handmade as
it circulates globally across varied sites. The texts within examine craft in familiar
spaces alongside those less often considered, including protests, prisons, museums,
advertisements, factories, takeout counters, craft fairs and broadly within popular

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culture. As the authors in this book contend with the state of craft politics in the
twenty-first century, they continue to shift ideas of craft itself. Within these pages,
craft hovers between sensory experience and fixed object; it conveys the mutability
of form alongside the fluidity of language; and finally becomes evidence of politics
in-the-making. Craft, in all of its diverse forms, remains a mode of production that
is intimately tied to adaptation of identity, culture and survival to meet personal
and collective needs. This makes the new politics of the handmade not a singular
way of thinking about craft, but an essential series of questions and methods
through which we can continue to witness and address the urgent political issues
of our time.

Notes
1 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2014),
14. See also Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2017) and Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).
2 Elizabeth Agro and Namita Gupta Wiggers, Critical Craft Forum, http://www.
criticalcraftforum.com/about/ (accessed 30 June 2018). Clare M. Wilkinson-
Weber and Alicia Ory DeNicola, eds., Critical Craft: Technology, Globalization, and
Capitalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). Nicholas R. Bell, ‘Acknowledgments’, Nation
Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture (Washington: Renwick Gallery
of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with Bloomsbury Press,
2015), 7.
3 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017), 4–8.
4 Jenni Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2016), 2.
5 Judith Leemann and Shannon Stratton, ‘Circling Back into That Thing We Cast
Forward: A Closing Read on Gestures of Resistance’, in Collaboration through Craft, ed.
Amanda Ravetz, Alice Kettle and Helen Felcey (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 219.
6 Amanda Ravetz, Alice Kettle and Helen Felcey, ‘Collaboration through Craft: An
Introduction’, Collaboration through Craft, ed. Amanda Ravetz, Alice Kettle and Helen
Felcey (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 3.
7 Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, ‘Craft Hard Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies
for Craftivism in Unruly Contexts’, in Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, ed.
Maria Elena Buszek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 204–21.
8 Nicole Burisch, ‘From Objects to Actions and Back Again: The Politics of
Dematerialized Craft and Performance Documentation, TEXTILE, vol. 14, no. 1
(2016): 54–73.
9 Kirsty Robertson and Lisa Vinebaum, ‘Crafting Community’, TEXTILE, vol. 14, no.
1 (2016): 5. See also Claire Bishop, Radical Museology, or What’s Contemporary in
Museums of Contemporary Art? (London: Koenig Books, 2014).

INTRODUCTION 9
10

10 Kevin Murray, ‘New Models for Craft Sustainability: Engaging with the “Experience”
Economy’, Garland, 3 December 2018, https://garlandmag.com/article/experience/
(accessed 15 May 2019).
11 The Architecture Lobby, of which Deamer is a member, states that: ‘As long as
architecture tolerates abusive practices in the office and the construction site, it
cannot insist on its role in and for the public good’, http://architecture-lobby.org/
about/ (accessed 11 June 2018).
12 Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, https://gulflabor.org/ (accessed 14 June 2018,).
13 Mark Hatch, The Maker Movement Manifesto (New York: McGraw-Hill Education,
2014), 11.
14 Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, ‘Art and Death’, in Art in the
Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and
Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities
Press, 2015), 5.
15 Rachel Weiss, ‘An Argument about Craft in Los Carpinteros’, Journal of Modern Craft,
vol. I, no. 2 (July 2008): 258.
16 Laura Hoptman, ‘Unmonumental: Going to Pieces in the 21st Century’, in
Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, ed. Richard Flood, Massimiliano
Gioni and Laura J. Hoptman (London: Phaidon in association with New Museum,
2007), 138.
17 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’,
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no.1 (2012): 4.
18 Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), xvi–xvii.
Adamson describes how craft was ascribed ‘positive qualities of creativity, rootedness,
and authenticity’, but how these very attributes were complicit in the colonial project
of casting Indigenous cultures as dead, dying or in need of rescuing or reform. See
also Ellen Easton McLeod, ‘Embracing the “Other” ’, In Good Hands: The Women of
the Canadian Handicrafts Guild (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999),
203–33.
19 Kristen A. Williams, ‘ “Old Time Mem’ry”: Contemporary Urban Craftivism and the
Politics of Doing-It-Yourself in Postindustrial America’, Utopian Studies, vol. 22, no.
2, 2011, 303–20.
20 Charles Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 19.
21 Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
22 H. de Coninck, A. Revi, M. Babiker, P. Bertoldi, M. Buckeridge, A. Cartwright,
W. Dong, J. Ford, S. Fuss, J.-C. Hourcade, D. Ley, R. Mechler, P. Newman,
A. Revokatova, S. Schultz, L. Steg, and T. Sugiyama, 2018: Strengthening and
Implementing the Global Response. In: Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special
Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and
related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the
global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to
eradicate poverty [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea,
P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R.
Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and
T. Waterfield (eds.)], (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), 360.

10 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

11

23 Heather Davis, ed., ‘Proposition 2: On Colonial Patriarchy and Matriarchal

Decolonization’, in Desire/Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada
(Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press and Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art,
2017), 134.
24 Kathleen Ash-Milby and Ruth B. Phillips, ‘Inclusivity or Sovereignty? Native
American Arts in the Gallery and the Museum since 1992’, Art Journal, vol. 76, no. 2
(Summer 2017): 12.

INTRODUCTION 11
12

12
13

1 FROM CRAFTIVISM TO
CRAFTWASHING
Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch

Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past
crises – War and Shopping – simply will not work.
ARUNDHATI ROY, CAPITALISM: A GHOST STORY1

A craft movement may have the trappings of an uprising, but it will leave
political and economic systems intact.
KATHLEEN MORRIS, ‘YOU ARE NOT A LEMMING’2

This essay engages with questions at the heart of our research together and our
work as editors of The New Politics of the Handmade: What is the relationship
between artwork, direct political action and change that takes place over longer
durations? What role does craft play in political action – whether as object,
material, practice or sign? Our writing aims to understand the ways that craft
as political discourse takes form, refuses form and repeats or re-enacts its own
histories. We take the position that craft is not a progressive political movement;
like other forms of cultural production, craft is embedded within broader histories
and systems. Bearing this in mind, this text offers a counter to more optimistic
views of craft’s political potential and aims to sharpen the tools and vocabularies
that we use to understand contemporary craft politics.
Craft is frequently described as both a fix and foil for the ills of capitalism and
alienating conditions of industrialization. Despite a growing body of scholarship
on craft’s fluid relationship to the economy and industry, recent dialogues of the
handmade continue to romanticize craft – and often textiles in particular – as
simple, fulfilling, authentic, politically significant and even revolutionary work.
Through this lens, we consider the broader implications of how craft functions
within capitalist markets – however ethical they may seem. Much of craft activism
14

in recent years has centred on consumption-based approaches or the presentation

of craft in the public space, and this text turns a critical eye on these approaches.
Through these readings, we are interested in tracing how craft discourses in popular
culture, galleries and museums, and academia contribute to the framing of craft
as a progressive movement within the current economic and political system. We
contend that there remains a need for more rigorous analysis of the forces that
shape the creation, reception and circulation of craft as a form of politics in the
making.
We begin by looking closely at the framing of craftivism and contemporary
craft during the 2000s. Craftivism emerged in the late nineties as part of anti/
alter-globalization and anti-war activism and gained recognition as a political
movement through the early twenty-first century. Indie craft highlighted local
craft economies and began to establish new networks that ‘rebranded’ the
handmade as an ethical consumption practice, and a series of museum exhibitions
celebrated the re-emergence of diverse forms of craft into contemporary art. These
developments were in turn followed by a rapid uptake of handmade aesthetics into
marketing and consumer cultures. To describe this phenomenon, we use the term
‘craftwashing’3 in relation to marketing that uses craft to perform political and
social engagement while obscuring ethical, environmental and labour issues in the
chain of production. We outline the shift from craftivism to ‘craftwashing’ in the
first section of this essay and look closely at examples where craft is a shorthand,
a supplement, an accessory and sometimes a tool to signify and instigate political
action. We consider how craft has been evoked in publications, exhibitions, charity
and marketing campaigns of the last two decades, and we call into question the
myth of craft as an inherently progressive and democratic political form. Craft’s
many uses and meanings shift across these contexts, particularly when social and
financial capital is exchanged. Where the ‘craft’ of craftivism depends on well-worn
associations to confront political and economic issues, the ‘craft’ in craftwashing
capitalizes on them.
Craftwashing also gains power from craft’s historical position ‘on the margins’
of modern art, whether such exclusions have been constructed on the basis of
gender, race, ethnicity, class or material. Craftwashing derives further power from
whiteness and white liberal norms of property, choice and charity, when the myth
of craft’s marginality is coupled with cultural appropriation and amnesia about
the origins of specific techniques. Later in the text, we expand our case studies
to further critique the ways that craftwashing is used in marketing campaigns to
perform local, national and global citizenship. As we chart this shift from craftivism
to craftwashing from the early 2000s to the present, we are particularly interested
in two ideas: that craft is unthreatening and fundamentally good; and that social or
political causes often drive consumption of objects that are handcrafted, or made
to look and feel handcrafted.

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15

From craftivism …
It has been over a decade since the word ‘craftivism’ emerged to describe the
blending of craft and activism. The term has since been applied to projects and
actions as diverse as contemporary art works, public knit-ins, embroidered protest
banners, yarnbombing, ethical fashion and indie craft sales, small-scale food
production, traveling public workshops and pussy hats. Publications such as Betsy
Greer’s Craftivism: The Art and Craft of Activism and Sarah Corbett’s A Little Book
of Craftivism have focused on documenting or celebrating craftivism, stressing the
political power of these forms of making. Greer, who first popularized the term
craftivism with her website of the same name, writes that:

Craftivism was, for me, a way to actively … take steps toward being an agent of
change. Small change? Of course. But done continually and repetitively, small
changes aggregate and spread … I talked to people about ways they can use
their individual interests to help facilitate change … to express your feelings
outward in a visual manner without yelling or placard waving … Craftivism
needs your unique voice, via stitches or paintings or puppets or other crafty
endeavor, to further spread the idea that creativity can be a catalyst for change.’4

Craftivism’s emblematic artworks from the early to mid-2000s created links

between the handmade, individual creativity that Greer champions here, public
space, collaboration and participatory democracy. These include hybrid works
of contemporary protest art such as The Revolutionary Knitting Circle’s Peace
Knits banner, Cat Mazza’s Nike Blanket Petition, Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Wartime
Knitting Circle, the Pink M.24 Chaffee Tank by Marianne Jørgensen and the Cast
Off Knitters, among others. As we describe in ‘Craft Hard, Die Free,’ many of these
works use a collaborative patchwork aesthetic. They publicly perform the act of
crafting together as a form of protest that uses the sensory and affective qualities
of textiles to counter the perception that activism is violent or destructive.5 This
tactic echoes Greer’s notion of political engagement ‘without yelling or placard
waving’. Corbett calls the pairing of craft and social justice ‘world changing’, and
emphasizes that her collective’s projects are effective because they are ‘small,
attractive, and unthreatening’.6 Greer further argues that, ‘the creation of things
by hand leads to a better understanding of democracy, because it reminds us
that we have power’.7 Similarly, much earlier writing on craftivism (including our
own) claims that small actions – from an individual stitch to crafting in public –
might gradually contribute to significant social and political shifts.8 Together these
claims position craftivism and handmaking more broadly as modes of meaningful
self-expression and empowerment. In turn they suggest that ‘creativity’ itself is
politically progressive.9 While many of these projects succeeded in rallying groups

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16

around a particular cause or serving as a tool or prop for political action, we

are interested in tracking how craftivism’s sometimes exaggerated revolutionary
language and progressive political claims have been extended to include more
general forms of craft practice.
There is a clear distinction between the political intentions of activist works
(and their historical precedents) just described, and commercial craft endeavours.
However, the politicized language that characterizes craftivism is also often
used to describe the North American ‘indie craft movement’, which has become
increasingly commercial since its beginnings. Emerging out of the feminist Riot
Grrl scene of the late 1990s, and drawing upon punk and DIY aesthetics, indie
craft’s revival and reworking of popular crafting has grown from small websites
and local craft groups to now-massive enterprises like Etsy and the Renegade Craft
Fair.10 Most notably documented in Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl’s 2008
book and Levine’s 2009 film, Handmade Nation, marketing and media attention
framed indie craft and DIY practices as a ‘revolutionary’ ‘global movement’11 that
was ‘radical’, ‘guerrilla’, and alternative to mass-produced goods.12 As stated in
the 2003 Craftifesto: ‘Craft is Political. We’re trying to change the world. We want
everyone to rethink corporate culture & consumerism.’13 Alongside this claim that
craftivism fosters personal agency, one assumption underlying indie craft is that
individuals create change and participate in a democratic public activity by making
and buying handmade things. While much of the politically inflected language has
since disappeared from the promotion and discussion of indie craft sales, the idea
of craft (and crafting) as an inherently progressive political form continues to have
traction, as we will address in the rest of the essay.
It is worth focusing closely here on the language of individualism and
self-expression in contemporary craft cultures. In the revised edition of The
Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker describes a shift in the early-twentieth-century
use of embroidery, not to support a selfless feminine ideal, but to ‘transform
the relationship of art to society’.14 She speaks of embroidery by women artists
who were active in both avant-garde art and revolutionary circles, then more
broadly as means for women to express their own ‘individuality’.15 Parker suggests
embroidery’s shift to become ‘a manifestation of the self ’16 contributed to its
nostalgic uptake in ‘counter-cultures and radical movements’ of the 1960s and 1970s
but often left gender, race and class stereotypes unexamined. A contemporary
banner by London’s Craftivist Collective reads ‘Become Who You Are’,17 and
shows how craftivism and indie craft continue to reproduce idealistic claims such
as these: that authentic self-expression, ‘becoming who you are’, and individual
choice matter and – while not antagonistic – they remain politically significant
processes. In this sense, craftivist dialogues echo and easily reproduce neoliberal
values of individual creativity and self-expression,18 which are tacitly accepted as a
form of lifestyle-based activism. This ‘becoming’ is expressed through self-styling
and identity construction through consumer choice. In these contexts, consuming,

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17

judging (and sometimes producing) craft is used to curate and communicate a

politicized sense of individuality through good taste, and craft expresses personal
and economic freedom of choice in a broadly disempowering sphere of market
capitalism. The marketplace becomes an arena where ‘conscious consumers’
exercise the power to choose unique objects that reflect their progressive values.
For makers, they participate in what have been described as ‘feminized’ micro-
economies that often reproduce forms of precarious and exploitative labour.19
Alongside the growing consumer and lifestyle-oriented interest in craft of the
last two decades, institutional focus has also reinforced a particular reading of
craft in relation to art and politics. Craft theorist and historian Glenn Adamson
describes two modes of idealism that are central to modern craft: a ‘more personal,
spiritual form … directed towards the improvement of the self’, and ‘countercultural
craft, explicitly antagonistic to the mainstream’.20 This antagonist ideal remains
evident in exhibitions and catalogues of the 2000s that describe craft as dangerous,
radical, countercultural or other: Confrontational Clay (2000),21 Radical Lace
and Subversive Knitting (2006), Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, (2007),22 Gestures
of Resistance (2010)23 and publications like Breaking the Mould: New Approaches
to Ceramics.24 Further still, the UK-based reality TV show Handmade Revolution
(in which Adamson himself appears as a judge) echoes this rebellious language
while collapsing the boundary between popular media and institutional framings
of craft.25 While this sampling of titles with politicized overtones represents artists
and craftspeople who are working in a variety of social and political contexts,
the overall effect is clear: for contemporary craft to be interesting or relevant, it
has to be distanced from its formerly domestic, feminine or traditionally passive
connotations (or be seen to overcome them). Instead, these newer framings are
invested with an aura of transgression and political urgency, in what Julia Bryan-
Wilson describes as a declaration of contemporary craft’s ‘currency’.26 However, the
idea that craft becomes political or countercultural only when it enters public space
relies on a false opposition between the public and private that feminist scholarship
of the later twentieth century has aimed to challenge.27 As Kirsty Robertson
outlines, the multiple (and sometimes conflicting) accounts of craft activism in
the 2000s are largely framed as departures from craft’s feminized associations. For
example, they ‘place knitting as an act of individual emancipation’.28 The crux of
the problem is that these dialogues are ‘disconnected from wider circumstances
and unfortunately caught in unsettling a binary opposition between public and
private – or more accurately, public space and domestic space – that has largely
been made redundant by the consuming politics of neoliberalism’.29
Craft’s renewed visibility in public spaces, museums, academia and the media
is bolstered by the idea that craftivism and contemporary craft are forms of
revolutionary political action and democratic participation, particularly in North
America and Europe. This framing relies on the above understandings of craft as a
marginal and countercultural practice in a state of continual personal reinvention,

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18

and in indie craft’s positioning as a community that reflects anti-capitalist values

and allows for personal critiques of globalization. As Kristen A. Williams notes in
her work on craftivism’s connections to the values of self-sufficiency, sustainability
and thrift, these ideals channel a nostalgic desire for the return of a simpler time.
She describes this as ‘a specific performance of individualism often understood
as constitutive of American national identity’.30 Craft is simultaneously cast as
a conscious political choice and as an accessible pre-political practice through
associations with domesticity, simplicity, honesty and moral purity.
Further, the framing of craftivism as a local or global movement of individuals
working together to address a common cause, as in many of the examples
mentioned earlier, assumes political unity among people who produce, promote
or consume craft. As Robertson carefully counters: ‘The politics of these groups …
are often eclectic, ranging from ultra-conservative to anarchist.’31 The idea of a
unified, inherently progressive craft movement ignores these specific political and
regional conditions that give handmade objects deeper meaning. Instead, when
craft is read only through the lens of progressive politics, it operates more readily
as marketable sign within local, global or transnational economies. This operation
appears in broader public discourse and corporate branding: when handmade
objects and raw materials are used to represent morality and charity; when craft
is championed as the antidote to historical and contemporary forms of alienated
labour; when it is romanticized as an anti- or pre-industrial mode of production
and rural lifestyles; or offered as tangible ways to boycott or avoid purchasing
unethically produced goods.
Revolutionary language and aesthetics of politicized craft are not only common
within activist craft communities, indie craft and contemporary art. As we
describe later, craft also features prominently in powerful marketing campaigns
that leverage the political claims of handmaking and channel its affective power
into the consumer sphere. In these cases, and in craftwashing broadly, we see
the conflation of Arts and Crafts movement ideals with neoliberal language of
entrepreneurship and individualism, that together draw significant power from
the craftivist claims of the last two decades. These claims have contributed to
corporate uptake of craft as a loaded political symbol and an aesthetic shorthand
for ‘reclaiming’ all that is other, outside, oppressed. Marketing products based
on these associations enables consumers to access and perform and what Nicole
Dawkins has termed ‘the moral value of handmade goods’.32 With this in mind, we
turn to our discussion of craftwashing using examples across a variety of economic
models. Our examples range from multinational fashion brands, to small-scale
design groups and non-profit organizations that promote the work of independent
craftspeople. As we see, each construct personal consumer choice as an explicitly
political process, and allow consumers in various markets to participate in the
myth that making, supporting or buying craft is a form of progressive political
action.

18 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

19

… to craftwashing
To describe how craftwashing works, we draw from the term ‘greenwashing’,
which refers to branding strategies that make products seem eco-friendly while
concealing their negative environmental impacts. As journalist Heather Rogers
describes: ‘green has gone from just a color to indicating that something possesses
what’s needed to protect the earth’s natural systems.’ When a product is branded as
‘green’ or ‘handmade’, that label saves (and even dissuades) the consumer the trouble
of thinking further about the environmental or economic impact of the product.
This is especially powerful when claims of social or environmental responsibility
are explicit parts of branding, as they are with the well-known brands Tom’s Shoes,
H&M and Levi’s. Rogers notes that ecologically branded products can be ‘a badge
of honor, and in some circles a status symbol’, that never require consumers to
sacrifice too much and ensure that ‘saving the planet can be fun and relatively
easy’.33 Craftwashing operates the same way: like greenwashing, it capitalizes on
the individual consumer desire to do good – or be perceived as morally good –
amid overwhelming, irreconcilable political anxiety and impending ecological
collapse. By marketing affectively charged handmade objects (or their lookalikes)
as solutions to pressing environmental, social and economic justice issues, craft
aesthetics are twinned with notions of individual political agency and morality,
while leaving existing power systems largely unquestioned and intact. As Rogers
and others have noted, consumer-based actions can be a small part of the solution,
but they rarely address larger (and increasingly urgent) structural problems in how
we produce, consume and live on this planet, representing instead a ‘catastrophic
game of denial’.34 To bring about substantive change, industry and policy leaders
need to invest in broad-based structural shifts, rather than relying on consumer
actions and marketing campaigns that do little to address the root causes or
systemic problems.
The following paragraphs give concrete examples of craftwashing that are
drawn from various economic scales. In each case, craft functions as a sign of
the political, while strategically avoiding or concealing larger systemic inequities.
We look at craft and design objects and marketing of consumer-driven charity
projects by the Dutch independent bedding design company Snurk, and fashion
brand Tory Burch and Lauren Bush Lauren’s FEED Foundation. We begin to
consider the relationship between craftwashing and cultural appropriation, where
contemporary (craft) marketing encourages the consumption of craft as a way
of performing national identity and (global) citizenship. We then trace debates
on authenticity and belonging on the popular craft site Etsy and the Canadian
Craft Federation’s Citizens of Craft campaign. In these examples, we see craft is
instrumentalized as a sign of individual agency and choice, moral goodness
through self-sufficiency and entrepreneurialism, and private investment in the
public sphere. Here, several constructs of neoliberalism come into focus.35

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Dutch independent bedding company Snurk channels the positive associations

of craft through the appearance of the ‘granny’ figure of maternal warmth and
nostalgia in the 2012 advertising for their ‘Granny Square’ duvet. The advertisement
copy reads: ‘Take one crochet pattern from Grandmother’s time, one pile of
colorful yarn and a bunch of lovely ladies from the local craft club. Stir in some
cookies, tea and bottles of Prosecco and before you know it, you’ve all crocheted the
most cheerful looking bedspread.’36 Here, words like ‘lovely’, ‘local’ and ‘cheerful’,
signal a past era of domestic ease and togetherness through crafting. Evoking this
bygone time presumably takes us far away from the political discontents of the
public sphere, just as Robertson cites a disavowal of feminist activism as being
central to rebranding craft(ivism) for the twenty-first century. Earlier in this text,
we named several artworks that use individually knitted or crocheted squares
to signify collective action. Recalling the associations of these works, the Snurk
granny square motif operates as a sign of craft’s complex meanings: instead of
a collectively handmade textile or a nostalgic piece made by a lovely crocheting
grandma, it is a high-resolution photograph digitally printed on the surface of the
cloth. Similar digital images of knitted textures (and occasionally, actual knitting)
have also appeared in advertisements for products as varied as milk, chain coffee
shops or smoothies – many from multinational corporations whose actions do
not always match the charitable aims or cosy associations of these campaigns.37
What these campaigns have in common is their use of textiles as a sign of honesty,
community, generosity and authenticity. In Snurk’s product, a crafted textile, and
its associations with traditional conceptions of gendered domesticity, comfort and
inheritance of familial property, leverages the look of the handmade to add value.
If the image of a textile evokes associations of domesticity and warmth, the
aesthetic of recycled or patchwork fabrication operates similarly to cue neoliberal
values of resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and uniqueness. Another series of products
from Snurk, the ‘Le-Clochard’ duvet and ‘Le-Trottoir’ sheets take the look of DIY
and recycling to the height of farce, by aestheticizing homelessness as designer
home decor. The quilt uses a printed image of a taped-up cardboard box (Plate 1) to
signify a makeshift street shelter, advertised with the invitation to ‘sleep on the street
so a homeless youngster doesn’t have to’.38 Part of the proceeds from sales go towards
supporting various foundations in Europe that assist homeless populations, totalling
€ 80,000 as of March 2017. These products aestheticize ‘making do’ and other tactics
for surviving in the urban environment. Despite the object’s self-conscious DIY
irony, its marketing avoids addressing the economic inequities that separate buyers
with disposable income and designer taste from people who (may) sleep on real
cardboard boxes. The realities of homelessness and the suffering of people who are
denied the comforts of home remain invisible – or worse, are used as a marketing
stunt when Snurk’s designer sleeps in Amsterdam’s Dam Square under the duvet
with cardboard signs directing passers-by to Snurk’s website (Figure 1.1). The object
itself capitalizes on the material and aesthetic associations of poverty. Objects like

20 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

21

FIGURE 1.1 Snurk. ‘To grab the attention of people and press, Erik slept under the
Le-Clochard duvet cover in the middle of Dam square in Amsterdam.’ The Netherlands,
2008. Le-Clochard, 2008, cotton. Photo credit (top): Theo van der Laan. Photo (bottom):
Ram van Meel. Copyright: Snurk.

this encourage consumers to make a one-time retail purchase when they know a
portion of the proceeds goes to charitable causes, while the broader structural and
systemic issues that lead to homelessness remain unexamined.
The ‘limited edition’ FEED Foundation bag similarly exploits the rustic
material associations of burlap fabric, and the aesthetic of the labour-intensive
Colombian Mochila weaving used for its straps.39 The FEED bags launched in 2012

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22

as a collaboration between a for-profit company founded by Lauren Bush Lauren,

luxury brand Tory Burch and high-end department store Holt Renfrew.40 The bags
are just one of a number of fashionable products by designers that claim to ‘change
the world’, by fighting global poverty, increasing environmental awareness or
‘rescuing’ Indigenous craft traditions by empowering artisans (See Elke Gaugele,
Chapter 2 for more on this topic). Like the Le-Clochard duvet, the FEED bags
rely on an increasingly common gesture of soft-philanthropy: with each individual
purchase, a portion of the retail price is donated to ‘fight hunger and eliminate
malnutrition around the world’,41 a model that requires little or no investment
beyond a one-time purchase. Behind this problematic ‘buy-to-give’ equation, is
the bag’s status as a ‘limited edition’ craft object, complete with vaguely pastoral
burlap, punk-rock stencilling of the FEED name and ethnic flair.
The early FEED designs and production blur the lines between DIY, approp­
riation of Indigenous craft practices, mass production and designer luxury-goods.
However, as the brand has grown in popularity, fine leather, denim and intricate
beading have replaced burlap, and the company’s marketing claims to support
artisans and use ‘environmentally friendly materials … whenever possible’.42
Notably, FEED also markets the project as a movement, stating that ‘we’ve built
a movement connecting our customers to the cause, one bag at a time’.43 Here,
the language and aesthetic draw publicity and capital to Bush Lauren, Burch
and Holt Renfrew, while gender and race, as well as the moral and political
underpinnings of handcraft remain unexamined, yet central, to the FEED brand.
As we see with the FEED bag, craftwashing also intersects with appropriation
of Indigenous cultural and craft traditions in the fashion industry.44 In this
sense, living cultural practices tied to survival, ritual, connection to the land and
storytelling are whitewashed; consumerism reproduces and naturalizes ongoing
forms of colonial violence by marketing Indigenous traditions as variously lost,
rare and extinct, or as fascinating, noble expressions of true humanity. Just as
gendered crafting becomes associated with transformative individuality as
detailed earlier, the (neo)colonial gaze appropriates Indigenous aesthetics to
position craft as virtuous and politically conscious. Globalization allows objects,
materials and motifs to circulate and become available for wider markets and,
in turn, crafted objects are marketed as progressive expressions of individuality
and global consciousness.
In her discussion of indie craft, Dawkins describes how craft has been recast
as an affective experience that is less concerned with the ‘particular artisanal
qualities or labour concerns’ of crafted objects, but instead with what she identifies
as ‘the pleasures and transformative values of making things yourself ’.45 We extend
this line of thinking to consider how craftwashing in the objects and marketing
campaigns just discussed relies upon similar associations and experiences. Instead
of accessing the pleasures of making things, objects like the Snurk bedding and the
FEED bag offer the pleasures of selecting and buying things to craft an identity as a

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socially conscious consumer. The feel-good values of the handmade are transferred
and exploited here to conspicuously perform individual lifestyle choices and acts
of charity, while downplaying questions about supply chains, labour practices,
cultural appropriation and environmental impact.
In these types of (charitable) consumer experiences the promise of ‘change’
is not only troubling in its vagueness, but as with other forms of so-called
conscious consumerism, a diversion from the urgent work of critically evaluating
the systems that create and allow for these problems in the first place.46 Eco-
capitalism and greenwashing falsely propose that consumers might solve the
environmental crisis and maintain the current economic system by simply
buying different, better or more ethical stuff. Craftwashing operates in a similar
way, leveraging the language and aesthetics of craft to encourage consumption
as a viable solution to social and economic inequalities or environmental
causes. Unfortunately, as sustainability experts outline in a report for the United
Nations Environment Program, consumption-based approaches are often
‘overly simplistic, ineffective or altogether misplaced’.47 It is clear that we need to
profoundly rethink our relationships to the things we produce and consume, not
just at the individual consumer level, but as part of large-scale ‘transformative
systemic change’.48

Independent of what?
The examples mentioned show how craftwashing works when craft objects and
buying practices are marketed as forms of conscious consumption or charitable
activities. Perhaps in response to the increased marketing of craft as a political
force, many communities of craft makers have also re-intensified their use of the
symbols and language of independence and revolution. In this part of the essay, we
track ongoing debates around the popular craft-selling platform Etsy, and analyse a
recent marketing campaign by the Canadian Craft Federation. Both are navigating
craft’s recent commercial popularity by attempting to redefine and preserve
the status of the handmade. These campaigns have often hinged on promoting
craft’s authenticity, by reinforcing the political value of craft as an alternative to
mainstream production and consumption.
Following Etsy’s 2015 move to become a publicly traded company, Etsy
sellers were no longer restricted to exclusively selling products made by hand
themselves. A number of articles maintained a strong position that craft sold
on the site should be ‘independent’ of broader production and manufacturing.
Their authors targeted Etsy’s exponential growth and its newly relaxed criteria for
accepting sellers on the site, with titles like ‘How Etsy Alienated Its Crafters and
Lost Its Soul’49 or ‘Can Etsy Blow Up and Keep its Soul?’.50 The articles betray both
an anxiety and awareness about how the handmade is being defined, marketed

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24

and sold – and by whom. Within these articles and community forums, the word
‘handmade’ was the subject of debate, while the word ‘soul’ connoted the formerly
unique position of makers selling their own handmade goods on the site. We
might ask how a website has a ‘soul’ to lose, and what this loss signifies in terms
of the role that craft performs as a feature of online communities. These anxieties
reveal how the overall marketing of craft and the increasingly slippery definitions
of words like ‘handmade’, ‘craft’ or ‘authentic’ affect the landscape for makers and
buyers alike.
Long-time Etsy sellers are frustrated because they have relied on the site not
only to sell their work, but also to authenticate it as genuinely handmade within an
alternative economy of self-defined makers unified by supposedly shared values.
Debates around defining the handmade were always present on the site, but were
not as contentious when there were fewer sellers and less competition. For Etsy
craft sellers, their ‘authentic’ work has value insofar as it remains distinguished
from mass-produced goods, and this claim relies largely on the politicized
language we have outlined earlier. The distinction between handmade and mass-
produced is a false binary that not only ignores the global chains of production
supplying North American craft producers with their raw materials, but also
the ways in which mass-produced objects are no less the products of someone’s
(often invisible) time and labour. Like the indie craft scene, Etsy’s success has
largely been built on the idea that DIY craft is an ethical or alternative to buying
from large corporations: ‘At its outset, Etsy was a powerful tool for makers, by
makers. We were a bunch of Davids, fighting back against the big-box Goliaths
with artisanal slingshots.’51 However, Etsy and its sellers are just as embedded
within the market as big-box stores. As Kathleen Morris makes clear, ‘While Etsy
pledges to empower citizens to change the global economy by “bringing heart to
commerce,” this aspiration changes nothing about the capitalist institutions that
safeguard Etsy’s corporate for-profit status as a craft marketing powerhouse.’52
Within the context of craftwashing, the Etsy debate foregrounds that craft’s
economic and social value is no longer defined by a particular way of making or
by the producer. While this is no doubt troubling for some, it underlines the need
to interrogate not only how craft producers leverage the aesthetic and political
associations of the handmade, but also how defining ‘craft’ still privileges certain
forms of making over others.
Similar motivations are behind the Canadian Craft Federation’s 2015 Citizens
of Craft rebranding campaign. The campaign aims to raise the public profile of
craft, and market the work of Canadian craftspeople practicing in a variety of
media from jewellery to bookbinding.53 The campaign invites people to ‘declare’
themselves as part of a ‘movement’ with its own manifesto tinged in revolution,
capitalizing on the persistent claim that craft is a form of political rebellion. Like
the hand-drawn 2008 ‘Craftifesto’ poster we cited earlier, Citizens of Craft’s sleek
design sets short claims of craft’s personal and political power in bright yellow and

24 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

25

black. It advocates for the purchase of craft products led by statements of the beliefs
and progressive values that craft represents in society: originality, authenticity,
diversity, with a connection to the maker’s hand, that cannot be ‘automated,
manufactured or cloned’. Here, craft is again positioned as a mark of individuality
and a trusted antidote to supposedly anonymous and mass-produced objects. As
a result, Kathleen Morris states, craft is shoehorned into ‘a reductive approach to
neoliberal citizenry in which an individual is reduced to consumer’.54 The website
uses black and white photographs of a range of handmade objects to visualize each
of the ten points in the Citizens manifesto including the iconography of a raised
fist – this time adorned with a funky geometric ring by Canadian crafter Joe Han
Lee (Figure 1.2). This well-worn image echoes the cover of Greer’s Craftivism book,
which features a blue fist stencilled on raw canvas. Both evoke the use of this image
by workers’ rights campaigns, Black Power, feminist and resistance movements
that have historically used this emblem of a raised fist not for marketing products,
but for demanding human rights. Another image, features a procession of small
porcelain animals walking across a bridge by Janet Macpherson accompanied by
the claim that ‘while we all move to different drums’, this newly minted class of
craft (buying) citizens can ‘move together’ as ‘each maker’s unique expression
bonds us to a richer community’.

FIGURE 1.2 Citizens of Craft, 2015. Maker: Joe Han Lee, Courage, 2012. Photo: Joe
Han Lee. Copyright 2015 Ontario Crafts Council (operating as Craft Ontario).
Note: Citizens of Craft is an unregistered trademark of Ontario Crafts Council.

FROM CRAFTIVISM TO CRAFTWASHING 25

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Positioning makers and consumers of craft as citizens taking part in a collective

movement once again infers that individual self-expression through consumption
is a form of politically engaged citizenship that matters. The campaign evokes
constructs of Canadian national identity and progressive political values, but does
not critique their limitations. To point ‘craft citizens’ in more critical directions might
trouble the campaign’s objective to raise the profile of local craft communities and
act as a bridge to (international) consumers. The campaign shows how easy it is for
even savvy communities of contemporary makers to participate in craftwashing: to
use well-worn myths such as craft’s inherent progressiveness, national unity or
the false binary of handmade/manufactured. Craft has a complex relationship to
histories of colonization and the articulation of national identities, in particular
through ‘the association of craft with cultural difference’.55 This line of thought
finds increasing urgency as craft communities negotiate the consequences of their
growth and popularity, alongside the increased pressure to remain financially
viable, and challenges from artists, scholars and activists to acknowledge colonial
underpinnings of the historical categories that separated craft from fine art. Rather
than activating craft consumption or craft activism as a reparative nation-building
project that requires good upstanding citizens, we are interested in other moves for
craft criticism and activism: addressing and reversing economic and institutional
structures that marginalize the work of women and people of colour, understanding
cultural appropriation and self-determination, and supporting artists, curatorial
approaches and scholarship that examine craft’s complex roles in the colonial
nation-building projects and their ongoing impacts (see Ellyn Walker’s Chapter 15
and Heather Anderson’s Chapter 16).
We also recognize that the legal discourses of certification, design patenting
and protectionism within craft practice56 are applied unevenly to emphasize
property and market share for some contemporary Western makers. These do
little to rectify the lack of attribution of Indigenous craft or cultural property. As
Dawkins notes, ‘making as part of a larger aesthetic or moral calling [is] a matter
of (white) privilege and of cultural capital’.57 We remain sceptical that unevenly
policing the boundaries and definitions of what kinds of craft are ‘authentic’, as in
the examples earlier, will reclaim craft’s market share or fully address the critical
issues at hand. In fact, combined with the characteristics of craftwashing just
described, this kind of labelling around the ‘authentic’ handmade may have the
opposite effect: adding more dollar value to the ‘look’ of both the handmade,
and the ‘craftlike’,58 and heightening the buzz of words like ‘handmade’, ‘craft’,
or ‘artisanal’. As Kathleen Morris notes, if we look at ‘who is being served by
the perpetuation of this archetype, we find both corporations and organizations
whose target audiences respond through their purchasing power’.59 In the
marketplace, it is the retailer and consumer – not the craft historian, theorist or
activist – who has the power to choose a given object, regardless of whether its
claims to authenticity are genuine.

26 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

27

Conclusion
This essay re-evaluates the political claims that surround contemporary craft
activism and traces their development over the last two decades. It investigates
how the particular qualities of craft, alongside histories of craft activism, have been
conflated with notions of authenticity, individuality, citizenship, sustainability
and radical politics, in both scholarly and popular understandings. In tracing a
recent genealogy of craft activism and its collision with various economic models,
we have sought here to identify and challenge the myth of craft as an inherently
progressive political movement. We describe how the idea of ‘revolutionary craft’
forms a strong affective foundation for lifestyle-based marketing and branding
today. As Arundhati Roy reminds, war and shopping will not save the world – and
neither will craft. In our view, craft is neither good nor bad, moral nor immoral,
revolutionary nor status quo.
We have looked at examples of craftwashing in action – from luxury goods, to
indie designers and self-determined craft communities – where the use of craft
as a marketing tool can obscure pressing issues of precarious labour, complex
global supply chains, environmental catastrophe and the ongoing appropriation
and preservation of cultural traditions. By casting ‘craft citizens’ to perform in a
loop of supposedly ethical production-consumption, craftwashing forecloses on
important critical questions about the structures that support these systems.
Through the recent resurgence of craft as a marketable phenomenon, and the
appearance of craftwashing, individual acts of production and consumption may
feel charged with political meaning. But political agency must not be confused
with buying power or owning beautiful things. In short: if there is something
political about craft now, it is not about buying more stuff. Within our current
economic system and for a field so deeply connected to objects and materials, it
may seem difficult, even impossible, to ask: What are the forms of craft politics
that do not focus on the market? What processes and ways of thinking about
craft can offer viable alternatives to the continued and destructive expansion
of capitalism? We contend that these questions are still worth asking, for craft
scholars and practitioners alike. While this text critiques the ways in which the
language of craft activism has been used in consumption-based approaches, we
nevertheless consider craft as a vital and ongoing frame for understanding the
very nature of exchange and survival for all forms of life and matter. We remain
hopeful that craft activism can continue to exist beyond the trappings of individual
consumption, and instead offer tangible activations of self-determination, bodily
autonomy and cultural memory intertwined with global citizenship and justice.
These topics criss-cross through the chapters that follow in The New Politics of the
Handmade, and together they activate craft theory as a particularly sharp set of
tools for analysis, continuing to build the critical vocabularies for understanding
craft politics today.

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Notes
1 Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 46.
2 Kathleen Morris, ‘You Are Not a Lemming: The Imagined Resistance of Craft
Citizenship,’ Journal of Modern Craft, vol. 9, no.1 (July 2016): 8.
3 We began using ‘craftwashing’ as a shorthand for examples of corporate marketing,
and described it in a paper at the Textile Society of America conference in 2012.
The term has also appeared in discussions about craft beer to describe a similar
phenomenon, where large companies imitate and capitalize on the appeal of small
independent breweries to market their products. We expand upon this use to show
how ‘craftwashing’ can describe a wider range of materials, products and campaigns.
The term ‘artwashing’ has also appeared recently to describe the use of art (or even
creativity more generally) in the service of urban development and gentrification
initiatives, or in the case of oil and gas companies sponsoring public art institutions,
to ‘soften’ their corporate image. For more on this, see Oli Mould, Against Creativity
(New York: Verso, 2018), 162–72.
4 Betsy Greer, ‘Craftivist History’, in Extra/Ordinary: An Anthology of Craft and
Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Elena Buszek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011),
175–83 (emphasis added). Greer too, notes her own ambivalence about the word
‘craftivism’.
5 Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, ‘Craft Hard Die Free: Radical Curatorial Strategies
for Craftivism in Unruly Contexts’, in Extra/Ordinary: An Anthology of Craft and
Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Elena Buszek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011),
204–21.
6 Sarah Corbett, A Little Book of Craftivism (London: Cicada Books, 2013), 5.
7 Betsy Greer, Craftivism: The Art and Craft of Activism (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp
Press, 2016), 8.
8 See Black and Burisch, ‘Craft Hard Die Free’; Julia Bryan-Wilson in dialogue with
Cat Mazza, Liz Collins, Sabrina Gschwandtner and Allison Smith, ‘The Politics
of Craft’, Modern Painters vol. 20, no. 2 (February 2008): 78–83; Nicole Burisch,
‘Craftivism: Reevaluating the Links between Craft and Social Activism’, in Utopic
Impulses: Essays in Contemporary Ceramics, ed. Ruth Chambers, Amy Gogarty and
Mireille Perron (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2007), 158.
9 For more on the rhetoric and cooption of creativity into capitalism, see Mould,
Against Creativity.
10 See Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl, ‘The New Wave of Craft Timeline’, in
Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2008), xiv–xix. See also the chapter ‘Knit Your Own Job: Etsy and
the New Handmade Culture’, for an overview of this history, as well as the shifting
language around its political claims in Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women
Are Embracing the New Domesticity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 71–93.
11 Betsy Greer, Craftivism. Sayraphim Lothian uses the term ‘guerilla kindness’ in the
same volume, 11. See also Renegade Craft Fair’s page ‘About: Our History’ which
similarly describes a ‘global indie-craft movement’ http://www.renegadecraft.com/
about (accessed 2 December 2017).

28 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

29

12 Faythe Levine (director), Handmade Nation: The Rise of D.I.Y Art, Craft and Design,
2009, 65 minutes (film). See also the New York Times article that calls Handmade
Nation ‘a new and growing community, one with its own esthetic, lifestyle and
economy’, and refers to the ‘movement’s anti-industrial, anti-institutional and
highly entrepreneurial manifesto’. Penelope Green, ‘The Ambassador of Handmade’,
New York Times, 3 September 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/
garden/04craft.html (accessed 17 November 2011). See also The East London Craft
Guerilla website, http://www.craftguerrilla.com/page2.htm (accessed 2 December
2017). Their manifesto reads: ‘The Craft Guerilla Army is taking on the world for a
better hand made existence! We’ve had enough of soulless, mass produced tat and so
has the average consumer.’
13 Amy Carlton and Cinnamon Cooper, ‘Craftifesto’, in Handmade Nation: The
Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design, ed. Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), xx.
14 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 189.
15 Ibid., 202–3.
16 Ibid., 203–4 (emphasis added).
17 Sarah Corbett, A Little Book of Craftivism, 44–45.
18 Nicole Dawkins, ‘Do-It-Yourself: The Precarious Work and Postfeminist Politics
of Handmaking (in) Detroit’, Utopian Studies, vol. 22, no. 2 (2011): 263. See also
Kristen A. Williams, ‘ “Old Time Memr’y”: Contemporary Urban Craftivism and the
Politics of Doing-It-Yourself in Postindustrial America’, Utopian Studies, vol. 22, no. 2
(2011): 308.
19 Alex Williams, ‘That Hobby Looks Like a Lot of Work’, New York Times, 16 December
2009. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/fashion/17etsy.html
(accessed 1 March 2019); and Sara Mosle, ‘Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy,’
Double X, 10 June 2009. Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20130329053942/
www.doublex.com/section/work/etsycom-peddles-false-feminist-fantasy (accessed
22 April 2019). See also Dawkins, ‘Do-It-Yourself ’.
20 Glenn Adamson, ‘Section Introduction to Modern Craft: Idealism and Reform,’ in
The Craft Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 135 (emphasis added).
21 Judith S. Schwartz (curator), Confrontational Clay: The Artist as Social Critic (Kansas
City, MO: ExhibitsUSA, Mid-America Arts Alliance, 2000).
22 David Revere McFadden (curator), Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting (2006);
Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, (2007), (New York: Museum of Art and Design).
23 Judith Leemann and Shannon Stratton (curators), Gestures of Resistance
(Portland: Museum of Contemporary Craft, 2010).
24 Rob Barnard, Natasha Daintry and Clare Twomey, Breaking the Mould: New
Approaches to Ceramics (London: Blackdog Publishing, 2007).
25 Glenn Adamson, ‘Goodbye Craft’, Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American
Culture, ed. Nicholas R. Bell (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 25.
26 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017), 258. See also Kirsty Robertson, ‘Rebellious Doilies and Subversive

FROM CRAFTIVISM TO CRAFTWASHING 29

30

Stitches’, in Extra/Ordinary: An Anthology of Craft and Contemporary Art, ed. Maria

Elena Buszek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 192. 184–203.
27 See Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy,’ Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 56–80.
28 Robertson, ‘Rebellious Doilies’, 192.
29 Ibid., 192.
30 Williams, ‘ “Old Time Memr’y” ’, 305–6.
31 Robertson, ‘Rebellious Doilies’, 190. Williams, ‘ “Old Time Memr’y” ’, 306, likewise
notes that recent trends towards DIY and self-sufficiency have a relationship to
practices and lifestyles from ‘across a broad political spectrum’.
32 Dawkins, ‘Do-It-Yourself ’, 262.
33 Heather Rogers, Green Gone Wrong: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Eco-
Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2010), 4–5.
34 Ibid., 180. See also Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
35 See Dawkins, ‘Do-It-Yourself ’, 277 for further analysis around the relationship
between neoliberalism and the indie craft scene.
36 This product is no longer on the Dutch or US Snurk site, they now have a duvet
with an overall pale knitted yarn motif: https://www.snurkliving.com/bedding/yarn-
duvet-cover-pink (accessed September 2012 and 20 December 2017).
37 See Innocent Smoothies’ ‘Big Knit’ campaign, ‘The Innocent Big Knit – About,’
http://www.thebigknit.co.uk/about (accessed 7 February 2018); see also Tamara
Cohen, ‘Innocent Accused over Charity “Con”: Smoothie Giant “Failed to Hand
Over Promised Cash’, Daily Mail, 27 May 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/
article-1391521/Innocent-Smoothie-maker-defends-handing-520-000-charity-
cash-2008.html#ixzz56RtDaMZM (accessed 7 February 2018). ‘Lait: Source Naturelle
de Réconfort’ campaign for the Fédération des producteurs de lait du Québec, http://
strategyonline.ca/2009/12/03/milkknit-20091203/ (accessed 7 February 2018).
Tim Hortons’ #WarmWishes campaign, http://www.timhortons.com/ca/en/
corporate/news-release.php?id=8265 (accessed 7 February 2018); see also Sara
Mojtehedzadeh, ‘Tim Hortons Protests Sweep the Nation after Minimum-wage
Hike’, Toronto Star, 19 January 2018, https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/01/19/
tim-hortons-protests-sweep-the-nation-after-minimum-wage-hike.html (accessed 7
February 2018).
38 ‘Sleep on the Street so a Homeless Youngster Doesn’t Have to’, Snurk Beddengoed,
https://www.snurkbeddengoed.nl/en/service-more/supporting-homeless-youngsters
(accessed September 2012 and December 2017).
39 ‘The Tory Burch FEED Bag’, http://www.feedprojects.com/feed-shop (accessed
September 2012). As advertised the bag is ‘Made from traditional FEED burlap
fabric, with colourful mochila webbing handles’, however a Toronto Star article
reports that the straps are ‘woven by artisans in Spain’. Derick Chetty, ‘Lauren Bush
Lauren Hopes to Save the World, One Bag at a Time’, Toronto Star, 8 May 2012,
https://www.thestar.com/life/fashion_style/2012/05/08/lauren_bush_lauren_hopes_
to_save_the_world_one_bag_at_a_time.html (accessed September 2012). Bush
Lauren says of Tory Burch that ‘they found this amazing strap in the four different

30 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

31

colours’, in the Flare interview, but the supply chain is unclear. Mosha Lundström
Halbert, ‘Canadian Exclusive: Tory Burch & Lauren Bush Lauren Create FEED Bag
for Holt Renfrew,’ Flare, 23 May 2012, http://www.flare.com/fashion/canadian-
exclusive-tory-burch-lauren-bush-lauren-create-feed-bag-for-holt-renfrew/
(accessed September 2012 and 20 December 2017).
40 ‘General FEED Questions’ https://www.feedprojects.com/help?page=1 (accessed 9
December 2017).
41 ‘History,’ FEED Projects, http://www.feedprojects.com/history (accessed 20
September 2013), and product tag, Tory Burch + FEED, released April 2012.
42 ‘FEED is a social business, which means there is an enduring principle at the heart of
what we do: people’s choices of what to buy and wear have the power to change the
world.’ ‘About FEED: We Make Good Products’ https://www.feedprojects.com/about-
feed (accessed 8 December 2017) (emphasis added).
43 ‘About FEED: Our Founder’, https://www.feedprojects.com/about-feed (accessed 8
December 2017).
44 Urban Outfitters’ appropriation of Navaho patterns, the racist neocolonial ‘dsquaw’
Fall 2015 collection by Canadian designers DSquared, and Victoria’s Secret’s use of a
‘Native-American’ style headdress in 2012 runway shows are only a few examples.
45 Dawkins, ‘Do-It-Yourself ’, 263.
46 Mathew Snow, ‘Against Charity’, Jacobin, 21 February 2015, https://www.jacobinmag.
com/2015/08/peter-singer-charity-effective-altruism (accessed 21 May 2019).
47 Fostering and Communicating Sustainable Lifestyles: Principles and Emerging
Practices. United Nations Environment Programme – Sustainable Lifestyles, Cities
and Industry Branch (UN Environment), 2016, 103. See also Nicola Spurling,
Andrew McMeekin, Elizabeth Shove, Dale Southerton, Daniel Wlech, Interventions
in Practice: Reframing Policy Approaches to Consumer Behaviour, Sustainable Practices
Research Group Report, September 2013.
48 H. de Coninck, A. Revi, M. Babiker, P. Bertoldi, M. Buckeridge, A. Cartwright,
W. Dong, J. Ford, S. Fuss, J.-C. Hourcade, D. Ley, R. Mechler, P. Newman,
A. Revokatova, S. Schultz, L. Steg, and T. Sugiyama ‘Strengthening and Implementing
the Global Response,’ in Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the
Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above Pre-industrial Levels and Related Global
Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global
Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to
Eradicate Poverty, (eds.) V. Masson-Delmotte, Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H.-O.
Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan,
R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy,
T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield, (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, 2018), 315.
49 Grace Dobush, ‘How Etsy Alienated Its Crafters and Lost Its Soul’, Wired, 19 February
2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/02/etsy-not-good-for-crafters/ (accessed 7
December 2017).
50 Liz Core, ‘Can Etsy Blow Up and Keep its Soul?’ Grist, 4 March 2015, http://grist.org/
living/can-etsy-blow-up-and-keep-its-soul/ (accessed 7 December 2017).
51 Dobush, ‘How Etsy Alienated Its Crafters’.

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52 ‘Etsy – Your Place to Buy and Sell all Things Handmade …’. Available at https://www.
etsy.com/ (accessed 16 June 2015), quoted in Morris, ‘You Are Not a Lemming, 9.
53 Craft Ontario, Citizens of Craft, http://citizensofcraft.ca/ (accessed 6 December
2017). This campaign launched in Toronto, Canada, on 14 March 2015 at the Crafting
Sustainability conference. On 15 March, we delivered an earlier version of this
essay, that included a short analysis of the previous evening’s launch in the context
of craftwashing. The term ‘citizens of craft’ is also used by Nicholas Bell to describe
the rise of a ‘refreshing’ new ‘class of historians, curators, critics and practitioners
who are engaged in craft … from outside its traditional hubs’ of the post-war studio
craft movement in America. ‘Introduction’, Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary
American Culture, ed. Nicholas R. Bell (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 11–19.
54 Morris, ‘You Are Not a Lemming,’ 9.
55 Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), xxi.
56 Kirsty Robertson, ‘Embroidery Pirates and Fashion Victims: Textiles, Craft and
Copyright’, Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture, vol. 8, no. 1 (2010): 86–111.
57 Dawkins, ‘Do-It-Yourself ’, 268.
58 Jenni Sorkin, ‘Craftlike: The Illusion of Authenticity’, Nation Building: Craft and
Contemporary American Culture, ed. Nicholas R. Bell (London: Bloomsbury,
2015), 75.
59 Morris, ‘You Are Not a Lemming,’ 10.

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2 ETHICAL FASHION, CRAFT

AND THE NEW SPIRIT OF
GLOBAL CAPITALISM
Elke Gaugele

When the UN Global Compact, the ‘world’s largest corporate sustainability

initiative … for achieving a better world’,1 was presented to the World Economic
Forum in 1999, it established a new arena for the aesthetics and politics of
cloth. In the years that followed, designers and fashion labels began to position
themselves as activists struggling against climate change, ecological crisis,
overconsumption and the exploitation of labour. Stripping for People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals, urging people to ‘buy nothing’ and to ‘vote green’
were some of Dame Vivienne Westwood’s most important fashion messages from
2010 onwards.2 And in 2012, Westwood launched her spring collection during
London Fashion Week at the closing ceremony of the Paralympics dressed as an
eco-warrior and unfurling a ‘Climate Revolution’ banner (Figure 2.1).
At least some years before punk’s 40th anniversary in 2016 and its final
co-option by the mainstream, Westwood referenced her own countercultural
and punk roots by reinventing herself as a tempestuous climate activist, and by
promoting ethical fashion and launching her ‘Handmade with love’ collection.
The collection consists of hand-beaded clutches and key rings made by Maasai
craftspeople, but also items made of recycled canvas, roadside banners and brass.
Westwood’s enterprise earnestly promotes these as being crafted in ‘Nairobi’s
biggest slum’.3 In the last decade, ethicality – and with it charitable notions of
doing good – has become part of the core business of the fashion industry, not
only for global luxury designers such as Westwood, but also by fast-fashion
companies.
This ‘ethical turn’ in fashion and textiles is part of a new politics of craft
and craftwashing (see Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch, Chapter 1) in the
contemporary period of globalization, characterized by the expansion of
neoliberalism after 1989. A parallel field of antiglobalization critique has emerged
34

FIGURE 2.1 ‘Designer Vivienne Westwood walks on the catwalk by Vivienne Westwood
Red Label on day 3 of London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2013, at the British
Foreign & Commonwealth Office’, 16 September 2012, London, England. Photo: Gareth
Cattermole/Getty Images.

with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like the Clean Clothes Campaign

(CCC) and other environmental, human rights or labour rights organizations.
This essay examines the background and critiques of the ethical turn in fashion,
and draws upon a postcolonial feminist perspective on human rights cultures
outlined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in ‘Righting Wrongs’.4 In order to
investigate the interrelations between capitalism and critique – the undertones
of the contemporary politics of craftwashing at play in the examples addressed
here – Spivak’s theoretical perspective is read alongside concepts outlined in Luc
Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s 2003 The New Spirit of Capitalism.5 In order to better
understand the contemporary political and economic framework of craftwashing
and its connections to the global fashion industry, I outline the following two
strands: the political sphere of bluewashing and craftwashing within global
governance politics; and the UN Ethical Fashion Initiative’s mission for African
textile handicraft as a tool for governance and policy development in cooperation
with Vivienne Westwood and other luxury fashion designers. The essay closes
with a discussion on the integration of craft, sustainability and social critique into
contemporary global capitalism.

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Green(washing), blue(washing) and the UN

Global Compact
The UN Global Compact is the historic starting point of the contemporary ethical
turn in fashion and textiles, and will be discussed here in relation to craftwashing
and its connections to the neoliberal economic agenda of bluewashing. The
framework for the organization was set up under the normative umbrella of
the United Nations, merging the economic interests of global enterprises with
norm positing claims directly lifted from social, ecological and humanitarian
antiglobalization activism. Like the term ‘whitewashing’, green- and bluewashing
are also associated with textiles and connotations of craft techniques such as
dyeing, bleaching or painting as a means to conceal or erase the truth. The term
‘greenwashing’ is defined as ‘disinformation disseminated by an organization so as
to present an environmentally responsible public image’.6 The term was coined by
groups who were active in the environmental movements of the 1970s and 1980s;
previously they had used the colour green to signify connections to environmental
issues and eco-friendliness.7 Similarly, bluewash(ing) references globalization
and the blue flag of the United Nations, and the term emerged as the United
Nations began to address questions of sustainability and social justice through
global governance. Bluewashing, which was first employed as a term to critique
ineffective humanitarian intervention, now became a term to critique non-binding
corporate partnerships formed under the blue flag of the UN Global Compact
initiative. Following the increased involvement of NGOs in the 1990s, the UN
invited non- and intergovernmental organizations and actors for international
policymaking and normative positioning. Since then, NGO ethics have influenced
the establishment of core global normative values on a UN-level much more than
before. Consequently, possibilities for participation in these initiatives were opened
up to business representatives in the 2000s.8 Whereas NGOs such as CCC or the
International Labour Organization (ILO) had consistently fought for solidarity
and better working conditions for the workers and casualties of the sweatshops
of the global fashion industry, in 1999 UN Secretary General Kofi Annan adapted
their statements to launch the Global Compact as a programme for corporations
who aimed to define their ‘business as a force for good’.9 The Global Compact’s ten
principles remain rather imprecise in their adaption of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, the ILO’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights
at Work, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development and the United
Nations Convention Against Corruption.10 The first principle states ‘businesses
should support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human
rights’ and principle two insists ‘that they are not complicit in human rights
abuses’.11 Principles three to six refer to labour rights and claim that businesses

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should ‘uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the
right to collective bargaining’, foster ‘the elimination of all forms of forced and
compulsory labour’ and should work on ‘effective abolition of child labour’ as
well as on ‘the elimination of discrimination’.12 Principles seven to nine concern
environmental issues and such vague demands such as enterprises should ‘support
a precautionary approach to environmental challenges’, ‘undertake initiatives to
promote greater environmental responsibility’ and ‘encourage the development
and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies’.13 The tenth principle
postulates anti-corruption: ‘Businesses should work against corruption in all its
forms, including extortion and bribery.’14 However, participation in and control
of the ten Global Compact principles in the areas of human rights, labour,
environment and anti-corruption have been voluntary and unenforceable from
the beginning. By the 2000s, most big companies had started to use the keywords
and values determined by the UN documents to build their identities around
corporate social responsibility and frame their activities.
A number of players within the fashion industry continue to use their
commitments to social responsibility and humanitarian action as a public
relations front and for their own economic benefit: Levi’s Water<less jeans, H&M’s
Conscious Collection, Fast Retailing Ltd.’s (Uniqlo) donation of clothes for Middle
Eastern refugee camps or Primark’s (Associated British Foods [ABF]) doubtful
self-representation as an ethical partner following the catastrophic collapse of
the Rana Plaza factory building in Bangladesh in 2013. For example, the Primark
website features a whole section on ‘Our Ethics’,15 where, in 2016, the company
described their compensations for Rana Plaza victims and, in 2019, shows
a ‘360 virtual tour’ through a tidy Bangladeshi factory, as well as its corporate
partnerships with NGOs such as the Ethical Trading Initiative, Newlife the Charity
for Disabled Children or the Partnership for Cleaner Textile. Last but not least, the
fast-fashion company portrays itself as a model of ethical business practices by
offering downloads of educational resources for teachers and students in business
studies.16
As terms like ‘organic growth’, ‘human rights’ or ‘sustained investment policy’
have migrated from the principles of the Global Compact into annual reports
for investors, an enormous number of fashion firms have started to issue press
releases and include information on their websites to represent their social and
environmental responsibility and humanitarian engagement. These documents
often feature colourful images of racialized textile workers and craftswomen.
Representations of Western ethicality are here signalled by images of ‘exotic’
and distant people, places and practices, enabling the industry to pursue its
exploitation while making few concrete changes to their supply chain.17 The British
global fashion company Monsoon/Accessorize exemplifies this strategy with
advertisements displaying ‘beautiful pieces that have been handmade by craftsmen
and women, using traditional techniques passed down through generations’.18 The

36 the NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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FIGURE 2.2 Monsoon/Accessorize Artisan Welfare Programme. Courtesy: Monsoon/

Accessorize.

company even claims to run an Artisan Welfare Programme (Figure 2.2) for craft
projects ‘across Asia’, currently based in India and Afghanistan, represented by
images of women in colourful saris unrolling threads. However, scores from the
Fashion Transparency Index, which investigates the one hundred largest global
fashion companies, reveal that Monsoon/Accessorize has been rated below
10 per cent on its realization of the information published on their social and
environmental policies, practices and impacts in 2017.19 One could name this
craftwashing as the firm articulates their corporate identity with catchphrases
like ‘artisan’, ‘ethical trading’, ‘charity’ and ‘sustainability’.20
The craftwashing strategies in the Monsoon/Accessorize campaign correspond
with Development and Environmental Policy Project’s specialist Chukwumerjie
Okereke’s analysis of the way that neoliberal appeal is closely connected to the
promise to simultaneously deliver economic growth as well as environmental and
cultural protection.21 In this campaign (and others like it), textiles and crafts act as
visual, physically sensible representations of humanitarian, labour and ecological
norms and values established by the global agenda. Given this perspective, global
craft can be discussed in relation to what Jacques Rancière terms an ‘aesthetic
metapolitics’.22 For Rancière, metapolitics attempts to realize what politics can
only give the appearance of achieving: to change not only the law and order of
the state, but also the specific forms of individual lives. Thus, the contemporary
ethical discourse, Rancière states: ‘is only the point of honour given to the new
forms of domination’.23 Spivak also points out that an ethical imperative always
acts as a force of hierarchization that ‘may carry within itself the agenda of a kind
of social Darwinism – the fittest must shoulder the burden of righting the wrongs
of the unfit – and the possibility of an alibi’.24 On a military level, notions of ethical
responsibility and of making oneself a ‘force for good’ in the world are a common
formula for justifying interventions in sovereign countries.25 Likewise, economic

ETHICAL FASHION, CRAFT AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM 37

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notions of honour, doing-good and participation in ethical discourses mirror

new forms of domination on a global scale: a neoliberal shift that merges power
relations of global governance policies with those of Western economies and
societies. Further, we might consider how these initiatives impose Western taste on
Indigenous production and crafts, perpetuating a form of cultural colonialism.26
The professionalization and institutionalization of communication among
NGOs, and their cooperation with corporations, also partly weakens their claims.27
In these new forms of governance, more than two-thirds of NGOs accredited by
the United Nations are from industrialized countries, and this tends to influence
majority-voting situations in UN discussions. This gives rise to overlapping
interests of NGOs and industrialized countries with regard to questions of labour
rights and environmental standards, which are denied in many countries of the
global South because of over-regulation and protectionist arrangements. Though
countries of the global South hold the majority of votes in intergovernmental
arenas such as the General Assembly of the United Nations, they often cannot
enforce their interests. And even when NGOs are based in the global South, there
is no guarantee that they act in the interest of the local population instead of
representing particular interests of global capitalist elites.28 As a result of global
governance initiatives within global politics, the United Nations has become one
actor among many, and during the last decades many NGOs gained influence
where traditional humanitarian organizations lost ground.29

From blue helmets to fashion and

craft: Policies of global governance30
Making a political ‘jump … from blue helmets, to food aid to fashion’,31 in 2006
the United Nations turned to ethical fashion and crafts as a political tool for
global governance with the establishment of the UN Ethical Fashion Initiative
by the International Trade Centre (ITC) as a Joint Body Initiative of the United
Nations and the World Trade Organization in Geneva. An article entitled ‘Why
Is the United Nations Working in Fashion?’ questions the UN’s shift from
peacekeeping interventions and humanitarian assistance to fashion as a political
tool for governance and development aid: ‘To move from humanitarian assistance
to development, one thing the United Nations does is to invest in economic
development by helping such countries build the skills to export. And hence the
jump … from blue helmets, to food aid to fashion.’32 The United Nations first
developed its ethical fashion program as a governance strategy for pacification
in countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and Mozambique that had
experienced or were recovering from civil conflict. Aiming to bridge ‘the work
of development and the fashion system’, the initiative mainly focuses on creating
new niche markets for luxury fashion: ‘We connect the poorest of the poor to the

38 the NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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markets of the world via fashion.’33 In 2010, a second UN Ethical Fashion Initiative,
titled Fashion4Development (F4D) and aimed at assisting African designers,
began under the patronage of Bangladeshi supermodel and designer Bibi Russell.
Since then, Russell has been replaced by role model Evie Evangelou, and F4D’s
concept has shifted to focus on charity events such as global runway shows and
class-specific First Ladies Luncheons organized by Madame Ban Soon-Taek (the
wife of UN Secretary General 2007–2016 Ban Ki-Moon) stressing that the fashion
industry could lift people from poverty.34 More recently with António Guterres as
the secretary general, the event, still under the patronage of Evangelou, cooperates
with the Organization of African First Ladies against HIV/AIDS (OAFLA).35
Currently, the Ethical Fashion Initiative works with African fashion designers
to promote their work. In 2015, four designers were invited to Florence for the
Constellation Africa Show at Pitti’s menswear fashion fair: Nigerian label Orange
Culture by Adebayo Oke-Lawal, South African knitwear brand MaXhosa by
Laduma Ngxokolo, Projecto Mental by Tekasala Ma’at Nzinga and Shunnoz
Fiel from Angola, as well as British-Ivorian Alexis Temomanin’s label Dent de
Man.36 One year later, the Ethical Fashion Initiative’s second Generation Africa
Show showcased ‘the creativity of Africa’37 from a different angle. Featuring the
Autumn/Winter 2016–17 collections of AKJP, Ikiré Jones, Lukhanyo Mdinigi
and Nicholas Coutts and U.Mi-1, the show gained a lot of attention, as three
asylum seekers were invited to model on the runway, staged to be looked at as
‘part of an empowering international event celebrating creativity from Africa’, ‘to
raise awareness on migration’, to ‘demonstrate fashion’s capacity to support the
betterment of society’ and give ‘them an opportunity to earn a wage’.38 After the
show, Simone Cipriani, leader of the Ethical Fashion Initiative announced a pilot
program to assist asylum seekers with finding work in Italy’s fashion industry, and
training them for employment, if they would return to their country of birth.39
Since 2006, the Ethical Fashion Initiative has built a new globally governed
ethical regime of fashion and craft with an economy based on more than 7,000
artisans mostly from African countries Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya,
Mali, as well as from Haiti, Cambodia and the West Bank of Palestine. The
UN International Trade Centre has established bases in Haiti; Nairobi, Keyna;
and Accra, Ghana, and it even aims to expand to new areas soon, notably in
Brazil, India, Mexico and Peru.40 Niche markets, and especially the production
of crafts, described as ‘the skills of the artisans’,41 are highly rated within both
fashion and UN initiatives as strategies for so-called developing countries that
are not set up to compete with high-volume, low-cost manufacturing states. Thus,
each country is represented by its specific crafts: Haiti for ‘horn with carving, fer
découpé using discarded steel oil drums, papier-mâché, beadwork, paper beads
and patchwork quilting’; Burkina Faso and Mali for dyeing yarn, spinning yarn,
hand-weaving, bogolan (traditionally dyed cotton fabrics with fermented mud),
basilan dyeing (using a variety of local vegetable tinctures, earth pigments and

ETHICAL FASHION, CRAFT AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM 39

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minerals) and indigo textile design techniques and Kenya for ‘beading, sewing,
stitching, crocheting, embroidery, brass work, horn and bone carving’.42 Though
the Ethical Fashion Initiative praises itself for having ‘access to the most
talented craft­speople with artisanal skills linking back to their cultural heritage’,43
it trades crafts as though they were natural resources that can be mined for the
global fashion industry, capitalizing on craft’s association with authenticity,
sustainability and ethics. This again coincides with Okereke’s analysis of how
the ethics of global sustainability intertwine with neoliberal ideas of justice.44
He states that neoliberalism is not only a political and economic concept, but
also an environmental and ethical project with distinctive modes of resource
appropriation, property rights, as well as the intensification of ethnic, tribal and
vernacular references, and the commodification of nature.
The UN Ethical Fashion Initiative fosters these neoliberal strategies by
encouraging a broad variety of ecological textile techniques and traditional
handicrafts, while positioning the skills of local artisans as a source of inspiration
for the global market: ‘This inspires fashion designers from around the world and
gives fashion brands a unique opportunity to produce authentic ethical fashion
goods.’45
Just as craftworkers are featured on the websites of the global fashion enterprises,
the UN Ethical Fashion Initiative also uses marketing images of artisans wearing
colourful dress, spinning, dyeing, sewing and hand-weaving in single or collective
poses, such as a group of Black craftswomen in Burkina Faso working with cotton
to spin yarn for weaving (Figure 2.3). The predominantly Black artisans and textile
workers of the Ethical Fashion Initiative produce work mainly for white Western
luxury labels and class-specific consumers of Carmina Campus, Sass & Bide, Stella
McCartney, Stella Jean, Mimco or jeweller Chan Luu.46 In an exemplary case,
Vivienne Westwood referenced the economic angle of the UN Ethical Fashion
Initiative when she produced her Ethical Fashion Africa Collection in Kenya.47

FIGURE 2.3 Women in Burkina Faso process cotton to make yarn for weaving.
Courtesy: Ethical Fashion Initiative.

40 the NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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Westwood’s collection became a flagship campaign for the Ethical Fashion Initiative
with politically inflected catchphrases such as ‘We are not a charity, this is work’
and calling upon women’s emancipation with a tone reminiscent of what Spivak
has termed the ‘white woman’s burden of the fittest’.48 Materials from the campaign
state: ‘Our overarching goal is to empower women.’49 Cipriani, head of the UN
Ethical Fashion Initiative speaks of the mutual benefit for luxury designers: ‘we
connect the most marginalized people to the top of fashion’s value chain for
mutual benefit.’50 As part of this swap, Westwood receives and flaunts her status as
a do-gooder. ‘It’s quite incredible to think that we might be able to save the world
through fashion’,51 Westwood has said in press interviews. Artist Juergen Teller,
who photographed the Ethical Fashion Africa Collection in Kenya, did the same: ‘we
were part of something good, not such fashion-idiots.’52 Nevertheless, Teller staged
a promotional photograph of Westwood herself posed in a garbage dump wearing
a draped dress printed with Rubens’s 1618 painting The Rape of the Daughters of
Leucippus, laced boots, ankle warmers, and carrying her Gold Label handbag with
the slogan ‘I’m expensive’ (Figure 2.4, Plate 2). Though the colonial lens of a classy,
white gaze the campaign betrays a ‘slumming chic’ where the brown-and-white
colour palate and visual language of Westwood’s baroque-printed gown stylishly
match with pieces of garbage underfoot, signs of environmental disaster and the
signifiers of poverty represented by the wooden shelters in the backdrop of the
site. The campaign has been widely criticized, for example by Kyle Tregurtha from

FIGURE 2.4 Juergen Teller, Vivienne, Vivienne Westwood campaign, Autumn Winter
2011, Nairobi, 2011. Courtesy: Juergen Teller.

ETHICAL FASHION, CRAFT AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM 41

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Another Africa, who points out that the campaign’s default position towards Africa
is defined by ‘poverty and calamity’, is ‘reminiscent of missionary work’ as well as
‘patronizing’ in an outdated colonial manner.53
Correspondingly, the Ethical Fashion Initiative and its network of partners
in the global luxury industry have distributed a new definition of ‘luxury’ that
highlights the accumulation of ethical capital: today’s luxury should be socially
responsible and ethical, and should also be sustainable from an economic
viewpoint. This definition was first proposed at the International Herald Tribune
2012 luxury conference entitled Empowering African Artisans by key actors
from the Ethical Fashion Initiative like Cipriani, Fendi and Westwood under the
patronage of fashion critic of Suzy Menkes, where they discussed Africa’s potential
as an ultimate consumer of luxury goods.54 Under the auspices of so-called mutual
benefit, a new ‘fashion value chain’55 emerged, thus fabricating a conscious class
of ethically ‘better’ and morally superior consumers. In summary, the UN Ethical
Fashion Initiative aims for both: peacekeeping strategies and a working business
where – using Spivak’s term – ‘subaltern’ artisans and textile workers manufacture
ethical capital as an added value for Western consumers, as well as for the global
fashion industry.
Following Spivak’s diagnosis, we can identify an ‘implicit connection between
world governance and the self-styled international civil society.’56 The International
Trade Centre’s Executive Director Patricia Francis even acts as a booster for
the political interconnection between ethical fashion and governance on her
level: ‘The glossy world of fashion is far removed from blue helmets, food aid or
peace treaties – but it is also part of the United Nations’ work to ensure the world’s
people have better, safer lives.’57 However, Spivak identifies important concerns
about these kinds of global social movements:

The leaders from the domestic ‘below’ – for the subaltern an ‘above’ – not
realizing the historically established discontinuity between themselves and
the subaltern, counsel self-help with great supervisory benevolence. This
is important to remember because the subalterns’ obvious inability to do
so without sustained supervision is seen as proof of the need for continued
intervention.58

Spivak also points out that contemporary human rights discourses are fuelled by
relentless ideological pressure from the global North, even when they are initiated
in the South.59 According to her, ethical practices create hierarchical orders where
the subjects and producers of the work of righting wrongs ‘shared above a class
line that to some extent and unevenly cuts across race and the North-South
divide’.60 It is remarkable that ‘Righting Wrongs’ uses textile metaphors to define
the subaltern, emphasizing their removal from the ‘dominant loom’ as Spivak
writes. She continues, ‘see the same knit textile as a torn cultural fabric in terms of

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its removal from the dominant loom in a historical moment. That is what it means
to be a subaltern’.61 The ‘subordinate subaltern’, is as diverse as the ‘recipients of
Human Rights activity’62:

I use the word subordinate here because they are the recipients of human
rights bounty, which I see as ‘the burden of the fittest,’ and which … has the
ambivalent structure of enabling violation that anyone of goodwill associates
with the white man’s burden.63

From a historical perspective, practices of ethical fashion and its understandings

of craft follow in the colonial tradition of white charity, and in the history of
industrialization where textile labour had become a social instrument of gender
and class distinction. In 1904, German philosopher Georg Simmel had already
formatted a critique of fashion and honour in the modern age by underscoring the
class-formative function of both: ‘Fashion … is a product of class distinction and
operates like a number of other forms, honour especially, the double function of
which consists of revolving within a given circle.’64
Currently, the hierarchical structuring of class, race and gender through textile
labour, craft and fashion are redefined and adapted by the neoliberal global
economy under the signs of ecology, social justice and ethical consumption.
Sociologist Patrik Aspers argues that global capitalism is still in an early stage,
‘and in the same way as capitalism caused social commodities in the West
during its Early Phases, global capitalism does in the developing world.’65 These
contemporary initiatives are historically connected to the class-specific gestures
of welfare practices in the early stages of modern Western liberalist capitalism,
where women in need were trained and employed for textile workshops and
homework. Contemporary neoliberalism similarly leverages the idea of ‘female
empowerment’, and in the case of the UN Ethical Fashion Initiative emphasizes
that their employees live in ‘slums’ and ‘rural areas’.66 Stella McCartney calls upon
this class-specific language of charitable action to advertise her Noemi Leopard
Print Tote bag with: ‘This tote bag is made with the United Nations International
Trade Centre which provides work to disadvantaged communities in Kenya.’67
McCartney’s marketing positions handmade craft as a relic of a barter deal between
the supposedly impoverished global South and Western ethical consumers: ‘Each
is created by hand from printing to stitching and our production has reached 160
people in poverty stricken areas.’68 Following Spivak, the teaching of benevolence
and to be a ‘helper’, is cultural absolutism at its worst. The simple economic act
of remunerating people acceptably for their labour is thus transformed into
a performative ethical act of class hierarchy. Just as Spivak highlights how
‘the burden of the fittest’ and the duty of re-territorializing ‘the white man’s
burden’69 currently touches the economic sphere, Simone Cipriani, head of the
UN Ethical Fashion Initiative, claims to have created a new business model. He

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calls this ‘a system to organize employment and therefore give dignity to people’,
stating that ‘another kind of fashion is possible, bringing social and environmental
sensibility’.70 However, Okereke argues that ecological modernization discourses
and the related concepts of the ‘good life’ represent a very powerful handmaiden
of the neoliberal project: ‘The first fault line between sustainable development
and the two neoliberal notions of justice lies in the way in which the idea of the
good life may be conceptualized. The problem resides in the fact that, although
sustainability as [is] an ideal order … [it] does not accept complete heterogeneity
in conceptions of the good life.’71 Therefore, for Western fashion brands and
consumers to create the illusion of doing ‘good work’, a Western ideal of the good
life must be imposed through the chain of production.

Craft(washing), sustainability and the new

spirit of global capitalism
In their 2003 book, French sociologists Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello introduce
The New Spirit of Capitalism as the relevant ideology that justifies engagement in
capitalism.72 Their argument draws from Max Weber, who defined the ethos as the
centre of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ and as a set of ethical motivations. While ethos
might at first appear foreign to capitalist logic, it in fact inspires entrepreneurs
to further accumulate capital.73 Weber stresses that rational modern capitalism
simply exists through the ethical restriction of the legitimate forms of monetary
acquisition.74 The spirit of capitalism itself is characterized by historically variable
patterns of values that mainly result in a dynamic relation between capitalism and
critique.75 Critique is the driving force in changes of the spirit of capitalism,76 and
Boltanski and Chiapello describe two forms of critique with historical roots in the
nineteenth century: ‘the artistic critique, which elaborates demands for liberation
and authenticity, and the social critique, which denounces poverty and exploitation’.77
While practices of institutional critique in the art world have been integrated into the
discourse of capitalism and therefore partially satisfied during the 1990s, Boltanski
and Chiapello suggest that we are witnessing the revival of social critique in the
twenty-first century.78 Following this, the discourses of ethical fashion signify a shift
towards this new spirit of capitalism, where global capitalism aims to integrate social
critique into its system. The values proposed by ethical fashion and the parallel rise
of craft(washing) can be seen as part of such a ‘new spirit’, anchored in the social and
ecological antiglobalization critique of the 1990s as well as its neoliberal adaptions
by the Global Compact and enterprises described earlier.
As part of this commodification, fashion and handicraft become the carriers
of emotions like love and trust or of virtues like honesty, and call upon ecology
and sustainability. Marketing researchers have demonstrated in detail how love is
named as the most important driver for the appeal of a ‘handmade effect’: made

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with artisan love and containing love of a symbolic nature.79 More precisely, this is
a major incentive for craftwashing, as Western consumers follow this handmade
affect and indicate stronger purchasing intentions and the will to pay more for
handmade products, for example, when buying gifts for their loved ones.80 At
the same time, ethical fashion gains a quasi-religious implication ‘in which
ethical referred to philosophically guided actions and behaviours as determined
by their impact on others’.81 In response, the perception of honesty has become
highly relevant in Western consumer decisions, alongside social responsibility
and environmental consciousness. Today, apparel is regarded as a key market of
green economics, and sales of textile goods has increased tenfold since 2000.82 In
2014, several luxury fashion enterprises including the Dior Group, listed a growth
of up to 12 per cent in organic fashion, perfumes, cosmetics, jewellery, wine and
spirits.83 Nevertheless, critical qualitative research in fashion and beauty has shown
that the use of organic cosmetics is motivated more by ‘egocentric than ecocentric
concerns.’84
As Boltanski and Chiapello outline, capitalism requires reasons for committed
engagement and must thus be orientated toward the common good.85 Ethical
fashion with its inherent shift from craftivism to craftwashing can be read as a
dialectical operation, where global capitalism needs and uses the opponents of
globalization to generate its ethos: ‘As a result, it needs its enemies, people whom
it outrages and who are opposed to it, to find the moral supports it lacks and to
incorporate mechanisms of justice whose relevance it would otherwise have no
reason to acknowledge.’86
NGOs like Clean Clothes Campaign have rigorously targeted the bluewashing
of the Ethical Fashion segment of H&M.87 Their adbusters-style critique of the
Conscious Collection addressed the concerns for malnourished and underpaid
workers in the Cambodian garment industry by redubbing the collection
Unconscious Collapses and calling on H&M to live up to its ‘conscious’, ‘sustainable’
and ‘responsible’ declarations.88
Ethical fashion and its related interest in craft and textile labour mirror this
dialectic and the ambivalent incorporation of antiglobalization critique into
contemporary discourses of global capitalism such that, as Spivak says diversifies
the ‘subordinate subaltern’ as the ‘recipients of Human Rights activity’89 and
subordinates the structures of ‘enabling violation’ under the ‘goodwill’ of ‘the white
man’s burden’.90 However, the field of fashion theory and textile studies is slowly
moving to offer critiques of the sustainability paradigm for its pioneering function
in neocolonialist agendas. Presenting a rebuke to the ‘ethics brigade’, architectural
critic Austin Williams has recently applied his critique of the emerging ethical
and sustainability dogma to the field of fashion.91 Similarly, cultural and fashion
theorist Efrat Tseëlon has echoed Williams’s questions on ethical fashion as
a self-appointed authority that imposes itself on a so-called underdeveloped
world.92 Ethical fashion, Williams states, ‘is a faddish interpretation of this

ETHICAL FASHION, CRAFT AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM 45

46

political agenda that provides moral authority as well as market leaderships’.93

Showcases and marketing strategies for handicraft, the protection of artisans
and traditional techniques, ethical object lessons, love, charity and sustainability
are all preproduction modes for this neocolonial spirit of global capitalism. The
craftivist politics embedded within 1990s antiglobalization critiques have been
commoditized, transformed and craftwashed in service of corporate identities and
the neoliberal and neocolonial economic order. Therefore, critical analysis of the
paradigms ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethicality’ and questioning their function on the
level of Global Governance is essential. It’s time for a shift in fashion and textile
studies toward decolonial queer-feminist perspectives on human right cultures
and politics on a global scale.

Notes
1 ‘Our Mission’, United Nations Global Compact, https://www.unglobalcompact.org/
what-is-gc/mission (accessed 9 April 2019).
2 ‘Vivienne Westwood’s Top Ten Political Moments’, Dazed, http://www.dazeddigital.
com/fashion/article/24335/1/vivienne-westwood-s-top-ten-political-moments
(accessed 25 May 2016).
3 ‘Our Partners, Vivienne Westwood’, Ethical Fashion Initiative, http://
ethicalfashioninitiative.org/partners/vivienne-westwood/ (accessed 25 May 2016).
4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. CIII,
no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 523−48, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/169150 (accessed
9 April 2019).
5 Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005).
6 Oxford Dictionaries (Oxford, 1999), www.oxforddictionaries.com/de/definition/
englisch/greenwash (accessed 9 April 2019).
7 The term greenwashing became popular and was even branded in the
Greenpeace Book on Greenwash, published on the occasion of the 1992 Earth
Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Bruno Kenny, The Greenpeace Book of Greenwash
(Amsterdam: Greenpeace, 1992).
8 Tanja Brühl and Elvira Rosert, Die UNO und Global Governance (Wiesbaden:
Springer VS, 2015), 375.
9 United Nations, Global Compact, www.unglobalcompact.org (accessed 9 April 2019).
10 ‘The Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact’, UN Global Compact, https://www.
unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/mission/principles (accessed 3 June 2016).
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 ‘Our Ethics’, Primark, http://www.primark.com/en/our-ethics (accessed 3 June 2016
and 9 April 2019).

46 the NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

47

16 Ibid.
17 Efrat Tseëlon, ‘Introduction: A Critique of the Ethical Fashion Paradigm’, in
Fashion and Ethics: Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, vol II, ed. Efrat Tseëlon
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 17.
18 ‘Our Artisan Collection’, Monsoon, www.uk.monsoon.co.uk/uk/women/artisan-
trade (accessed 30 July 2015).
19 Rebecca Ley, ‘#whomademyclothes: Transparency Poor in Garment Supply Chain,
Study Finds’, http://www.ethicalcorp.com/whomademyclothes-transparency-poor-
garment-supply-chain-study-finds (accessed 9 April 2019).
20 ‘Our Artisan Collection’, Monsoon, www.uk.monsoon.co.uk/uk/women/artisan-
trade (accessed 30 July 2015).
21 Chukwumerjie Okererke, Global Justice and Neoliberal Environmental Governance.
Ethics, Sustainable Development and International Co-Operation (Oxon: Routledge,
2008), 186.
22 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, Critical Horizons, vol.
7, no. 1 (2006): 18.
23 Ibid.
24 Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, 550.
25 Austin Williams, ‘Fashionable Dilemmas’, in Fashion and Ethics: Critical Studies in
Fashion and Beauty, vol. II, ed. Efrat Tseëlon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011), 79.
26 Tseëlon, ‘Introduction’, 17.
27 Brühl and Rosert, UNO und Global Governance, 373.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 This paragraph includes a short passage from ‘From Blue Helmets to Fashion and
Craft: Policies of Global Governance’, which is a revised section of a previously
published essay by the author, Elke Gaugele, ‘On the Ethical Turn in Fashion –
Policies of Governance and the Fashioning of Social Critique’, in Aesthetic Politics in
Fashion, ed. Elke Gaugele (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 216–20.
31 Natalie Domeisen and Prema de Sousa, ‘Why Is the United Nations Working in
Fashion?’ International Trade Forum Magazine, no. 3 (2006), www.tradeforum.org/
Why-is-the-United-Nations-Working-in-Fashion (accessed 9 April 2019).
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 United Nations, Department of Public Information, News and Media Division,
‘Press Conference on ‘Fashion 4 Development, A Global Platform to Advance the
Millennium Development Goals’, New York, 28 June 2012, www.un.org/News/
briefings/docs/2012/120628_Fashion.doc.ht and www.fashion4development.
com/2013-annual-luncheon (accessed 30 July 2015).
35 ‘F4D’s First Ladies Luncheon’, Fashion 4 Development, www.fashion4development.
com/first-ladies-luncheon (accessed 8 April 2019).
36 ‘ “Constellation Africa” show at Pitti Uomo’, Fashion Revolution, http://
fashionrevolution.org/constellation-africa-show-at-pitti-uomo/ (accessed 2 June 2016).

ETHICAL FASHION, CRAFT AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM 47

48

37 ‘Pitti Uomo 89’, Ethical Fashion Initiative, http://ethicalfashioninitiative.org/events/

pitti-uomo-89/ (accessed 2 June 2016).
38 Ibid.
39 Luke Leitch, ‘Four African-Designed Labels Get Their Big Break at Pitti Uomo’,
VOGUE online 14 January 2016, http://www.vogue.com/13387669/generation-
africa-show-pitti-uomo/ (accessed 9 April 2019).
40 ‘Where We Work’, Ethical Fashion Initiativewww.ethicalfashioninitiative.org/where-
we-work/ (accessed 30 July 2015).
41 ‘Ethical Fashion Initiative’, International Trade Center, www.intracen.org/exporters/
ethical-fashion/the-initiative (accessed 30 July 2015).
42 ‘Where We Work’, Ethical Fashion Initiative.
43 ‘Ethical Manufacturing’, Ethical Fashion Initiative, www.ethicalfashioninitiative.org/
ethical-manufacturing/#products (accessed 30 July 2015).
44 Okererke, Global Justice,172–86.
45 Ibid.
46 ‘Ethical Manufacturing’, Ethical Fashion Initiative.
47 Vivienne Westwood, ‘This Is Not Charity, This Is Work’, Vivienne Westwood Ethical
Fashion Initiative Collection, 28 January 2011, www.viviennewestwood.co.uk/w/
news/this-is-not-charity-this-is-work (accessed 14 July 2013).
48 Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, 524.
49 International Trade Center, Ethical Fashion Initiative, ‘We Use Fashion as a Vehicle
Out of Poverty, at the Same Time Fulfilling Fashion’s Desire to Be More Fair,’ www.
intracen.org/exporters/ethical-fashion (accessed 30 July 2015).
50 Suzy Menkes, ‘A Matchmaker Helps Artisans Find Luxury Jobs’, New York Times,
14 November 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/fashion/a-matchmaker-helps-
artisans-find-luxury-jobs.html (accessed 9 April 2019).
51 Olivia Bergin, ‘Vivienne Westwood’s Mission to Save the World, One Handbag at
a Time. The British Designer’s New Range of Handbags Will Benefit the People of
Kenya Who Handmake Them’, Telegraph, 9 August 2011, www.fashion.telegraph.
co.uk/news-features/TMG8691362/Vivienne-Westwoods-mission-to-save-the-
world-one-handbag-at-a-time.html (accessed 14 July 2013).
52 Elisabeth Raether, ‘Es sieht gut aus in Afrika’, ZEITmagazin, no. 41, 6 October 2011,
www.zeit.de/2011/41/KollektionWestwood (accessed 30 July 2015).
53 Kyle Tregurtha, ‘Vivienne Westwood, A Slight of Cast, Caste & Casting’, Another
Africa, 16 March 2012, http://www.anotherafrica.net/design/advertising/vivienne-
westwood-a-slight-of-cast-caste-casting (accessed 9 April 2019).
54 ‘The Promise of Africa. The Power of the Mediterranean’, International Herald
Tribune, Luxury Conference, Rome, 15–16 November 2012, www.ihtconferences.
com/luxury-2012/press-coverage.aspx (accessed 30 July 2015).
55 Menkes, ‘Matchmaker Helps Artisans Find Luxury Jobs’.
56 Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, 550.
57 Domeisen and de Susa, ‘United Nations Working in Fashion?’
58 Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, 535.

48 the NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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59 Ibid., 257.
60 Ibid., 524.
61 Ibid., 544.
62 Ibid., 546.
63 Ibid., 544.
64 Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, International Quarterly, 10 (1904): 133, www.modetheorie.
de/fileadmin/Texte/s/Simmel-Fashion_1904.pdf (accessed 9 April 2019).
65 Patrik Aspers, ‘A Note on Global Capitalism’, in Global Capitalism: The Road Ahead,
ed. Bharti Thakar (Hyderabad: Icfai University Press, 2008), 13.
66 ‘Ethical Fashion Initiative’, International Trade Center.
67 Stella McCartney, http://www.stellamccartney.com/ca/stella-mccartney/tote_
cod45267317or.html (accessed 10 September 2016).
68 Ibid.
69 Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, 538.
70 Menkes, ‘Matchmaker Helps Artisans Find Luxury Jobs’.
71 Okererke, Global Justice, 50.
72 Boltanksi and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 9.
73 Ibid., 8.
74 Gabriele Wagner and Philipp Hessinger, ‘Max Webers Protestantismus – These und
der neue Geist des Kapitalismus’, in Ein neuer Geist des Kaptialismus? Paradoxien und
Ambivalenzen der Netzwerkökonomie, ed. Gabriele Wagner and Philipp Hessinger
(Wiesbaden: Springer, 2008), 25.
75 Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 4.
76 Ibid., 28.
77 Ibid., 346.
78 Ibid.
79 Christoph Fuchs, Martin Schreier and Stijn van Osselaer, ‘The Handmade
Effect: What’s Love Got to Do with It?’ Journal of Marketing, vol. 79 (March
2015): 100, http://dx.doi.org/10.1509/jm.14.0018 (accessed 9 April 2019).
80 Ibid., 98.
81 Sue Thomas, ‘From “Green Blur” to Ecofashion: Fashioning an Eco-Lexicon’, Fashion
Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, vol. 12 (2008): 533.
82 The Co-Operative Group, Ethical Consumer Markets Report 2012, www.
ethicalconsumer.org/linkclick.aspx?fileticket=96yXzu8nyrc%3D&tabid=1557
(accessed 22 July 2013).
83 ‘Combined Shareholders Meeting’, Christian Dior Group, 9 December 2015, www.
dior-finance.com/en-US/Documentation/PresentationDesResultats/pdf/2014-12_
ag_slides_en.pdf (accessed 9 April 2019).
84 Tseëlon, ‘Introduction’, 61.
85 Boltanksi and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 28.
86 Ibid.

ETHICAL FASHION, CRAFT AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM 49

50

87 ‘Conscious? Not Really ...’, Clean Clothes Campaign, 24 March 2013, www.
cleanclothes.org/news/2013/03/25/conscious-not-really (accessed 9 April 2019).
88 Boltanksi and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 28.
89 Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, 546.
90 Ibid., 544.
91 Williams, ‘Fashionable Dilemmas’, 69.
92 Tseëlon, ‘Introduction’, 3–68.
93 Williams, ‘Fashionable Dilemmas’, 79.

50 the NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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3 SELVEN O’KEEF JARMON:

BEADING ACROSS
GEOGRAPHIES
Nicole Burisch

There’s a small village in the Czech Republic called Desna. For over 150 years,
the village has been the site for the production of glass beads, including the
Preciosa Ornela factory whose seed beads are distributed around the world and
used by groups from the Kayapo in the Amazon to the Masai Mara in Kenya. The
factory’s beads are sold in over 100 countries, and find their way into projects
that span personal, religious or ceremonial, decorative and tourist uses.1 This
text looks at beading practices and their associated materials to read connections
between places, economies and cultures, and to raise questions about the ways that
so-called traditional craft practices circulate within a contemporary global (art)
economy. The factory in Desna is an interesting starting point, as its functioning
relies on and emerges from a history of exchange across sites and cultures: from
glassmaking technology originating in Venice and adopted by Czech artisans over
four centuries ago, to beads traded by colonizers and incorporated into Indigenous
production throughout the Americas and Africa, to beading supplies that circulate
today in a globalized craft economy.
***
To think through these relationships, this text focuses on 360 Degrees Vanishing, a
project spearheaded by Houston-based artist Selven O’Keef Jarmon (Plate 3). The
project used beadworking practices from South Africa’s Eastern Cape to create an
architectural installation on the facade of the Art League of Houston (ALH), an
artist-run space in Texas. Starting in 2014, Jarmon collaborated with the ALH, the
Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Council (ECPACC) in East London,
groups of local volunteers, and beaders Zukiswa Meme, Ntombosindiso Maphini,
Zoliswa Mkangaye, Nolusindiso Jekemane, Mvuzo Ntlantsana, Joyce Kelele,
Nontobeko Ndiki, Tyhilelwa Bolana, Bukelwa Mhlontlo, Thembeka Maphetshana,
Nongenile Nyoka, Nonceba Zweni, Nozukile Sandile and Nozuko Mahlombe.
52

FIGURE 3.1 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, 360 Degrees Vanishing, 2019. Photo: Alex Barber.
Courtesy: Art League Houston.

Over a span of eighteen months, the beaders, from various Xhosa-speaking

municipalities in the Eastern Cape and ranging in age from 22 to 78, travelled
to Houston to work on the production of beaded panels, eventually assembled
and installed in late June 20192 on the outside of the ALH (Figure 3.1). The large
beads used in the 360 Degrees Vanishing project are made of acrylic and sourced
from The Beadery in Rhode Island, the last American company of its kind that
produces such materials.3 The final beaded installation with its circle of half green
and half orange on a sparkling white background, takes production usually scaled
for bodily adornment and increases it to an impressive architectural scale. The
result covers the ALH building with the products of accumulated time and creative
efforts of many hands, a visual representation of the communities that participated
and the knowledge transmitted through the work of the beaders.
Most scholars of beadwork trace back the production and use of beads as one of
the earliest forms of creative expression and exchange, with their circulation closely
tied to the expansion and development of early trading networks.4 Small, portable
and highly desirable as a form of barter currency, beads have been manufactured
and circulated since at least 40,000 years ago.5 Métis beadwork scholar Sherry Farrell
Racette describes how, in the nineteenth century, glass beads underwent processes
of ‘indigenization’,6 where materials introduced by colonizers became incorporated
into the dress and traditions of Indigenous peoples: ‘Women literally stitched new
goods into daily and ceremonial life.’7 Part of this process involves ‘transferring older

52 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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meanings on to new forms’.8 While Racette’s writings are concerned with the history
of beadwork in North America and its use by First Nations and Métis women, the
process is similar for South African beadwork, with glass (and eventually plastic)
beads replacing materials such as wood, shells, bone or seeds.9 Thus, as curator
Marie-Louise Labelle asserts, contemporary beadwork in this region ‘can be seen as
a continuation of a tradition that has been well established since time immemorial’.10
The critical framing of beads within ongoing processes of indigenization unsettles
the idea that an ‘authentic’ craft or art practice is necessarily tied to specific
materials (as evidenced by the work of the many contemporary Indigenous artists
who continue to incorporate a range of new materials into their practices). Instead
this framing makes space for the fact that beading, like any other cultural practice,
is rarely static or fixed. It is instead a dynamic and adaptable practice, specific to
each place, that continues to evolve to this day.11
In southern Africa, small amounts of glass beads from India were introduced
between 750 and 800 CE, the product of technologies and trade routes that
‘were already thousands of years old’.12 Specific beadwork patterns, styles and
colours have been used to communicate information about the wearer, including
leadership, age, marital status, spiritual practice or ethnic identity – while
simultaneously being the product of cross-cultural exchange and influence.13
Glass seed beads, like those produced in Desna, were introduced to the area in
vast quantities following European colonization and trade in the early 1800s and
adapted for local use, along with fabric.14 Since then, both wearing and practicing
beadwork have undergone shifts in cultural meaning, often in relation to the
renegotiation of group identities and the artificial distinctions ‘superimposed
by successive colonial and apartheid regimes in attempts to entrench separate
ethnic identities’.15 In recent instances, the making and wearing of beadwork has
been viewed by some as a ‘symbol of resistance’, a ‘self-conscious statement of
defiance against colonial and missionary attempts to redefine African culture and
identity’.16 Prior to this, beadwork was at times viewed as an outdated practice,
and linked to broader conversations around the relevance and significance of
wearing traditional dress.17 Bulelwa Bam, manager of the Eastern Cape Arts and
Crafts Hub, and the principal organizer of the South African participants for
360 Degrees Vanishing, affirms that ‘The Eastern Cape is made up of different
tribes, and each tribe has its own traditional dress … distinct and different than
the others.’18 Bam also describes how, while these meanings and practices are
still known and most people keep an outfit for ceremonial purposes, younger
generations are less likely to adhere to the traditional determinations around
colours and patterns, gender and age. Thinking through the connection to Desna
and the Preciosa factory (who count the Xhosa-speaking groups in the Eastern
Cape among their clients), beadwork remains a part of local traditions, while also
undergoing changes due to modernization and the adaptation of the practice for
sale to tourist markets.

SELVEN O’KEEF JARMON 53

54

FIGURE 3.2 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, 360 Degrees Vanishing, 2014, artist’s concept
drawing. Courtesy: Selven O’Keef Jarmon.

360 Degrees Vanishing builds upon these developments, to draw attention to the
skills and traditions of beadwork, and to counter the loss of knowledge around its
uses. The ideas for the project emerged in the mid-2000s when Jarmon returned
to South Africa, where he had previously lived and worked (Figure 3.2). As in
his earlier projects, Jarmon sees 360 Degrees Vanishing as a way to work with
local producers to find ways to empower them through creative production. He
became interested in beadworking, and the ways that older forms and techniques
were being lost as beadworkers adapted their designs to appeal to tourist markets.
Jarmon describes how previously ‘these were not objects just meant to be sold on
the streets to tourists as they are now. [They] had so much meaning and use in
the culture: as a currency, in the house and in ceremonies. As these ceremonies
disappeared and as people moved from the rural to the urban [areas], the
significance and meaning was lost.’19 The notion of a ‘vanishing’ culture is often
perpetuated as part of colonial erasure and appropriation of Indigenous cultures.
However, Jarmon’s concerns about losing the knowledge of the traditional uses
and colours of beadwork are echoed by Bam and the beaders themselves, along
with the clear desire to maintain a connection to these histories. The 360 Degrees
Vanishing project addresses this situation, by centring the expertise of the older
beaders in the creation of the installation in Houston. Most importantly, the
beaders occupy a position of authority, their knowledge of beading practices and
their significance remains at the core of the project (Figure 3.3, Plate 4). During
their trips to Houston they taught beading to teams of local volunteers, and to

54 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

55

FIGURE 3.3 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, 360 Degrees Vanishing, beaders working at Art
League Houston, Houston, Texas, 2015. Photo: Peter Gershon.

younger South African beaders who were part of the visiting groups. Jarmon notes
how this is a distinct contrast to how people from their area usually experience
travel; most often they are sent abroad to receive training, whereas with this project
they are the ones doing the training.20 Not only is their knowledge and labour
being valued (the beaders were all paid an honorarium), but because of their
ongoing visits and presence, they are also connecting to and commenting on the
culture of Houston as much as the other way around, in a way that unsettles the
relationships between ‘aid’, ‘visitors’, ‘experts’ and ‘tourists’.21
For Jarmon, the ‘objective is to find a way to keep them in the creative seat
while they think about other possibilities for what they could do with this thing
they create … other markets, other perspectives’.22 These aims are echoed in the
2014–2015 Annual Report of the ECPACC, which describes the project as a ‘rare
export of uniquely Eastern Cape skills to the international stage’ and goes on
to state that, ‘[T]‌his exporting of skills will result in immeasurable benefits for
both the craft industry and our economy.’23 Significantly, the language in both the
ECPACC report and in Jarmon’s discussion reveals a focus on how to monetize
or ‘find markets’, as a key strategy for preserving and supporting beadworking
knowledge. Value here, is clearly linked to the position of the practice within
capitalist markets. Jarmon stresses that these practices ‘already have value’24 before

SELVEN O’KEEF JARMON 55

56

their incorporation into his project in Houston, suggesting that we might also
question how various forms of cultural production might be valued, regardless
of their viability within the market. In light of these considerations, it is worth
unpacking the ways that value is communicated or acknowledged throughout the
evolution of the project, and for its various participants.
In many ways, ‘value’ in Jarmon’s project is constructed in relation to the
position of the work within a contemporary art economy and the translation of a
‘traditional’ craft practice into this context, often in ways that emphasize process
and community exchange. Jarmon and Bam both describe the ways that the project
encourages dialogue, conversation, exchange and a sense of community. In this
sense, 360 Degrees Vanishing resembles other relational craft projects that focus on
the performative and collaborative co-creation of craft as a core part of the work.
This emphasis puts the project in line with those that capitalize on the performance
and accessibility of social crafting in the gallery to engage viewer-participants and
potentially effect social change (see Noni Brynjolson, Chapter 4). Similar to others
like it, 360 Degrees Vanishing raises questions about how to best acknowledge
or document the labour of collaborative or relational craft projects: If value is
centred around and produced through social exchange and collaboration, how
are these relationships communicated, archived or supported during and beyond
the run of the project?25 And how are these aspects of the project represented in
the final installation? 360 Degrees Vanishing provided valuable space not only
for the creation of the work, but also for the formation of relationships between
participants and exchange between diverse communities – hopefully aspects that
will continue to resonate in the completed installation.
In a related vein, 360 Degrees Vanishing intersects with broader dialogues
around the translation (and recent prevalence) of craft and other so-called outsider
art practices within contemporary art spaces. These kinds of projects can highlight
the problematic institutional politics and histories that frame this inclusion,
particularly those that hinge upon the association of craft with ‘outsider’ or ‘folk’
art and the public performance of ‘exotic’ identity in relation to these frames. As
curator Thomas J. Lax asks with regard to an exhibition at The Studio Museum
in Harlem that combined objects and practices from Black artists working both
within and outside the contemporary art world: ‘What are the ethical, aesthetic
and political consequences of transporting these objects into the context of a
contemporary art museum?’26 This line of questioning is invaluable and should
continue to guide reflections on how institutions acknowledge the expertise,
labour and creative autonomy of all artists – as well as the colonial histories that
have shaped (and continue to shape) relationships between art and craft.27
360 Degrees Vanishing is also notable for the way it has leveraged funding
across various private and public sources to support costs. Alongside the
ALH and the ECPACC, the project received support from the Morgan Family
Foundation, the Houston Arts Alliance, and institutional partners such as the

56 The NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Our Image Film and Arts, the City
of Houston, Rice University, Texas Southern University, the Mitchell Center
at the University of Houston and Workshop Houston among others.28 Jarmon
also raised funds through the sale of beaded souvenir items, a specially branded
‘360 Degrees’ coffee blend, crowdfunding socials, South African themed cocktail
events and soirees for wealthy art patrons. While these kinds of initiatives are
de rigueur in Houston’s art fundraising scene, there is nevertheless a substantial
(and uncomfortable) difference between the community-based beading circles
labouring to produce the panels and the elite partygoers featured in Houston’s
society pages attending these events. Value, in the form of cultural and social
capital, is here accrued and leveraged across multiple sites and class registers.
If economic advantages and new markets are part of the potential benefits for
the project’s creators and participants, it remains to be seen how these will be
supported in the long term.
360 Degrees Vanishing is a multifaceted project that exemplifies one of the most
interesting issues in craft and contemporary art today: namely, how so-called
traditional practices accrue social, economic and artistic value as they move across
geographic and cultural contexts. The historical and present-day global circulation
of beads and the practice of beadwork make this an especially relevant project
for thinking about these shifts, as well as considering how Indigenous cultural
practices continue to circulate and function both locally and globally. With its
emphasis on collaboration and empowerment, 360 Degrees Vanishing articulates
one possible way for this work to take place. It also underscores the ongoing need
for projects that place self-determination and a nuanced understanding of cultural
economies at their centre.

***
This text begins with a factory in Desna, a small village whose connections can
be traced across a global network of beadworking communities. At the time of
writing, a story broke about another factory connected to bead production and
glassmaking: Portland, Oregon-based Bullseye Glass came under suspicion
for contributing to elevated levels of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in the
surrounding neighbourhoods. Bullseye suspended production of certain colours
and in turn impacted a global community of artists and producers who relied on
their products.29 The Bullseye Glass example is a notable high-profile instance of
the environmental impacts of beading materials coming under scrutiny, a kind
of attention that could (and arguably should) be brought into any conversation
around the production and circulation of craft. This case serves as a reminder
that the raw materials for craft (whether glass or plastic) must always come from
somewhere, and that this ‘somewhere’ is an actual place where people live, air
circulates and rivers flow, and is connected not only to communities of crafters,
but also to the land.

SELVEN O’KEEF JARMON 57

58

Notes
1 Rick Lyman, ‘Glass Seed Beads Made in Czech Village Adorn Bodies of the World’s
Tribes’, New York Times, 12 January 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/
world/europe/glass-beads-made-in-czech-village-adorn-bodies-of-the-worlds-
tribes.html?_r=0 (accessed 24 August 2017). The article also details how the bead
manufacturing industry as a whole has shifted over the last couple of decades,
with cheaply produced plastic beads edging out smaller producers or family-run
workshops in the village. Glass beads like Preciosa’s are now often reserved for
personal use or high-end projects destined for wealthy collectors.
2 The Art League of Houston suffered damage to its roof due to Hurricane
Harvey, delaying the final installation of the project. Updates here: https://www.
artleaguehouston.org/360-degrees-vanishing/ (accessed 5 January 2019).
3 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, email correspondence with the author, 21 September 2016.
4 Sharma Saitowitz, ‘Towards a History of Glass Beads’, in Ezakwantu: Beadwork from
the Eastern Cape, catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same
name at the South African National Gallery, 31 October 1993–29 May 1994 (Cape
Town: South African National Gallery, 1993), 36.
5 Lois Sherr Dublin, The History of Beads (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 18.
6 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade: The Indigenization of
European Trade Goods in Historic and Contemporary Canada’, Journal of Museum
Ethnography, no. 20 (March 2008): 69.
7 Ibid., 72. See also ‘ “Islands of Memory” and Places to Land: Haudenosaunee
Beadwork in the Schreiber Collection’, Alexandra Kehsenni:io Nahwegahbow, NGC
Review/Revue du MBAC, (2018): 1–10.
8 Racette, ‘My Grandmothers Loved to Trade’, 71.
9 Saitowitz, ‘Towards a History of Glass Beads’, 41. See also Marie-Louise Labelle,
Beads of Life: Eastern and Southern African Beadwork from Canadian Collections
(Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2005), 51.
10 Labelle, Beads of Life, 2.
11 It is important to note that the ongoing work of rethinking outmoded colonial
models for the framing of beadwork (and craft broadly) is a project that can be
addressed through critical as well as curatorial approaches. The curator for the
exhibition Ezakwantu, Emma Bedford, makes this goal explicit when she states
that: ‘Every attempt has been made to avoid presenting beadwork and the society
which produced it as fixed in time and space; as if they had originated from a
static or idealised past. The questionable notion of disappearing cultures has
been abandoned in favour of underscoring the many and various ways in which
beadwork has changed and continues to change.’ Emma Bedford, ed., Ezakwantu
Beadwork from the Eastern Cape (Cape Town: South African National Gallery,
1993), 10.
12 Dublin, The History of Beads, 140. See also Saitowitz, ‘Towards a History of Glass
Beads’, 35–41 for an in-depth account of the history, development and use of beads in
southern Africa, as well as details about their manufacture, export and trade.

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13 Emma Bedford, ‘Exploring Meanings and Identities: Beadwork from the Eastern
Cape in the South African National Gallery’, in Ezakwantu: Beadwork from the
Eastern Cape (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1993), 14.
14 Labelle, Beads of Life, 49–51, Dublin, The History of Beads, 140.
15 Bedford, ‘Exploring Meanings and Identities’, 10.
16 André Proctor and Sandra Klopper, ‘Through the Barrel of a Bead: The Personal and
the Political in the Beadwork of the Eastern Cape’, in Ezakwantu: Beadwork from
the Eastern Cape, ed. Emma Bedford (Cape Town: South African National Gallery,
1993), 58.
17 See Procter and Klopper, ‘Through the Barrel of a Bead’, 56–65 and Labelle, Beads
of Life, 153–65 for detailed accounts of shifts in the perception of beadwork as a
formerly ‘outdated’ practice to its more current association with resistant or anti-
colonial positions.
18 Bulelwa Bam and beaders, interview with the author, 11 December 2014.
19 Selven O’Keef Jarmon interviewed by Sixto Wagan, ‘Selven O’Keef Jarmon: Fashion
Designer/Visual Artist’, University of Houston Center for Art & Social Engagement,
Profiles in Leadership, http://www.uh.edu/cota/case/profiles/jarmon.php (accessed
24 September 2017).
20 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, interview with the author, 29 September 2015.
21 Harbeer Sandhu, ‘Walking While Black in River Oaks’, Free Press Houston, 29
August 2014, http://www.freepresshouston.com/walking-while-black-in-river-oaks/
(accessed 3 October 2017). The article details an incident where Bam was stopped
and interrogated by a police officer for the ‘suspicious’ behaviour of walking in
the wealthy neighbourhood of River Oaks where she was being hosted during the
project. In the article, Bam also expressed criticisms of Houston’s car culture.
22 Jarmon, interview.
23 Eastern Cape Provincial Arts & Culture Council Annual Report 2014–2015 (East
London: ECPACC, 2015), 30.
24 Jarmon, interview.
25 For more on this, see Nicole Burisch, ‘From Objects to Actions and Back Again: The
Politics of Dematerialized Craft and Performance Documentation’, Textile: Cloth and
Culture, vol. 14, no. 1 (2016): 54–73.
26 Thomas J. Lax, ‘In Search of Black Space’, in catalogue for the exhibition When the
Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South (New York: The Studio
Museum in Harlem, 2014), 10. Lax’s exhibition makes a solid case for how this
‘transportation’ might provide a richer frame for understanding Black cultural
production in the United States, particularly in the South.
27 See also the video ‘Chika Okeke-Agulu on Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de
Plantation Congolaise’, Artforum (May 2017), https://www.artforum.com/video/
id=68168&mode=large (accessed 3 October 2017). In discussing his review of
Dutch artist Renzo Martens’s collaboration with Congolese plantation workers for
an exhibition at the Sculpture Center, Okeke-Agulu asks: ‘[The plantation workers’]
access to the international art world is determined by Renzo Martens. Is this a new
form of dependency? Is this a new form of neo-colonisation through the art world?’

SELVEN O’KEEF JARMON 59

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28 Bill Davenport, ‘South African Beaders to Assemble Selven O’Keef Jarmon’s Big
Tapestry Project at Rice’, Glasstire, 25 July 2014, http://glasstire.com/2014/07/25/
south-african-beaders-assemble-selven-okeef-jarmons-big-tapestry-project-at-rice/
(accessed 24 September 2017). See also https://www.artleaguehouston.org/360-
degrees-vanishing for a complete list of project supporters.
29 April Baer, ‘The Global Reach of Bullseye Glass’, Oregon Public Broadcasting, 26
February 2016, http://www.opb.org/news/article/bullseye-glass-portland-air-
pollution-global-impact/ (accessed 24 September 2017).

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4 THE MAKING OF MANY

HANDS: ARTISANAL
PRODUCTION AND
NEIGHBOURHOOD
REDEVELOPMENT IN
CONTEMPORARY SOCIALLY
ENGAGED ART
Noni Brynjolson

It is a sunny, late summer day in Dallas, and I am visiting Trans.lation, a

neighbourhood art centre. From the outside, the building is nondescript: one of
about a dozen storefronts in a beige strip mall on a busy street in Vickery Meadow,
a neighbourhood located 10 miles north of downtown. While its outward
appearance is unassuming, what goes on inside is a surprisingly diverse range of
activities. During my visit, a group of people build several wooden planters that
will become part of a community garden in the dusty back lot of the building.
Inside, a few kids paint some jewellery display stands, while a meeting takes place
between instructors, followed by an Arabic lesson. All of this takes place in the
colourful space of Trans.lation: a neighbourhood art organization, community
centre and public artwork rolled into one. I see only a fraction of the activities
during my visit; there are also weekly painting and drawing classes, dance
workshops and meetings to discuss tenants’ rights. What I notice during my visit
is an emphasis on activities focused on the collective, sometimes collaborative,
production of art and crafts. There are paper flowers and beaded jewellery in the
window and painted self-portraits on the walls. A few of the regular attendees are
preparing for a craft fair and Ethiopian New Year celebration in a few days. Trans.
lation was initially conceived by artist Rick Lowe as a public art project; Lowe has
described his work as ‘social sculpture’, a term used by Joseph Beuys in the 1970s
62

to suggest the transformative role that art can play in society. Established in 2013
during a year-long public art festival organized by the Nasher Sculpture Center,
Trans.lation grew into a permanent art centre that aimed to create sustainable,
long-term change in the community.
Trans.lation, like many other socially engaged art projects, has organized a
significant amount of its programming around craft production and artisanal
markets, and the fact that this has become a recognizable feature deserves further
attention and analysis. Pop-up shops, flea markets, swap meets and craft fairs have
become familiar tropes in contemporary socially engaged art and are frequently
presented as models of practice that offer the possibility of small-scale, localized
economic change in disadvantaged neighbourhoods; Lowe’s Project Row Houses in
Houston also regularly holds craft fairs and pop-up markets. Similarly, in Chicago,
Theaster Gates’ Soul Manufacturing Corporation involved producing handmade
objects in a gallery space through utopian models of labour. These objects may
eventually be used in his housing renovation project, Dorchester Projects or sold
to support Rebuild Foundation, the non-profit established by Gates.
Across these initiatives, the aim is to spur economic development in
disadvantaged neighbourhoods and empower local residents through artisanal
production. This essay considers both the benefits and pitfalls of focusing on local
economic redevelopment through the production and sale of handmade goods.
On the one hand, Gates and Lowe may be seen as responding directly to the desires
and needs of the residents of poor, primarily African American neighbourhoods
by providing economic opportunities. On the other hand, it may be argued that
this type of project simply replicates structures of capitalist production and urban
gentrification. I begin by discussing each project and its relationship to artisanal
production – while they support craft-making, they also promote hands-on
engagement with local politics and the ‘crafting’ of neighbourhood social spaces.
Then, I consider these examples in relation to contemporary debates surrounding
socially engaged art, as well as longer standing discussions related to labour,
alienation and economic inequality.

The skilled makers of Soul Manufacturing

Corporation
Theaster Gates is perhaps best known for initiating Dorchester Projects, a large-
scale, long-term effort to renovate and repurpose abandoned houses in South Side,
Chicago, a primarily African American neighbourhood. Many Black southerners
settled in Chicago after the Civil War, attracted by expanding industrialization and
the promise of employment, and the Black population grew from approximately
4,000 in 1870 to 15,000 in 1890.1 The second great migration occurred between
1940 and 1960, when the city’s Black population grew from 278,000 to 813,000.2

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The majority settled in the South Side, due to discriminatory real estate practices as
well as the hostility and violence experienced in white neighbourhoods. Gates was
born in Chicago and grew up on the West Side. He holds degrees in urban planning,
religious studies and ceramics, and these areas of experience coalesced in his Soul
Manufacturing Corporation project, which he began to conceptualize around
2006. The project developed around Gates’s investigations into the materiality of
clay, which were inspired by the traditions of Japanese pottery making. He invented
a character named Yamaguchi, a Japanese master potter who, in Gates’s fictional
narrative, visits Mississippi in search of a legendary type of black clay. The story
allowed him to explore ‘ways that African American culture rubs gently against
the East’.3 He was looking for ways to make his practice relevant to the community
where he was working in Chicago, and to explore ways in which labour, race and
economic inequality were connected. He asked himself, ‘If I am to be engaged
in production, why not have it grow in neighbourhoods that have real need and
interest?’4 Out of this inquiry came Soul Manufacturing Corporation: ‘An attempt
to think about the production of ceramic objects as a way of creating new and
innovative arts-based economies.’5 The project has been exhibited in three different
locations, and in each site, the gallery space was transformed into a workshop space
in which skilled makers (artisans specializing in a particular technique or material)
produced clay, wood and textile objects by hand.6 The makers performed similar
tasks to fabricators or studio assistants, but their labour was foregrounded during

FIGURE 4.1 Theaster Gates, Soul Manufacturing Corporation, The Spirit of Utopia, 2013,
installation view. Photo: Timothy Soar.

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the exhibition (Figure 4.1). In relation to this point, Gates (pictured in Plate 5)
has written about the sense of collectivity established in his projects and states that
‘we are not together under utopic circumstances for the most part – I pay people
to help me do things’.7
The first public exhibition of Soul Manufacturing Corporation took place at
Locust Projects in Miami in 2012. In addition to the skilled makers, Gates invited
a yoga instructor, a DJ and various readers to participate, and their role was to care
for the makers as they worked. Readings included Moby Dick, Howl and an essay
on Asian American experiences of the civil rights movement. Matthew Dercole,
one of the skilled makers, made clay bricks by hand throughout the duration
of the project, each one taking about 20 minutes. He described the experience
as intensely physically demanding, since it involved heavy lifting and repetitive
movements day after day. For him, the project ‘was a way to breathe life into the
production of objects by hand’, and he felt the desire to ‘make these things really
beautifully and put myself into them, because of the environment and the way
we were being treated and cared for in that space’.8 He described the attachment
he felt to the handmade bricks he produced, noting that each one was curved
or pressed in a slightly different way and felt unique to him. Pei-Hsuan Wang,
another skilled maker, worked on slip casting during the exhibition using moulds
weighing anywhere from 5 to 20 pounds. She also commented on the ‘resting and
relaxation of the body’ offered by yoga and readings, which for her, seemed like
a necessary respite from the physical exertion involved in making the objects.9
When Soul Manufacturing Corporation was exhibited at the Fabric Workshop
and Museum in Philadelphia in 2013, the makers gathered each afternoon to eat
lunch together and discuss art. The museum organized apprenticeships during the
exhibition, and the makers had the opportunity to share their knowledge and skills
with others. The third iteration of the project took place in 2013 at Whitechapel
Gallery in London, where it was performed as part of The Spirit of Utopia, an
exhibition that looked at the ability of art to construct alternate visions of the
world. London poet Zena Edwards performed in the gallery space, while skilled
makers produced clay pots and bricks.
Of the many objects produced by Soul Manufacturing Corporation, some were
functional, others were not. Dercole described the bricks he made as ‘objects with
potential’, and noted that some will become part of Gates’s sculptural work while
others may be used by the Rebuild Foundation, a Chicago non-profit founded
by Gates in 2011 to manage programming and events at Dorchester Projects.10
Soul Manufacturing Corporation emphasizes the importance of making things
by hand. However, this should not be seen as a reactionary move that fetishizes
the genius of the artist or the aura of the singular object. These objects are lacking
in ornamentation and, instead, suggest functionality and everyday use. They
are ‘objects with potential’ in the sense that they embody the activity of their
production, and in the case of the bricks, are quite literally buildings blocks. The

64 the NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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difference between these objects and other mass-produced goods is the visibility
of the labour involved in their production. In focusing attention on this process,
Gates writes that he is interested in figuring out ‘how a studio practice can have
resonance not only in the art world through symbol and gesture but also in the
lived world’.11 The collective aspects of labour are key in this regard, and he points
out that producing everyday objects in a shared studio space helped him ‘to
understand notions of transformation, care, and many hands working together
to make beautiful things happen’.12 In Dercole’s opinion, Gates is not interested in
‘empowering or helping people’, and he tries to avoid the condescension prevalent
in many forms of community-based art. Dercole says:

He’s not trying to offer a crutch to people who are limping, but instead, trying
to offer resources and opportunities to those who are interested. The city is
not investing here, we’re closing down schools, shoving poor Black families
into isolated pockets of the city, making food deserts, there is a real lack of
opportunity, and he is making resources accessible and available.13

Soul Manufacturing Corporation highlights ways in which skill and collective

labour can shape the economic relations of a neighbourhood. The title of the
project suggests a rethinking of the corporation, in which makers derive purpose,
meaning or even soul, through the fruits of their labour. Finally, the circulation
and distribution of these objects is worth noting: as objects with potential, the
handmade bricks and pots produced during these three exhibitions might
become functional components of Rebuild’s community-based projects in
Chicago – literal building blocks in housing renovations, perhaps, or dinnerware
for communal meals. Alternately, they might become part of Gates’s fine art
practice, potentially selling for large sums of money, which may then be reinvested
in Rebuild. The movement between devalued and valued object is central to
Gates’s work. For example, a 2013 exhibition at Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago,
Accumulated Affects of Migration, featured pieces of debris removed from one of
the Dorchester Projects houses and ‘repurposed’ as fine art – clearly a nod to the
Duchampian ready-made. Some of these debris-works (including floorboards
and countertops) were later sold by the gallery for more than $100,000.14 Gates
foregrounds the act of salvaging in his work, as well as the remarkable power of
objects to change value depending on their social context. One major question
that arises, though, is what happens when economic value is redirected back
into marginalized neighbourhoods? Who benefits, and how are the aims of these
projects shaped by their relationships with corporate partners? In 2018, Rebuild
received $300,000 from JPMorgan Chase (a corporation that played a major role in
the 2008 financial crisis, through risky subprime loans and questionable mortgage-
bundling practices). This philanthropic gesture could be seen as an attempt to
compensate for the bank’s role in foreclosing homes, including many in Chicago’s

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South Side. The money will go towards building an Arts and Innovation Incubator.
Speaking about the project, Gates said, ‘artisan entrepreneurs on Chicago’s South
Side have the talent, drive and innovative ideas they need to succeed – and now
they also have the space and institutional support that all entrepreneurs need.
We’re thrilled to partner with JPMorgan Chase to bring life-changing, hands-on
training and mentorship to small business owners in this part of the city.’15 In this
statement, Gates emphasizes the links between art and entrepreneurship that have
emerged in many socially engaged art projects – especially those that attempt to
work on a large scale. In considering these issues, Gregory Sholette has noted how
close Gates’s practice has come to conventional forms of development, and that
while it demonstrates ‘the capacity to toggle back and forth between a market-
based art practice and not-for-profit social entrepreneurship’, much of the artist’s
work as a self-described ‘trickster’ seems to be intended mainly for the stage of the
art world audience.16 I return to a discussion of Gates and Soul Manufacturing
Corporation later in this essay, but first, it is worth turning to Project Row Houses
in Houston, a major influence for Gates,17 and a project that raises similar questions
about art, labour and entrepreneurship.

Community markets at Project

Row Houses
Project Row Houses was initiated in the early 1990s when artist Rick Lowe, living in
Houston’s Third Ward, began to think deeply about the role that artists could play
in the communities in which they lived. He recounts a story of a group of students
visiting his studio who told him that the paintings he was making at that time
reflected the community but were not ‘what the community needed’.18 After this
encounter, Lowe began to think about making work that operated outside of the
studio or gallery. Like Gates, he was thinking about how to create something in the
world that was not purely symbolic. Lowe was inspired by the colourful, geometric
paintings of row houses by artist John Biggers, and by the historical importance
of the buildings within the Third Ward. The small, narrow structures (sometimes
referred to as shotgun houses) are a common feature of many African American
neighbourhoods in the United States, and historians have traced their origins to
building practices in both the Caribbean and West Africa.19 In 1993, Lowe received
a grant for $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts, and alongside
a team of artists and community organizers, he used the funds to purchase and
begin renovating twenty-two row houses that were scheduled to be demolished
(Figure 4.2). As of 2019, Project Row Houses takes up five city blocks and thirty-
nine structures, including exhibition spaces, houses for young mothers, office
spaces, a community gallery, a park and low-income residential and commercial
spaces.20 It is funded by a mix of private and public sponsors; including the Texas

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FIGURE 4.2 Project Row Houses, Third Ward, Houston, Texas, September 2015.
Photo: Noni Brynjolson.

Commission on the Arts, First Unitarian Universalist Church, Southern Methodist

University, The Bruner Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual
Arts, the Houston Arts Alliance, the City of Houston and Chevron.21
In addition to hosting artist residencies, Project Row Houses frequently
organizes programming and events in the neighbourhood. During an initial visit
there in September 2015, I saw an exhibition put on by local art students who
had each been given studio space in one of the houses during the summer. The
site has become a popular tourist destination, and there were several large groups
and families wandering around, taking pictures and talking with the docents.
When I walked around the surrounding neighbourhood, I noticed a mixture of
abandoned houses and large, well-maintained brick mansions – often right next
to each other. There were signs of change associated with gentrification, including
new condos and park renovations. However, there were also signs of resistance,
centred on engrained histories of the neighbourhood.
In the 1800s the Third Ward was home to the white elites of Houston, who
built and lived in the Victorian-era homes. African Americans were segregated

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in the northern area of the ward. After World War II, many of the white families
moved to the suburbs, and the area became mostly inhabited by Black residents.
The neighbourhood was home to the People’s Party II headquarters, a Houston
offshoot of the Black Panther Party. In 1970, 21-year-old activist Carl Hampton
was shot and killed by police. Hampton was a charismatic resident of the Third
Ward who spoke out against police brutality and helped to organize free childcare,
health-care initiatives, food donations, home fumigations and support for elderly
residents.22 In the summer of 2015, Project Row Houses organized a memorial to
honour Hampton and two other Third Ward residents who had recently passed
away: Ayanna Ade, a neighbourhood activist who joined the Black Panther Party
in 1972 and later worked as a midwife,23 and Cleveland ‘Flower Man’ Turner, a local
artist who decorated his home with discarded objects including toys, appliances,
tools and an abundance of real and fake flowers. Project Row Houses purchased
a home for Turner in 2003 after a fire destroyed his previous residence.24 To
commemorate the lives of the three individuals, neighbourhood residents were
invited to build a garden together on the former site of the People’s Party building.
As I walked from Project Row Houses to the site of the garden, I passed by
Emancipation Park, established in 1872 by former slaves as a site to hold Juneteenth
celebrations. In 2017, the park received a $33 million makeover that was welcomed
by some residents, and feared by others as a driver of gentrification.25 Arriving
at the site on Dowling Street, all that was left of the People’s Party building was
an empty lot, but the garden planted nearby communicated a sense of possibility
rooted in the history of this place.
After walking around the neighbourhood, what became clear to me about
Project Row Houses – and what is missing from a good deal of writing that focuses
myopically on its status as either art or activism26 – is how deeply it connects with
the neighbourhood’s African American history. One of the main functions of the
project could be seen as reorienting this history towards current issues related to
gentrification and economic inequality. This is visible in one of the most frequent
events that takes place at Project Row Houses: community markets, which are
often held during the opening of a new exhibition, or ‘Round’ of artist residencies.
During the markets, local artisans are invited to bring their goods to the market
and sell them. Recent markets have featured a diverse array of products, including
beaded jewellery, metalwork, woodwork, printed T-shirts, soaps, lotions, dolls,
purses, paintings, woven scarves, hats and gloves, and palm readings. The markets
are intended to offer exposure and a secondary revenue stream to local artisans.27
Organized by Project Row Houses Curator and Programs Director Ryan Dennis
Round 43: Small Business/Big Change: Economic Perspectives from Artists and
Artrepreneurs focused specifically on the relationship between art and local
economies. In the text accompanying the exhibition, Dennis poses an important
question that has been asked in relation to Project Row Houses: ‘How, within a
neighbourhood being gentrified, do we push against big-business models that so

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easily find their way into small neighbourhoods without supplying any forms of
support to small business?’28 Dennis, along with Special Events Manager Cecilia
Pham, told me that the idea for the markets came about as one way to push
back – by offering residents a sense of community, an opportunity to meet one’s
neighbours, and a chance to support local artisans.
As models of practice, the community markets emphasize creative entre­
preneurship, individual empowerment and the branding of one’s products. It
may be difficult, then, to distinguish this approach from the strategies of local
community development agencies, which emphasize the growth of small
businesses and creative capital as measures of success. According to this model,
it is clear that those who have prior training, education or skills will benefit more
than those who do not. The community markets bring up other contradictions and
complicated questions surrounding Project Row Houses: Can these events attract
tourists, but maintain their commitment to local residents? Can they promote
individual entrepreneurship as well as community well-being? Can they prove to
be economically beneficial for residents without contributing to gentrification?
Can they promote social justice while also being sponsored by Chevron? These
are complicated questions – on the one hand, the community markets seem to
promote creative entrepreneurship, self-branding and an emphasis on individual
empowerment. On the other hand, they draw participants into the community-
directed activities of Project Row Houses, which often focus on critiquing
structural inequalities related to race and class in the Third Ward. In further
considering these provocative questions, it is worthwhile to return to a discussion
of Trans.lation, to look more deeply at ways in which participants create, use and
benefit from socially engaged art projects.

Meeting, making and organizing at

Trans.lation
The Vickery Meadow neighbourhood in Dallas is home to about 30,000 people.
Roughly half are African American or Latinx, while the other half is composed
of recent immigrants. Nearly all of the residences in the neighbourhood are
apartment buildings, most of them constructed in the 1970s for singles, with
by-laws prohibiting families or children. This changed with amendments to the
Fair Housing Act in 1988, which outlawed this type of discrimination. Following
this, families from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Mexico began to move in.
Carol Zou, Trans.lation’s program manager and artist-in-residence from 2015 to
2017, told me that there were often tensions between these different groups. From
her experience of living and working in the neighbourhood, it can be a violent
and conflict-filled place, in part because of the many traumas suffered by residents
before moving to the United States, as well as a lack of economic opportunities.

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However, she saw the possibility for a place like Trans.lation to connect people
with their neighbours and encourage the sharing of labour and resources. She said:

We collaborate with other non-profits in the area and we see ourselves as one
more connector or advocate. We see the work that happens here as a form of
developing relationships – the more relationships that are developed, the more
these issues come to our attention. There are so many landlord abuses and code
violations here, or instances of landlords raising rent before a lease is up. Most
people do not feel empowered enough to speak up, but the connections built
here enable them to report those abuses to us, or work together with other
non-profits in the area. Part of our work is providing economic opportunity
to counter the fact of rising rent, and part of our vision is to empower people
through artistic production tied to cultural identity – to invest in and support
the cultural producers who live here.29

I visited Trans.lation a number of times, and in addition to Zou, I met a handful

of people who live in Vickery Meadow and who regularly visited to make things,
attend meetings or take classes. I spoke with a gardener, Mohammed Abdul,
who was there with his nephew, Faiyazul Ahmad. They recently moved to Dallas
from Malaysia, where they worked as rice farmers. I met Nesreen Obaid, an Iraqi
refugee who came to Dallas three years ago and was working for the International
Rescue Committee, as well as for Trans.lation, where she teaches Arabic. When
I asked her what she liked about the centre, she told me that she ‘found herself
here’ and pointed out how culturally rich the neighbourhood was despite its
economic disadvantages. While waiting for the Arabic class to begin, she and Zou
discussed plans for a driving club for women who had recently moved to Dallas
from the Middle East and had no prior driving experience. I spoke to Ome Acatl
while she painted wooden stands for displaying jewellery, and she told me that she
had worked at Trans.lation for two years as an Aztec dance instructor and Nahuatl
teacher. Her contributions to Trans.lation were visible in every corner – bright,
beaded jewellery displayed in the window, the Aztec calendar on the wall and the
photos of dance costumes that were made during a workshop and worn during
several recent performances. I asked her about the role that Trans.lation plays in
the neighbourhood, and she told me that ‘it’s a place where people from different
religions, cultures, and levels of education can meet face to face and get to know
each other, and I think this affects how people relate to each other on the street’.30
Acatl’s jewellery was a popular item at the pop-up markets that occurred
regularly at Trans.lation, which were inspired in part by the community markets at
Project Row Houses. Zou told me that she had had to rethink the pop-up markets,
however, since they were attracting a lot of outside interest, and she was worried
that they might become overly tourist-oriented. For her, the community-directed
activities that made up the bulk of the programming at Trans.lation were the most

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FIGURE 4.3 Craft table and fall celebration for Ethiopian New Year, Trans.lation, Dallas,
Texas, September 2015. Photo: Lizbeth de Santiago.

valuable, and she tried to maintain an equal focus on finished objects and pro­
cesses of making.31 While Trans.lation offered space, resources and opportunities to
make and sell crafted products, it seemed to me that its most valuable quality was its
ability to act as a connector and a gathering place for residents. These two features
were interwoven, however, and during my visits I noticed that one activity would
lead to or merge with another – someone coming for Nahuatl lessons might end
up working on a painting, for example, or an overlap in conversations and activities
would result in new activities or plans being made: the Arabic teacher plans
a driving club, the Aztec dance instructor helps to build a garden, an Ethiopian
dinner is planned to coincide with the next pop-up craft market (Figure 4.3).

Craft and socially engaged art: Hands-on

practices
The three projects that I have described reconsider relationships between art,
craft, labour and neighbourhood redevelopment. This type of work, often labelled
social practice or socially engaged art, has gained a great deal of attention in
recent years from critics and audiences alike, and continues to expand as an
institutionalized genre through museum shows, conferences and art biennials.
Although social practice has gained popularity and validation as a genre, it has been
criticized for its smooth alignment with neoliberalism, primarily the perception

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that it offers social services once provided by the state.32 It also clashes with recent
calls for a return to aesthetic autonomy in contemporary political art. For example,
John Roberts argues that a refashioned, politically relevant avant-garde must stand
in advance of bourgeois culture, meaning and values – it must be an art ‘in advance
of capitalism’.33 This suggests that art’s critical potential lies outside the impure zone
of capitalist exchange and consumption – a position that seems possible in theory
but not in practice, as countless historical examples of the co-option of avant-garde
art make clear. ‘In advance of capitalism’ implies distance as well as externality, two
characteristics that supposedly enable avant-garde artists to see past the confines
of everyday life, expose the untruths of neoliberalism and create revolutionary
change. In Roberts’s view, much socially engaged art is guilty of ‘instrumental-
activism’.34 He believes that without a well-defined sense of aesthetic autonomy,
such work is fated to disintegrate into life: it becomes part of the indefensible zone
of social welfare work associated with non-profits, benefits creative entrepreneurs,
and generally works alongside rather than in advance of capital. Critic Ben Davis
has also criticized socially engaged art projects that claim to produce social change.
His position is that such projects, if they were really committed to activism, would
forego the art and focus all of their energy on activism. He points out that while
Project Row Houses might have created some low-income housing in the Third
Ward, it’s a minor accomplishment compared to the demand that still exists in
Houston. For Davis, Project Row Houses is too dependent on corporate funding,
and demonstrates the inevitable co-option that occurs around radical gestures.35
Davis is right to point out the ways in which activist and participatory practices
have been adopted by mainstream media and corporate culture. However, what he
and Roberts do not acknowledge is that this type of work tends to move constantly,
and often imperceptibly, in and out of the spheres of art, life and the social, to
the degree that drawing firm boundaries around any of these categories becomes
meaningless. This poses a problem for much contemporary art theory devoted
to defending the political potential of the avant-garde, in which critics focus on
weeding out vulgar, non-art or activist art practices that are seen as compromised
and corrupted as soon as they leave the protected world of aesthetic autonomy.
This results in observations of localized, situated practices being overshadowed
by arguments prioritizing critical theory, which often do not take into account the
complex web of relations between producers, consumers and social spaces.
Criticism of socially engaged art tends to lack a detailed analysis of practice
and instead focuses mainly on laying out theoretical arguments. Projects are
often described as inescapably instrumentalizing or compromised due to their
attempts to create concrete rather than allegorical change. In this sense, it is worth
noting certain similarities between craft and socially engaged art. Both have been
described as degraded and impure forms of art or have been subjected to repetitive
ontological challenges. They both claim to be useful, they both exist outside the
realm of aesthetic autonomy, and they both tend to be seen as complicit with the

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market. There are other similarities: they are associated with collaborative spaces
of production, they have been feminized to a certain degree, and they focus our
attention on processes of labour rather than, or in addition to, finished objects.
They also rethink the category of use value in relation to contemporary art. Glenn
Parsons and Allen Carlson write:

As the functionality of an artwork becomes more prominent and difficult to

ignore, its status or value as art seems to decline. Having been created for a
purpose, or with some social or political aim in mind, such works remain forms
of craft rather than art proper.36

According to histories of art centred on aesthetic autonomy, art lacks purpose,

does not depend solely upon technical skill, nor is it designed to satisfy a particular
demand. As Howard Risatti has argued though, craft objects do not operate in an
autonomous realm. Instead, as purposive objects, they are ‘subject to and governed
by external rules and laws’.37 This is similar to socially engaged art, which has been
criticized by many – including Roberts and Davis – for operating outside of the
autonomous realm of art.
Critiques of socially engaged art based on observations of practice might involve
asking more nuanced questions about participants, sites and resources: Who
benefits from these types of projects? Are they actually producing material
transformations of urban space or have they merely adopted the fashionable
rhetoric of social practice? In terms of projects that are attempting to create local
economic changes, there are important questions to ask related to gentrification
and creative capital as well. Are these projects capable of creating social change
if they are not working ‘in advance of capitalism’? Shannon Jackson’s views on
aesthetic autonomy are worth considering here in relation to the external, detached
position offered by Roberts. She asks: ‘What if we remember the contingency of
any dividing line between autonomy and heteronomy, noticing the dependency
of each on the definition of the other, watching as the division between these
two terms morphs between projects and perspectives?’38 The examples I have
discussed raise important questions about how to support local economies without
contributing to gentrification. Jackson’s emphasis on contingency is worth noting
here, and paradoxically, it seems to be the case that these projects contribute to
gentrification (through tourism and the geographical concentration of cultural
capital), while also offering the spaces, resources and social networks necessary to
organize against it.
Questions regarding socially engaged art and its complicity with or resistance
to market forces are especially relevant when combined with the emphasis on the
handmade that I consider here. In the past decade, artisanal goods have become
hot commodities, primarily for wealthy consumers who want to distinguish
themselves from the ordinary consumer of cheaper mass-produced goods.

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Farmer’s markets, craft fairs and pop-up shops attract customers seeking unique,
locally made or handcrafted products. Many items are now up-sold by adding the
label ‘artisanal’ or ‘craft’ to their title: beer, whiskey, soap, leather, cheese and meat
are just a few examples.
It is easy to view the handmade and the artisanal as ‘ethical’ or ‘good’ in and
of themselves, and to overlook the ways in which these modes of production
act as markers of exclusivity within capitalist economies. The projects I have
discussed highlight the complexities inherent within these categories. Gates’s Soul
Manufacturing Corporation envisions a utopian environment in which skilled
makers are cared for as they produce their work – a metaphor for the hands-on,
collective labour that goes into renovating and repurposing the Dorchester
Projects houses. Yet the project has also been criticized for Gates’s affiliations with
corporate investors, and for creating a safe haven for mainly white, middle-class
art critics and curators to engage in ghetto tourism in Chicago’s South Side.39
Project Row Houses encourages community-oriented activities and events, but at
the same time, promotes narratives of self-sufficiency, creative entrepreneurship
and branding; its community markets are spaces in which creativity and culture
are nurtured through the purchase of unique, specialized goods. Trans.lation also
prioritized community-organized economic development, although it focused less
on promoting narratives of individual entrepreneurship – perhaps, in part, due to
its lack of corporate funding.
The notion that simply making and selling handmade goods is going to produce
noticeable change, whether individual or neighbourhood-based, is simplistic and
misguided. But with these reservations and criticisms in mind, there are many
worthwhile aspects of these projects: first, they engage in practices under existing
economic conditions and attempt to come up with solutions that will concretely
benefit the everyday lives of residents. Second, they act as gathering places and
operate through an emphasis on collective production. Making things by hand in
a workshop or studio requires time, effort and skill. It requires a space conducive
to cooperation and conversation, a space in which residents share experiences of
daily life, make plans to cook, garden and visit together, or talk about ways to
organize against landlord abuses. Third, these projects place an equal emphasis
on object and process: on ‘craft’ as both noun and verb within hands-on practices.
Hands are involved in modes of knowing – my hands feel the surfaces, textures
and outlines of the material world around me, and when I make something,
my hands seem to possess their own knowledge and skill. Many scholars have
commented on the uniqueness of human hands in gaining practical knowledge
of the world and developing the ability to make skilled adjustments to our
surroundings. John Roberts has emphasized the importance of the hand in
gaining knowledge of the self and manipulating the world around us. He contrasts
the ‘operative hand’ associated with the mechanical gestures of capitalist labour
processes with the ‘emergent totipotentiality’ of the hand within artistic labour,

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which he argues ‘remains key to the ‘aesthetic re-education’ and emancipation

of productive and non-productive labour’.40 For Loïc Wacquant, skill relates to
embodied knowledge and the competency we gain through hands-on experience,
allowing us to make adjustments in the world as social agents.41 His research
focuses mainly on structural economic inequalities and how they relate to race
and violence in urban spaces – yet despite his emphasis on the power and force of
social structures, he leaves open the possibility for individuals to shape the world
around them. So, it follows that while the handmade and the artisanal may be
criticized for appealing to a privileged creative class, their redemptive qualities
cannot be completely co-opted – categories, institutions and structures can
always be remade, especially if enough hands are involved. These ideas connect
with earlier forms of Marxist thought that emphasized artisanal production, for
example, the Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth century – a reaction to
the instrumentalization of labour and the alienation of the working classes. There
are notable parallels between these historical critiques of alienation and socially
engaged art projects that foreground collaborative labour, hands-on experience
and exchanges between neighbours based on use value rather than exchange value.
In the projects I have discussed, making things by hand is intended to
demonstrate non-alienated forms of labour and the handmade is endowed with
political, almost spiritual qualities. Yet a pertinent question to ask is, what happens
when these ideas are put into practice and confronted with the impurities of the
capitalist market? Soul Manufacturing Corporation, Project Row Houses and
Trans.lation do not operate from a (privileged) position of detached, utopian
autonomy. Instead, they aim to create practical, everyday transformations in
communities through the use of shared resources and collective labour. They
emphasize the importance of being together in the same space, making things
collectively and engaging directly with political structures on the level of localized,
community-based practice. Across these projects, a focus on the handmade
encourages the recognition that with our hands, we can make changes to the
materials, institutions and structures around us.

Notes
1 Christopher Manning, ‘African Americans’, Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago
Historical Society, 2015, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org (accessed 5
October 2015).
2 Ibid.
3 Theaster Gates, ‘The End of Clay Fiction: Yamaguchi and the Soul Manufacturing
Corporation’, Studio Potter, vol. 40, no. 2 (2012): 30.
4 Ibid., 31.
5 Ibid., 30.

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6 Theaster Gates has used the term skilled makers to refer to the artists and artisans
involved in Soul Manufacturing Corporation who are proficient in working with
a particular material, or using a specific technique, such as slip casting or brick
making.
7 Theaster Gates, ‘The Artist Corporation and the Collective’, NKA: Journal of
Contemporary African Art, no. 34 (Spring 2014): 77.
8 Matthew Dercole in conversation with the author, 21 October 2015.
9 Pei-Hsuan Wang in conversation with the author, 24 October 2015.
10 Ibid.
11 Gates, ‘The End of Clay Fiction’, 31.
12 Ibid.
13 Matthew Dercole in conversation with the author, 21 October 2015.
14 John Colapinto, ‘The Real-Estate Artist: High-concept Renewal on the South Side’,
New Yorker, 20 January 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/20/
the-real-estate-artist.
15 Alex Greenberger, ‘JPMorgan Chase Gives $300,000 to Theaster Gates’s Rebuild
Foundation in Chicago’, ArtNews, 4 October 2018, https://www.artnews.com/
art-news/news/jpmorgan-chase-gives-300000-theaster-gatess-rebuild-foundation-
chicago-11111/ (accessed 30 November 2018).
16 Gregory Sholette, Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism
(London: Pluto Press, 2017), 138.
17 Nikil Saval, ‘Three Artists Who Think outside the Box’, New York Times, 3
December 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/t-magazine/art/theaster-
gates-mark-bradford-rick-lowe-profile.html (accessed 29 June 2016).
18 Michael Kimmelman, ‘In Houston, Art Is Where the Home Is’, New York Times, 17
December 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/arts/design/in-houston-art-
is-where-the-home-is.html (accessed 29 June 2016).
19 See Babatunde Lawal, ‘Reclaiming the Past: Yoruba Elements in African American
Arts’, in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D.
Childs (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004), 291–324.
20 Rick Lowe, ‘Project Row Houses at 20’, Creative Time Reports (October 2013), http://
creativetimereports.org/2013/10/07/rick-lowe-project-row-houses/ (accessed 10
October 2015).
21 See ‘Sponsors’, http://projectrowhouses.org/about/sponsors/ (accessed 24
February 2019).
22 Judson L. Jeffries, On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities Across
America (Jackson: University Press Mississippi, 2010), 22.
23 Cindy George, ‘Humanitarian and Black Panther Party Member Dies’, Houston
Chronicle, 6 June 2013, https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/
Activist-humanitarian-Ad-was-compelled-to-give-4585096.php (accessed 2 June 2020).
24 John Nova Lomax, ‘A Year After Houston’s Flower Man Died, His House Will
Join Him in the Great Beyond’, Texas Monthly, 16 January 2015. https://www.
texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/a-year-after-houstons-flower-man-died-
his-house-will-join-him-in-the-great-beyond/ (accessed 29 June 2016).

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25 Lisa Gray, ‘Friends of Emancipation Park Hope Renovation Revitalizes

Neighborhood’, Houston Chronicle, 1 November 2013. https://www.houstonchronicle.
com/life/columnists/gray/article/Friends-of-Emancipation-Park-hope-
renovation-4947655.php (accessed 29 June 2016).
26 For example, in Ben Davis’s essay, ‘A Critique of Social Practice Art’, International
Socialist Review, Issue 90 (July 2013), https://isreview.org/issue/90/critique-social-
practice-art (accessed 29 June 2016) he portrays Project Row Houses as a diluted
form of activism beholden to its corporate sponsors. Issues of race, the community’s
history and the perspectives of participants are not considered.
27 Ryan Dennis and Cecilia Pham in conversation with the author, 20 October 2015.
28 Round 43: Small Business / Big Change: Economic Perspectives from Artists and
Artrepreneurs ran from 24 October 2015 to 28 February 2016. See ‘Project Row
Houses, Round 43 Opening + Market,’ http://projectrowhouses.org/calendar/round-
43-opening-market (accessed 10 October 2015).
29 Carol Zou in conversation with the author, 7 September 2015.
30 Ome Acatl in conversation with the author, 7 September 2015.
31 Ibid.
32 See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
(London: Verso, 2011).
33 John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso Books,
2015), 31.
34 Ibid., 177.
35 Ben Davis, ‘A Critique of Social Practice Art,’ International Socialist Review, no. 90
(July 2013) https://isreview.org/issue/90/critique-social-practice-art.
36 Glenn Parsons and Allen Carlson, Functional Beauty (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 36.
37 Howard Risatti, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 220.
38 Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics
(New York: Routledge, 2011), 29.
39 Colapinto, ‘The Real-Estate Artist’. https://www.newyorker.com/
magazine/2014/01/20/the-real-estate-artist.
40 John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the
Readymade (London: Verso, 2007), 4.
41 Loïc Wacquant, ‘For a Sociology of Flesh and Blood’, Qualitative Sociology, vol. 38,
no. 1 (2015): 4.

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78
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5 THAT LOOKS LIKE WORK:

THE TOTAL AESTHETICS OF
HANDCRAFT
Shannon R. Stratton

One can’t go far in any market place, be it a shopping mall, an online outlet or a
specialty boutique without coming across the words ‘handmade’ or ‘handcrafted’.
Whether it’s a hand-embellished sweater at The Gap or a boutique liquor store
specializing in hand- and locally crafted small batch spirits, ‘the hand’ has become
a remarkable tool for elevating the thing for sale. Similarly, a kind of blatant DIY
craftsmanship that announces itself via a slightly off-kilter, soft-focus charm, natural
tones and materials, imperfection, hobby-craft execution circulates as an aesthetic
that is charged by lifestyle curating: from rooftop gardens to homemade bread
to exotic cocktails made with foraged herbs, there are certain activities that the
truly dedicated cultivator of the handmade indulges in. This handmade lifestyle
is further aestheticized in magazines like Kinfolk (whose tagline is ‘Slow Living’)
or Hearth (featuring ‘artists and artisans that value the art of living and tradition’),
not to mention countless food, craft, gardening and lifestyle blogs and Instagram
feeds that document organic recipes, children’s crafts and artistic practices that
tacitly promise better living through the handmade and the artisanal.
Handcrafted is now applied as a distinction to things that were not previously
required to be articulated this way. Food and beverages are particularly susceptible
to this term, despite being touched by hands since the beginning of time, and
many companies have adopted this adjective to raise the status of their products.
But as ‘handmade’ crops up as an adjective and an aesthetic in more and more
places – including where differentiating goods around handcraftedness seems
absurd (sandwiches and graphic design) – it becomes compelling to consider why
today’s marketplace is so committed to the handmade thing, and what it is that
consumers and citizens are looking for that the handmade proposes to satiate.
80

The personal touch

When I worked in downtown Chicago, I frequently found myself at Pret A Manger
for a snack, a global food chain with locations in the United Kingdom, France,
Hong Kong and the United States. A fan of their pre-packaged carrot cake (it is
surprisingly moist and the cream cheese icing is spot on), I started studying the
packaging, a small box that clarified: ‘Handmade for Pret A Manger.’ Looking
around, I found that the words ‘love’ and ‘small batches’ were everywhere on
their promotional materials, from soup stock to this very carrot cake: ‘made
from scratch, baked in small batches and popped into these flowery boxes’. Their
in-store posters further personalized their products. One poster introduces ‘Mike’
the baker, with an informal biography pitching his likeability and skill:

If we were on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ Mike would be our ‘phone a

friend.’ General trivia, politics … sport, he knows it all. More to the point, there’s
nothing he doesn’t know about artisan bread, baguettes and pastries, which is
very good news. Mike is our baker. He bakes our bread fresh, everyday with
sackfulls [sic] of whole grain and delivers to this shop before dawn. Genius.
(emphasis added).

This poster tribute was called, ‘Passion Fact no. 17’. Surrounding me were also
‘Passion Fact no. 64’ about how many months they train their vegetable slicers
(three) and ‘Passion Fact no. 57’ which claims that the company’s ingredients are
only processed by washing and basic preparation.
In her book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Sianne Ngai
outlines an aesthetic spectrum that includes important categories that are otherwise
marginalized in aesthetic theory. For her, the zany, cute and interesting represent
aesthetic experiences under the hyper-commodified, information-saturated,
performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.1 Ngai theorizes that these
categories index modes of production: ‘zany’ is an aesthetic category particular to
affective labour, ‘cute’ not surprisingly is an indicator of a range of feelings around
consumption that include tenderness as well as aggression, while ‘interesting’ is an
aesthetic borne out of the movement and exchange of information.
Ngai’s categories suggest another frame for understanding the aesthetic signifiers
that come to mind when we identify craft, skill and craftsmanship in a product
or marketing campaign. While ‘genuine’, as in ‘the real thing’, isn’t one of Ngai’s
aesthetic categories, it nevertheless cues the idea of the autonomous worker, the
unhampered expression of skill that is part of the appeal of handcraftedness: it looks
like slow labour, careful labour and personal labour. The handcrafted is something
made by a single, genuine individual in a small workshop who is reinvigorating the
singularity of the artist through their personal touch. In comparison to globalized

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mass production, the personalized nature of one pair of hands sounds positively
rare. If ‘zany’ is the aesthetic that Ngai names as indicative of performance-
driven late capitalism, the aesthetics and language of the handcrafted seem to
mitigate capitalism’s lunacy: ‘passion’ (as per Pret A Manger) sounds like love,
albeit a bit dramatic, whereas ‘zany’ sounds totally unhinged. This articulation of
happy productivity seems key to the application of ‘handcrafted’ or ‘handmade’ as
a crucial product descriptor now. Even Chick-fil-A, the notoriously conservative
Southern fast-food chain, describes their product as ‘happily handcrafted … as
always’ alongside a picture of a spotless baker’s table.
Of course, handcrafted is a popular term for foodstuffs like chocolate, beer and
wine and frequently found in association with clothing, but it even shows up with
some frequency in relationship to design work, a field that is already synonymous
with individuality. Manos (get it?) is a ‘Texas based studio, building handcrafted
websites, mobile apps and brands for companies all across the Blue Planet’. Their
URL is ‘manoscrafted.com’. Their ‘About’ section claims: ‘At Manos we’re Creating,
Crafting, Coding and Coffee-ing every single day’ before introducing the staff
via the header ‘meet the craftsmen’. ‘Craft, Tweak and Perfect’ is one step in their
self-defined ‘wonderful process’, with an icon of a handsaw hovering over the
description of that process, which turns out doesn’t involve saws at all.2
The design firm Creative Market sells ‘beautiful design for all’, and on their
home page and their ‘About’ section turn to similar language to describe graphic
design work. They clarify that graphic design isn’t really hand-wrought in the
old-fashioned way by saying: ‘Creative Market is a platform for handcrafted,
mousemade design content from independent creatives around the world’,3 and
like Pret A Manger, they personalize the team behind their brand. Their bios read
like dating profiles and are accompanied by hand-drawn portraits of each team
member: Chris is a drummer, indoor enthusiast, basset hound lover, beer/wine/
whisky/coffee drinker. Zack hearts San Francisco, the www, good design, fine
wine, German cars, American guitars, puppies, his beautiful wife, baby girl and
the first Guns N’ Roses record. Maryam loves food, dogs and anything awesome.

The heartfelt and good

What appears to be at stake here is authenticity, and handcraftedness (whether
actual, implied or named) is shorthand for that. For Pret A Manger, Manos and
Creative Market, the descriptor ‘handcrafted’ is used to humanize the consumer
experience by framing a service or a product with narrative. By identifying a
‘maker’ behind a product described as handcrafted, these companies are trying to
convey a sense of authenticity. Across all of these marketing examples, the message
seems consistent: handcrafted means real(er) people, it means passion, it means
feeling, it means care. It is de-facto ‘good’.

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Prior to encountering Pret A Manger’s ‘Passion Facts’, and drawing on Ngai’s

categories, I had conceived of the ‘sensible’ – both the ability to understand what
cannot be verbalized and the demonstration of good judgment – as the aesthetic
of the skilled handmaker. In other words: skilled making was a tactile, poetic
and also sound response to a set of materials and needs. In light of the marketing
strategies outlined here, ‘Passion Facts’ suggest a different possibility: that in
relationship to seemingly anonymous production and efforts to personalize
the corporate, it is actually passion that is the contemporary aesthetic of the
handmade. Passion inflects making with agency, desire and the heartfelt,
overriding the implications of wage-labour, boredom and detachment. As per
Jacques Rancière, the meaning (of handcraftedness) shifts in relationship to the
state of the world exterior to it.4
On the other hand, the sensible (as per its definition, not to be totally colluded
with Rancière) understands that the somatic, experiential quality of handcraftedness
lies in affect rather than rhetoric. The sensible is earnest. It makes good decisions.
The sensible is recognized not just when we see the word handcrafted, but other
markers that are aligned with it: wood-cut style fonts; illustrations that look hand-
drawn; DIY making; small-batch this and that; soft, natural hues and finishes;
recycled and natural materials; home-made food; homey touches; constructed
and affected shabbiness. These qualities set up (false) dichotomies that situate soft,
natural, rough and personalized as handmade; and hard, fabricated, smooth and
anonymous as manufactured. In other words, handmade has a human narrative,
whereas the manufactured is reproducible, cut-and-paste, code.
This aesthetic of the sensible can also be traced to the buy-local and slow food
movements, a consumer aesthetic born out of Italy when a group protestors ate
homemade pasta in opposition to the opening of a new MacDonald’s near the
Spanish Steps in Rome.5 Publicly protesting via what you choose to eat is one
action that might have an impact on local economies and workers, and while
this strategy (along with others like buying local, handmaking and learning skills
that might lend themselves to survival) may resonate as a meaningful endeavour,
the message that one’s choices as a consumer or labourer can have an impact on
capitalism, and thus be political, has now been adopted at the corporate scale as
a marketing contrivance. The collapse of qualities like soft, natural, rough and
personalized into a shorthand for handcrafted and handcrafted into an aesthetic
shorthand for both passion and good sense, has made handcraftedness easy
to poach.
A considerable amount of time is spent conveying authenticity in a somewhat
circular process: handcraftedness means this product (or the person buying the
product) is more authentic, and you can know the authentic by its degree of obvious
or narrated handcraftedness. Authenticity tests whether something is what it claims
to be, the search for authenticity being, as Lionel Trilling had put it: the anxiety
over the credibility of existence.6 Perhaps this correlation has developed out of an

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attempt to ‘test’ consumerism as a result of consumption being the primary way

people have come to express themselves, and perhaps depressingly, their politics.
Are these products credible? Am I, as a consumer, credible in my choices?
Pret A Manger and other chains in the food industry make it look sensible for
you to support their sizable chains by conveying the personalized, handcrafted
ethos that you as a consumer are drawn to as indicative of your informed choice.
If ‘Mike’ is an expert on artisanal breads, and Pret A Manger acknowledges Mike
publicly, then what do you have to worry about? You are a satisfied consumer, and
any real social responsibility that you should exercise has been neatly displaced by
a belief that your purchasing power is political. You eat at a chain that cares about,
no, is even passionate about craftsmanship, and thus, must be a more credible,
more authentic fast-food business.
The work of discerning authenticity in products or projects, and primarily in
the style of these things, as they are marketed or communicated, detracts from the
work of discerning political forms and patterns that need attention by citizens.
Fussing at the border of aesthetic messages can miss the importance of the non-
aestheticized, sociopolitical world.
In their scene ‘Slow People’ for Camel Collective’s six-hour performance,
The Second World Congress of Free Artists, Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida’s
Doctor Mikhail Patel describes this phenomenon perfectly. After introducing
three participant researchers who have ‘embraced some kind of radical alternative
to modernity’ like dumpster diving or becoming a locavore, he defines the ‘politics
of personal consumption’:

political life is reduced to individual action, and that action is defined along
a horizon that is limited to a series of nonorganizational yes-or-no choices,
between abstention and subsumption – choices that do not seek to upend
as much as to ethically abstain, while falling short of coherent systemic
indictment.7

He later goes onto to a finer point that there is, ‘in laypersons’ terms, a genuine
lack of large-scale responses that might give us, as a species … the ability to save
the world’.8

Exquisite work
What is a total aesthetics of handcraft? That is, how has ‘handcraftedness’
potentially become a totalizing aesthetic viewpoint that when co-opted by
corporations and marketing has both the effects of diluting criticism of corporate
capitalism and the creation of abstract value as well as reifying enterprise in
objects that become mere symbols of free-will ‘work’?

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In the fall of 2013, I embarked on the original version of this essay as a lecture
for the symposium The Deskilling and Reskilling of Artistic Production organized by
Luanne Martineau at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. I wrote it while
a resident at Elsewhere, an artist’s residency and self-proclaimed ‘living museum’9
housed in a defunct thrift and army surplus store in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Surrounded by a grotesque number of things and embedded in the residency
environment – a phenomenon that isolates and celebrates the labour of the artist
as special and deserving of extraordinary treatment – I (perhaps naturally) became
fascinated with the overlap between the desire for skill and how that desire is reified
and aestheticized as artisanal images, experiences and objects.
While I was working on the lecture, I came across a video by the artist-duo
Half Cut Tea about artist couple Nick Olsen and Lilah Horwitz who quit their
jobs to build a cabin on Olsen’s family land in West Virginia, and I reposted it on
social media. The video features Nick, Lilah and their dogs, walking and hanging
out around the property, discussing their respective art practices (photography
and recycled fashion), and the project of building their cabin. They spent around
$500 to make a simple structure, notable for its one wall constructed out of
found windows (Figure 5.1). A significant part of the story is Nick talking about
gathering the windows from antique and junk stores on a road trip, but the video
seamlessly blends their reflections on making, whether about the house or their
work. ‘Working with materials and being hands on with the process … part of the
reason I do things this way is the experience of it’,10 says Nick, while the camera

FIGURE 5.1 Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long, Nick Olson & Lilah Horwitz: Makers,
2012, video still, Half-Cut Tea.com. Courtesy: Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long.

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captures him making a traditional tin-type photograph. As Nick reflects towards

the end of the video about what ‘title’ he could give himself, he says, ‘sometimes
the easiest one is just saying you are an artist’. Here, the video cuts to Nick leaping
from a ledge into a waterfall-fed pond, the accordion and fiddle music swells
triumphantly and the original title comes back up:

Nick Olson & Lilah Horwitz

{makers}

This example has a multifold purpose: first is the project Half Cut Tea itself.
Produced by two Cranbrook Academy of Art graduates, Matt Glass and Jordan
Wayne Long, Half Cut Tea, who dub themselves as ‘inside art production’, present
short documentaries on artists, with new webcasts produced for release on their
website and Vimeo. While their biographies describe both Matt and Jordan as
having other artistic pursuits, they travel ‘the country looking for artists and
telling their stories through short documentary films’ that have been featured on
MSNBC, Huffpost, NPR, This is Colossal as well as being licensed for TV in seven
countries.11 Notably, their videos have a signature faded film quality, accompanied
by melodramatic folk-music soundtracks that together give each short film a
romantic and nostalgic character that works to create a total aesthetic across all
of their projects and inflect the subjects they capture. Second, are the two subjects
themselves and their project as documented by Glass and Long.
So why was I drawn to this video in the first place? I will be the first to
admit that I have the privilege of not being trapped in a cubicle, and do enjoy
a livelihood where I usually feel a considerable amount of agency. But the
majority of my work boils down to significant amounts of immaterial labour,
time spent on email, writing texts, grants, staring at spreadsheets and herding
other cultural workers in the effort to produce meaning that often seems illusory.
And of course, the infinite scroll: thumbing through Facebook and Instagram
posts, only partially with purpose. I don’t know how embodied I always feel, in
my labour or in my free time, and so I am as susceptible to the ‘dream of skill’
as the next information herder. I probably reposted Half Cut Tea’s video about
Olson and Horwitz because on top of having visited and taught at several small
and independent artist residencies over years, I was also spending summers
hosting artists in rural Ohio with my partner on his family tree-farm. While
onsite, I only dreamt about building packed earth cabins and retrofitting trailers
into idiosyncratic structures, because instead, I spent most of my time either
catching up on reading, socializing or simply continuing my regular work life –
just moving my regular season office out of doors.
When I first watched the video and shared it, I didn’t think too much about
Nick and Lilah’s age, or what they were wearing, I was caught up in my desire
for skill. The comment thread that unfurled beneath my post was intriguing: it

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eventually took to describing Nick and Lilah as ‘hipsters’, a pejorative term that
describes young, predominantly white Americans. ‘Hipster’ also tends to imply
economic privilege along with the visible markers of youth and race. Hipster is
a powerful word in the American popular lexicon, with several contemporary
writers taking the term and group to task in recent years. In short, applying that
label to anything can immediately void any cultural production based on a loose
association of styles. As Mark Greif points out in the New York Times:

All hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride
comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the
world. Yet the habits of hatred and accusation are endemic to hipsters because
they feel the weakness of everyone’s position – including their own.12

Style is a notoriously unstable category. What was ‘hip’ fifteen years ago is certainly
not ‘hipster’ now; rather the term has merely come to describe an idea (as there is
no real certain definition) of a commoditized, fashionable, pseudo-counterculture
that is devoid of the political. Canadian journalists Joseph Heath and Andrew
Potter do an excellent job of summing up how counterculture is the very thing
that drives consumer culture in their book Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture
Became Consumer Culture.13 They outline how rebellion drives the marketplace,
because the marketplace is driven by consumers who seek distinction from the
masses: ‘Social status, like everything else, is subject to diminishing marginal
utility – the less you have of it, the more you are willing to pay to get some.’14
In fashion, that social status can be achieved through the aspirational brand,
a product that many people want to own but can’t afford. Sociologist Dick
Hebdige describes fashion’s intentional communication (of status and distinction)
in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, as a loaded choice, whether expressive of
‘normality’ or ‘deviance’.15 A handcrafted thing (article of fashion, design, etc.)
could stand-in as an aspirational fashion object as it signifies access to the unique
and the singular, as well as to the knowledge of its whereabouts. Possessing the
handmade object shows that the consumer knows where to find the uncommon,
whether it’s the next big thing, or something so rare that they are the only ones
who have the distinction of knowing about it.
I’m sure there are many people who are uncomfortable with the idea that their
purchasing of small batch gin, French theory and rare vinyl still makes them a
consumer, but Heath and Potter are hard to argue with: the desire to stand out
and prove that you do not participate in mass society ratchets up consumption in
general – across a variety of goods and services. And as they point out, even if you
save your money, it is simply lent back out by banks for someone else to spend.
‘Consumerism’ they point out: ‘always seems to be a critique of what other people
buy. This makes it difficult to avoid the impression that the so-called critique
of consumerism is just thinly veiled snobbery or, worse, puritanism.’16 They go

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on to point out that taste is grounded in the sense of distinction, and given that
everyone cannot have good taste (or no one would be distinguished), ‘good taste’
continually shifts to more inaccessible, less familiar styles.17 Taste and distinction
are constantly moving targets.

Good taste, in other words, is a positional good. One person can have it only if
many others do not. It is like belonging to an exclusive yacht club, or walking to
work downtown or hiking through untouched wilderness. It has an inherently
competitive logic. Thus any consumer who buys an object as an expression of
her style or taste is necessarily participating in competitive consumption.18

Punk culture, according to Hebdige, was an attempted critique of capitalism

through fashion that was comprised of a bricolage of illegible signs, ‘signifying
practices’ that Hebdige saw as ‘radical in (the) Kristevan sense, in that they
gestured towards a “nowhere” and actively sought to remain silent (and) illegible’.19
Today’s ‘hipster’ style, rather than providing a cultural critique through personal
adornment like punk’s garbage bags and safety pins, is instead totally familiar and
readable. Some might even describe it as a nostalgic collage of countercultural
and popular fashion – a mix of lumberjack shirts and beards and floral skirts and
Doc Martens and Kurt Cobain cardigans that make up a greatest-hits of American
countercultural and popular fashion from hippies to blue collar workers through
to grunge and right up to normcore. ‘Hipsters’ appear to restate bygone culture
and values through their consumption and remix of a plurality of iconic (North)
American styles. Perhaps hipsters are relatively speaking, conservative.
So, if we understand style and consumption as being driven by a desire for
distinction, how might a person set themselves apart from others in terms of
style, but less overtly through consumption? Not unlike the savvy fashionista who
discovers the unique handcrafted bags on a side street in Italy or in an Etsy store
online, the discoverer of amazing experiences is articulating their unique and
distinguished relationship to the world through what they do rather than what they
buy. And what could confer more distinction today than the individualism of the
‘project’ and the particularly enlightened quality of its implied labour? And what
could be a more sensible, genuine project than those that are handcrafted and/or
emerge from an autonomous, DIY framework?
‘The formulation of diverse projects has now become the major preoccupation
of contemporary man’,20 says Boris Groys, in The Loneliness of the Project. Although
he goes on to speak about more academic endeavours, and the inherent social
isolation that ebbs and flows as projects are initiated and completed, Groys points
out a few things about ‘the project’ worth reiterating:

Each project is above all the declaration of another, new future that is supposed
to come about once the project has been executed … But unnoticed somewhere

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beyond this general flow of time, somebody has begun working on another
project. He is writing a book, preparing an exhibition or planning a spectacular
act of terrorism. And he is doing this in the hope that once the book is published,
the exhibition opened or the assassination carried out, the general run of things
will change and all mankind will be bequeathed a different future; the very
future, in fact, to which this project has anticipated and aspired.21

The ‘project’ probably costs money, and is likely to be exchanged at some point
for something else (cultural capital, credibility among ‘creatives’), but it also takes
attention away from traditional consumerism and retrains it on activity and
authenticity. In art, Groys points out, attention has moved away from the art object
itself and towards its documentation; heightening the importance of the doing, the
productivity, the action over the product itself:

Art documentation thus signals the attempt to use artistic media within art
spaces to make direct reference to life itself, in other words: to a form of pure
activity or pure praxis, as it were; indeed, a reference to life in the art project,
yet without wishing to directly represent it. Here, art is transformed into a way
of life, whereby the work of art is turned into non-art, to mere documentation
of this life. Or, put in different terms, art is now becoming biopolitical because
it has begun to produce and document life itself as pure activity by artistic
means.22

Nick and Lilah’s semi-functional house is a project that exists and circulates as
art documentation within the framework of Half Cut Tea’s video. It lives as pure
activity and praxis with over 1.5 million views on YouTube alone, making it clear
that there is a considerable draw to watching the narrative of the project, DIY
skill and handcraftedness even if the results are not a permanently inhabitable
structure. The string of comments on YouTube mostly express glee and awe at the
beauty of the thing, or thoughts on the wonder of making something with one’s
own hands; critical commentary on the project itself or the video’s framing of it
are few and far between.
In current popular culture, particularly advertising and journalism, artists,
craftsmen and designers are portrayed as the makers of meaning in American
culture, and wield considerable agency in the production of signs. As Jacques
Rancière defines it: art is the ‘recomposition of the relationship between doing,
making, being, seeing and saying’.23 The contemporary cognitive worker, whether
confined to a desk at a cultural organization, freelancing in a local coffee shop or
sharing desk space in an incubator, is still abstracted from the material world,
despite being situated in environments that suggest otherwise. For the worker
tethered to their laptop or smart phone, the dream of re-embodiment is in the act
of artistic production – in the project that will change the future after they publish

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that article, complete that website or launch their start-up. Work that more-or-
less continues later, back on the screen. Given that the average cognitive labourer
spends all day on their computer, this re-embodiment is primarily imagined
through watching it: the recirculation of videos and the re-pinning or tumbling of
images. It is a virtual addiction to skill through the fetishizing of documentation
(or in the case of object: handcraftedness).
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi poses an interesting question about what wealth is, in his
treatise against the conditions of contemporary labour and the loss of sensuous
life. He says:

We can evaluate wealth on the basis of the quantity of goods and values possessed,
or we can evaluate wealth on the basis of the quality of joy and pleasure that
our experiences are capable of producing in our feeling organisms. In the first
case wealth is an objectified quantity, in the second it is a subjective quality of
experience … One could instead conceive of wealth as the simple capacity to
enjoy the world available in terms of time, concentration and freedom.24

On one hand, the project is the very thing that Berardi feels has troubled the
condition of labour in the digital era; that is the complete investment of all
competences, all creative, innovative and communicative energies on the part
of the cognitive worker who values labour as the most interesting part of their
lives. The project (or ‘enterprise’ in Berardi’s terminology) means invention and
free will, but ultimately secludes the worker from social and sensual interaction
as they become permanently wired to their production, or as Groys recognizes,
isolated. On the other hand, the project represents work done by choice, in free
time, and out of free will. It is the work that is possible given a certain privilege in
terms of time and freedom, an opportunity for pleasure in experience, as well as
the privilege to seek isolation and entertain the possibility of bequeathing a new
future.
Perhaps without the privilege of time, and time to build skill, or without the
existing resources that allow skill to be spent on projects that do not create other
valuable resources, or maybe simply, without the privilege to think and act poetically
(and fail at poetics, as much as succeed), there is a desire building for skill itself,
reified, and what it represents as much as what it can actually provide. A desire
that reflects a hope to escape the mundane space-time of wage labour, and in the
case of many American workers, the mundane space-time of abstract, immaterial
labour that leads the worker to desire inhabiting the role of producer of things: the
role of artist, craftsman and industrial designer. At the very least, without access to
the time, resources and skill to produce meaning in this way, the cognitive worker
can circulate images of this work, playing a hand in the production of meaning
as self-styled curators on Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and YouTube. Homemade
houses like Nick and Lilah’s (re-presented in documentation like those of Half Cut

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Tea’s), have the capacity to communicate skill, agency, independence and stability
all in one neat package. Since these conditions cannot be ‘bought’, witnessing them
(or at least their record) can fuel the desire for similar circumstances, and with it,
the image of the project becomes something to be hungrily consumed.

Total art worlds

In Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour, Nigel Thrift writes about
aesthetics and the construction of worlds as ‘spaces formed by capitalism whose
aim is not to create subjects … so much as the worlds within which the subject
exists’.25 ‘Worlds have their own practices of rendering prominent’, Thrift says,
‘giving rise to a particular style of going on that consequently focuses passions’. He
goes on to say that: ‘The restlessness of the imagination becomes an asset that can
be valorized as everyday life becomes a cavalcade of aesthetically charged moments
that can be used for profit, not least because every surface communicates.’26
I read this excerpt of Thrift’s as an attempt to understand the contemporary
fashion for lifestyle. And not lifestyle, as in habits or ways of going about things,
but lifestyles as fully articulated worlds of interconnected aesthetic decisions. In
the Half Cut Tea video, there is particular emphasis on the aesthetics of experience;
the project can be understood as a gesture towards the construction of a self-
styled world that Nick and Lilah inhabit. Thrift is quick to note that style is not
about checking boxes, but about a series of modifications to being that produce
captivation. For Thrift, glamour is a key quality for creating allure, and thus the
captivation that style produces. It is a term that he chooses for its dual economic
and magical force, for meaning the ‘spell cast by unobtainable realities’.27
In closing, I want to examine the project transformed into a world as it happens
in the art practice and residency, Mildred’s Lane. Mildred’s Lane is a kind of lifestyle
art piece initiated by artists J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion, but increasingly the
focus of Puett. Mildred’s, as it is affectionately called by artists who have been
residents, dinner guests and lecturers, is Puett’s home on 96 acres in North East
Pennsylvania. Dubbed an ‘art complexity’, Mildred’s hosts a summer residency
program where students pay to participate in three-week programs, Social
Saturday dinner events and artist-directed projects. The Mildred’s Lane website
reveals that all of Puett’s work – from her off-site exhibitions to homeschooling
her middle-school son – are folded into the ‘complexity’ in an articulation of a
lifestyle-turned-world that leaves no part of her life orphaned from the larger
project, suspending herself indefinitely inside it.
The Mildred world is one of workstyles and comportment. Explained on the
‘Philosophy’ page of the website as a ‘practice and educational philosophy (in an)
attempt to collectively create new modes of being in the world’,28 Puett’s project
is self-aware of its world-making, future-changing proposition as per Thrift and

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Groys. Puett goes on to say: ‘This idea incorporates questions of our relation to
the environment, systems of labor, forms of dwelling, clothing apparatuses, and
inventive domesticating; all of which form an ethics of comportment and are
embodied in workstyles.’ Students at Mildred’s Lane, the site explains, will negotiate
these issues through rethinking ‘one’s collective involvements with food, shopping,
making, styling, gaming, sleeping, reading and thinking. Every research session will
be an intensive reconsideration of workstyles … (with) visits to alternative farms,
discussion around food and cooking, cleaning and maintenance.’29 Having been a
guest at Mildred’s, I have witnessed first-hand the ‘workstyles and comportment’
philosophy in action, where resident students and staff have adopted a fairly
thorough aesthetic that guides their life and work, whether it’s their mode of dress
or their projects (Figure 5.2, Plate 6).
In many ways, staying at Mildred’s Lane is like staying inside an art installation,
with bits and pieces of Dion and Puett’s work throughout the property as either
full-fledged installations (as in some of the guest cabins) or as odds and ends
throughout the house. Puett, Dion and their collaborators have cultivated a rather
precise shabby-chic-meets-Victorian-study aesthetic on the property, with only
vintage linens and glass in the kitchen, a library overflowing with books wedged
between jars filled with scientific specimens, and an admittedly delightful outdoor
porcelain bathtub. Puett and staff drift dreamily around the property in linen
shift dresses and drawstring pants, everything seemingly white or neutral or
grey. One feels untoward donning anything brightly coloured or patterned, as the
environment seems to instruct that ‘good’ comportment, along with ‘hooshing’30
the homestead, is to affect a kind of anachronistic prairie manner.

FIGURE 5.2 Rebecca Purcell, J. Morgan Puett and Jeffrey Jenkins in collaboration,
HumanUfactorY(ng) Workstyles: The Labor Portraits of Mildred’s Lane. Cheryl Edwards:
Digestion Choreographer, Paul Barlow: Master of Applied Complexity and J Morgan Puett,
Ambassador of Entanglements, 2014. Photo: Jeffrey Jenkins.

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Perhaps it is telling that Mildred’s has been featured in the New York Times31
and Food and Wine magazine,32 the former quoting frequent visitor Jorge
Columbo as saying: ‘Morgan has been making her own world as if the rest of
the world didn’t exist.’ Later in the article, Puett says: ‘What I’m interested in is
the future and what it looks like … in inventing a future through history and
material culture and art.’
Mildred’s is known for its Saturday Socials, a dinner party that Puett and
collaborators host on the property for invited guests and an extended group of
friends and acquaintances. These events are a veritable who’s who of the East
Coast art world give or take a few Western or European visitors who might be
nearby. Puett is truly a generous host in that regard, the door is always open once
you’ve been to Mildred’s, but it is this event, in relationship to the residents and
the lessons in workstyles and comportment that I wish to focus on closely here.
When I visited Mildred’s Lane in 2011, the residents were hard at work building
tables and lanterns, decorating the trees, choosing linens and picking flowers in
preparation for that evening’s social. Ever the pragmatist, I wondered out-loud
as an increasingly frustrated pair of residents worked out day two of a table
design: Why wasn’t there a table from last weekend?

‘We make them for every event’, was the matter-of-fact answer.
‘Are there no parts left over in storage?’ I asked.
‘Well we don’t have much room for storage’, I was told.

This was where I saw the full effect of the ‘workstyle’, the handmade, the skilfully
hand-wrought as aesthetic. The experiential event that was the Saturday Social
wouldn’t be the finely crafted, total artwork (or perhaps in this incident, art world)
that was being constantly prepared at Mildred’s, if a table hadn’t been especially
hand-built for that event. Of course, the diners might not realize this detail. Some
would likely assume as dumbly as I, that the tables were broken down and stored
until next week (and perhaps they are today, five years later). But the residents,
at least according to the educational philosophy, were being taught to find art in
every act of labour, and presumably joy in the aesthetic of simplicity, which is
probably all that is possible for craft on such a short timetable.
At the same time, it’s hard to examine Mildred’s Lane and not be suspect of
labour made so precious and of students-turned-production-assistants in the
construction of another artist’s world. While there is something to be said for
finding or making the aesthetics of the everyday, the everyday of Mildred’s is
particular. It is noticeably nostalgic for an amalgamation of the aesthetics of olden
times, when farm labour was by no means this lovely or charmingly inefficient.33
By designing and upholding its workstyles and modes of comportment, Mildred’s
engages in a glamourizing of the domestic and agricultural labour it relies on for
entertaining. The Saturday Social gathers an already glamorous set of individuals

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to dine together, and the overlay of this set of individuals onto the heightened
rural worlding of Mildred’s casts the kind of spell of unobtainable realities that
Thrift describes. For most, this home life, with its extensive cast of artists paying/
volunteering to help ‘make it’ is unachievable.
Mildred’s Lane is the ultimate project (or enterprise, to use Berardi’s terms). It is
the work that is only possible given a wealth of time, freedom and pleasure in every
experience; the privilege to take pleasure in, and aestheticize, the domestic labour
that is for many merely the dreaded chores wedged between jobs, children and
other responsibilities. Like Nick and Lilah’s cabin, there is an affected casualness in
the aesthetics of this work, a handcraftedness that presumes accessibility,34 but this
‘work’ remains in the category of enterprise. In presenting unobtainable realities
that are aestheticized through the vocabulary of the handmade and the authentic,
these qualities become a new kind of glamorous: the freedom to make, to be slow,
to build worlds, to deploy skill for pleasure rather than pay. Coupled with the
strange disconnect between the price and privilege required to gain access to the
art world, and the extreme wealth that travels through it, this attempt to live a
kind of aestheticized simplicity as an isolated artwork, often fails at being either
critical of those economic circumstances that make such an act possible or truly
celebratory of a legitimately simple life. What results is a kind of uncanny theatre,
or as Hal Foster recalls in Design & Crime, a Gesamtkunstwerk that ‘commingles
subject and object’.35 Referencing Adolf Loos’s critique of art nouveau, Foster is
wary of the total design of contemporary life, with the individuality of the owner
expressed down to every nail. As Loos describes the man in his complete art
nouveau interior: ‘he (is) precluded from all future living and striving, developing
and desiring. He (thinks), this is what it means to learn to go about life with one’s
own corpse. Yes indeed. He is finished. He is complete!’

Notes
1 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2012), 1.
2 ‘About’, Manos, http://manoscrafted.com (accessed 28 October 2013). The website
has since been taken down, but can be accessed here: https://web.archive.org/
web/20131024152101/http://manoscrafted.com/.
3 Creative Market website, https://creativemarket.com/ (accessed 25 August 2016).
4 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury, [2004] 2013), 61.
5 The International Slow Food Movement was founded afterward by participant
Carlo Petrini, http://www.slowfood.com/about-us/our-history/ (accessed 10
September 2016).
6 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1979), 93.

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7 Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida, ‘Slow People’, in The Second World Congress of
Free Artists, ed. Camel Collective (Denmark: Kunsthal Aarhus, 2013), 122.
8 Ibid., 123.
9 Elsewhere website, http://www.goelsewhere.org/ (accessed August 25 2016).
10 Matt Glass and Jordan Wayne Long (Half Cut Tea), Nick Olson & Lilah Horwitz
Makers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWvemw0nj7k (accessed 25
August, 2016).
11 Half Cut Tea website, http://www.halfcuttea.com/about/ (accessed 25 August 2016).
12 Mark Greif, ‘The Hipster in the Mirror’, New York Times, 12 November 2010, http://
www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/books/review/Greif-t.html (accessed 25 August 2016).
13 Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became
Consumer Culture (New York: Harper Collins, 2004). The Canadian release of the
book is titled The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed.
14 Ibid., 116.
15 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, [1979]
1988), 101.
16 Heath and Potter, Nation of Rebels,105.
17 Ibid., 125.
18 Ibid., 126.
19 Hebdige, Subculture, 120. Hebdige begins by pointing out that Kristeva in La
Revolution du Langage Poetique, ‘counts as radical those signifying practices that
negate and disturb syntax – “the condition of coherence and rationality” ’, 119.
20 Boris Groys, ‘The Loneliness of the Project’, Going Public (Berlin: Sternberg Press,
2010), 70–83. Originally appeared in New York Magazine of Contemporary Art
Theory, no. 1.1 (Antwerp: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, nd.). https://
thomas-hersey.wiki.uml.edu/file/view/The_Lonliness_of_the+_Project.pdf (accessed
25 August 2016).
21 Ibid,. 3
22 Ibid., 5
23 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 42.
24 Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 81.
25 Nigel Thrift, ‘Understanding the Material Process of Glamour’, in The Affect Theory
Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010), 295.
26 Ibid., 296.
27 Ibid., 297 (emphasis added).
28 Mildred’s Lane website, http://www.mildredslane.com/ (accessed 25 August 2016).
29 Ibid.
30 ‘Hooshing’ being the word-of-choice at Mildred’s (that eventually infects one’s own
vocabulary for better or for worse after leaving), for not just tidying up, but giving
your tidying a little extra ‘sumpin-sumpin.’

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31 Alastair Gordon, ‘In Her Own World’, New York Times 29 May 2008, http://www.
nytimes.com/2008/05/29/garden/29puett.html (accessed 27 August 2016).
32 Jen Murphy, ‘J. Morgan Puett: A Curator of Food Curiosities’, Food & Wine, http://
www.foodandwine.com/articles/j-morgan-puett-a-curator-of-food-curiosities
(accessed 27 August 2016).
33 Mildred’s Lane is not a working farm, although there is a garden. Cooking and
cleaning are shared by participants in the residency or currently involved in the
project. Other work, repairs and maintenance, including landscaping of the 96-acre
site is assumed to be part of this shared labour as per the published philosophy.
34 This is to say, that the casualness of this work presumes that it is easy or readily at
hand for anyone, if they simply made different choices. Of course, most working- and
middle-class people cannot take months off to experiment in world making, let alone
dedicate resources to lifestyle experiments. Artistic enterprise, while it claims to
model possibilities, is only capable of modeling those possibilities as motifs.
35 Hal Foster, Design and Crime (And Other Diatribes) (Brooklyn: Verso, 2002), 15.

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6 CRAFT AS PROPERTY AS
LIBERALISM AS PROBLEM
Leopold Kowolik

Monsieur Jourdain: Est-ce que les gens de qualité en ont?

Maître de musique: Oui monsieur.
Monsieur Jourdain: J’en aurai donc.
MOLIÈRE, LE BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME, ACT II

Satire grows like mould wherever a system or group or practice takes itself too
seriously or when people are unaware of an error they are deeply invested in
making. The more serious and the more myopic, the funnier. Satire often adheres
to pretentious trappings – affectation or conceit that obstruct societal honesty
and social improvement. It’s what Molière was addressing, and although it took
a century, the groups and pretentions he lampooned were eventually brought
to task by revolution. His bourgeois gentleman doesn’t understand the rules of
the aristocracy, the deeply serious rules of vanity, and so blunders along, a self-
deluding oxymoron, pursuing the bourgeois mantra that he must have what
‘people of quality’ have. Molière’s satire is apt because it targets self-deluding and
self-congratulating and in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme it centres on a character
who acutely misunderstands the situation and positions himself ridiculously
because of it.
It is easy enough to see how craft could be similarly satirized. Much of craft’s
identity seems to rely on overly serious self-reflection, strained gravitas, a weathered
voice of profound personality and the creased hands of individual creativity, all set
within an anti-capitalist counterculture with a deliberate obliviousness to price.
There are craftspeople, like British ceramicist Carol McNicoll, who know that
their work – however brilliant and politically charged – cannot be pragmatically
political and that, in truth, there is no such thing as ‘counterculture’. Standing in her
studio, discussing the active social statements of her anti-war series or the current
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FIGURE 6.1 Carol McNicoll, Freedom and Democracy, 2011, ceramic, wire, found
objects. Photo: Philip Sayer. Courtesy: Marsden Woo Gallery, London.

work that juxtaposes found-object made-in-China cheap vases with fractured

handmade plates, we talk left-wing politics. McNicoll’s work is clever, funny,
political and useful (all her work is functional, however sculptural) (Figure 6.1).
But she very clearly says: ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’ No fruit bowl is going to stop a
war; no vase will alter a banker’s bonus. Her art and her creativity are pleasurable
for her, but she is whistling in the wind of politics.
And yet, in parts of the discourse, craft has been situated as a foil or counter
to the interconnected systems of neoliberalism and capitalism. Craft makes
sincere claims against social inequalities, homogenization, industrialization
and manipulation. As a practice and a dialogue, craft aspires to freedom and it
is very serious. There are obviously acute global issues that need our immediate
attention: use of labour, overproduction/waste in race-to-the-bottom market gluts,
conscious disregard for environmental impact, dehumanized scales of production
and consumption, the tyrannical instability of high finance. Craft might have some
talking points for these issues. But for makers and consumers of craft to assume
that it is plainly ‘anti-neoliberal’ is like Monsieur Jourdain thinking he can be a
‘bourgeois gentleman’. It is crucial to properly understand craft’s relationship to
neoliberal capitalism, if craft is to stimulate real solutions to the pressing problems
of our age.
Because craft (meaning craft theory, craft culture and craft as a mode of object
creation) comes out of the very same political and philosophical construction as

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liberalism, many of the assumptions that fuel neoliberal capitalism are also lively
and at work within craft. Craft can indeed be thoughtfully political, as with the
work of McNicoll. Whether at the level of the simple individual object or on a
larger level as it engages with activism and socio-economic redress, craft has
powers as a process and as a discourse to stimulate conversation. But is craft a
foil to neoliberal capitalism, as some claims suggest? We must confront and
understand the complex relationship between craft and neoliberalism before craft
gets too proud of itself as a counter force.
This is a sprawling issue that draws in seventeenth-century history, political
philosophy and its history, Enlightenment shifts in subjectivity, the development
of economic theory and of course much of the geography and socio-economics
of material culture. Ultimately there is a much larger, richer question to be asked
that encapsulates the seminal and ongoing philosophical divisions of craft into art,
science and industry.
So let me be quite clear – this essay is just a start. However, if we can begin
to uncover what craft shares with neoliberalism, we might subsequently better
position craft to discuss and propose incremental, even conservative, solutions in
the ongoing discussion of better social systems. We cannot allow craft its delusion
of inherent anti-capitalism; furthermore, we must reject the self-congratulatory
tone of craft as a system, practice or object for differentiating oneself from the rest
of society.
I will argue that craft in the West is part of late capitalism, not juxtaposed to
it; and further, that craft is defined by the same political philosophy as capitalism.
I will do this by discussing foundational concepts of property and individualism
that are central to understanding both neoliberalism and craft. Each concept
employs a warped version of the original liberal tenets. Craft does occasionally
temporarily escape, embracing these twisted meanings or ironically toying with
capitalism’s underpinnings, as my examples will show. But we must be very careful
how we read these moments. If we are blinkered to craft’s genealogy and role, it
becomes the very worst of capitalist variables: what economists Thorstein Veblen
identified and Fred Hirsch labelled a ‘positional good’ – an entity used to create
social distinction at the specific cost of equality. In essence, craft risks being
reduced to a function of bourgeois snobbery.
Before we continue, two comments on vocabulary: I have already hinted at my
understanding of the word ‘craft’ and this should become more (or less) coherent
as we proceed. When I use the word, I am thinking not only of the objects but
also the people, theories and entire discourse surrounding the material culture
that is juxtaposed to mass production, industrial uniformity and uncreative design
and assembly. Then, for the purposes of this essay I use the phrase ‘neoliberal
capitalism’. This is not to say that I think capitalism and neoliberalism are
synonymous – one is an economic theory and system, the other a sociopolitical
machinery or ideology; one is the subset of the other, though which is a subset of

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which is no longer clear. In this essay, I am thinking of craft’s engagement with

the entire political-economic structure of contemporary Western culture and so
frame my question on the basis that any foil or counter is set against all that is
encompassed by the words ‘capitalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’.
We can reveal some of the shared genealogy of craft and neoliberal capitalism
by stepping backwards in time, through the swirling mists of Keynesian economics
and Mercantilism, back through capitalism and democracy, before Thomas
Jefferson articulated his ideas on a happy society. We arrive back at one of the
originating moments in the history of democratic capitalism: seventeenth-century
England, and to the political philosopher John Locke.

Locke on property
There are several beginnings of liberalism1 but to better understand the DNA of
neoliberal capitalism, Locke’s philosophy is especially helpful. As the historian of
political theory Nathan Tarcov puts it in his book on Locke, ‘there remains a very
real sense in which Americans can say that Locke is our political philosopher’.2
If we want to take issue with contemporary neoliberalism bonded to capitalism
as a homogenizing mode of unrestricted growth through consumption and
economization, then it’s fair to say that we’re talking about American globalized
industrial capitalism.
At the heart of this Americanized liberalism is confusion over the concepts that
are contained in the concept ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of Property’. Thomas
Jefferson adopted Locke’s ideas for the foundation of a state as he and his colleagues
created their new American republic. When the ‘pursuit of happiness’ appears to
replace what in other early American documents came from Locke as ‘property’,
Jefferson’s choice was a very careful clarification and replacement. But in other
places, especially in early American jurisprudence drawing from this migrated
version of Locke, the pursuit of property in a more limited sense of ownership
increasingly contaminated the idea, separating out the pursuit which was key
to the original connection between Lockean ‘property’ and ‘happiness’. Today,
this pollution has so subsumed any other reading, that neoliberalism requires
‘happiness’ to mean ‘the acquisition of stuff ’. Understanding how ‘stuff ’ came
to define our freedom and happiness is essential to understanding the political
counterposition attributed to craft.
This problem begins with Locke’s use of the word ‘property’ in his political
philosophy. Property lies at the core of the Second Treatise of Government,3 in
which he seeks to define the origin of and reasons for state power: ‘Political power
then I take to be a Right of making Laws … for the Regulating and Preserving of
Property.'4 The problem is that for Locke, property can mean specifics like land
and goods but it also means something much broader. Throughout the Treatise,

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‘property’ does include goods and possessions but it also includes everything a
person is. In his introductory essay on the Treatise Christopher Hughes describes
this broader meaning as: ‘One’s property is the whole of one’s social personality.’5
Locke says it quite specifically when he explains that people join society ‘for
the mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call by
the general Name, Property’.6 This is the ‘social personality’ that Hughes refers
to. Another Locke authority, Peter Laslett, explains what this really means: ‘it is
through the theory of property that people can proceed from the abstract world
of liberty and equality based on their relationship with God and natural law, to
the concrete world of political liberty guaranteed by political arrangements’.7
For Locke ‘property’ is not only ‘ownership of stuff ’ but it is also a conceptual
description of the guarantees of natural law. As Locke sees it, humans are ‘all the
Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of
one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they
are his Property, whose Workmanship they are.’8 ‘Property’ is therefore a nebulous
entity: it is the functioning encapsulation of sovereignty. It is a manifestation
of our fundamental rights. ‘Property’, defined in this broad way, is what allows
human beings to interact with one another in the same way that spirit defines
our interaction with God.9 Property is the agent or representation or container
of human power, the vessel for the rights and responsibilities that define power’s
dispersal through a society. In Locke’s thinking, humans are properties of God –
containers of divine sovereignty in the world – correspondingly our sovereignty
is contained in our ‘property’. To be clear: these properties include things we own
like land, but they also comprise everything we are – our skills included.
It follows that a misreading here leads to the situation we have today in
neoliberal capitalism. If we think of our inherent qualities or properties – our
skills and knowledge and labour – as the same as material properties like our lands
and houses and coal, then everything about us can be exchanged or alienated.
This balance sheet reading of property is how we end up with capitalism as Marx
accurately identified it. C. B. Macpherson, the great Canadian reader of liberalism,
most clearly articulated this reading of seventeenth-century political thought. His
highly influential but slightly flawed interpretation of liberalism centres on what
Macpherson calls the theory of possessive individualism. ‘The possessive quality [of
17th century liberalism] is found in its conception of the individual as essentially
the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them
… Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors’.10 This reading is
flawed because, as subsequent commentators have noted,11 Macpherson has read
‘property’ in an economic sense – what I have been calling the limited definition of
property. Writing in the 1960s from a progressive and Marxian-economic viewpoint,
Macpherson’s reading was necessarily economic. But Locke was not thinking like
that at all, as his underlying intention was to establish theories of political power
that would protect against absolutism. Locke’s theories were a defence against

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the Stuart monarchs specifically, though he intended his ideas to be a permanent

political bulwark. Locke saw ‘divine sovereignty’ residing in the people (manifest
in their ‘property’), not in a divine right of kings as the Stuarts would have had it.
He says clearly: ‘By Property I must be understood here, as in other places, to mean
that Property which men have in their Persons as well as Goods.’ 12
To read ‘property’ solely in the limited way, focused on ownership, is to misread
Locke. He was describing the worldly manifestation of the unalienable natural
rights of human beings in the face of tyranny. He was not talking in a limited
manner about economic ownership. This is the misreading that leads to neoliberal
capitalism, and this is the same misreading that craft continues to propagate.
Capitalism thinks of ‘property’ as something that is owned and that this means it
can also be traded. Neoliberalism goes the step further by bonding this property
concept with the ruined version of happiness. So we end up with ‘shop your way
to happiness’. This is the wretched appropriation and misreading of Locke’s word,
with almost none of his meaning.
Reified craft production relies on this misreading of ‘property’. When
craftspeople speak of the skills that are visible in an object, or describe the
characteristics of the handmade, when promotions of craft talk about the
embodiment of the maker, craft is relying on a limited definition of owned
property made available for the consumption of others. ‘Skill’, ‘the characteristics
of the handmade’, ‘the personality of the maker’ – these are properties considered
as owned by the maker in question. This is craft taking the same narrow reading
of the word ‘property’ – that skill, for example, is something owned by the maker,
something they can use as they see fit.
In a way, this is almost a minor point – after all this is not craft’s fault. Craft is
embedded in its historic context. But it is a mistake for craft to not see that the very
same misreading of property into the bloodline of capitalism is the reading that
craft uses to define itself. If we look carefully, we see that craft can momentarily
offer some succour. Like Jefferson’s originally intended pursuit, craft is aspirational.
In the brief moments when workmanship flows through the maker, the maker’s
property – meaning their sovereignty – is expressing itself. In a secular revision of
Locke’s meaning, the human as an embodiment of natural sovereignty embodies
his or her sovereignty in properties set to serve us. But this is aspirational because
it is not achievable. As Jefferson’s ‘pursuit’ implied, the ‘working towards’ is the
key. Craft is a pursuit that aims for the reunification of property as an intangible
container of self-generated political sovereignty (as meant by Locke) and property
as the physical embodiment of an owned piece of stuff. This aspiration is worth
the effort, but we will never achieve it: the moment we think we have achieved or
acquired a physical encapsulation of sovereignty through making or buying a craft
object, we have a capitalist piece of stuff.
We have only to acknowledge that craft can be owned or authored to see how
far craft is from juxtaposition to neoliberal capitalism, and how craft is also deeply

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invested in the limited reading of Locke. The breach of essential sovereignty takes
place in both neoliberal capitalism and in the craft workshop: the difference is
only one of scale and geography. Perhaps craft can offer a critical methodology
for understanding that alienation, as long as it acknowledges its own engagement
in the same system. If, even for a moment, craft can present skill not as property
or possession but, rather, treat skill as a site of intangible reflection of personal
political power, craft has engaged with freedom. But in so doing it only (only!)
takes a stand against tyranny – which is great, but it’s not anti-capitalist.

Property in craft
It is easiest to see how this observation applies to commercial craftspeople whose
work is designed for sale. But this same argument holds for more theoretical works
where sale is either not considered or intentionally ignored, of which craftivism is
a subset.
Carrie Reichardt is a British ceramic-based maker whose artwork and political
activist work has focused on large-scale mosaic. Reichardt positions her craft
as far from capitalism’s centre as possible and her work is vigorously political,
often intended for public spaces, and often collaborative. Even her authorship
is sometimes decentred with her ‘Mad in England’ trademark operating as
something of a mask. But no matter how you cut it, Reichardt is still inside the
current system working within the rules of democratic capitalism: ‘Marketing
oneself and selling one’s work as a name is still a capitalist’s tool that is hard to
avoid.’13 This acknowledgement doesn’t undermine her work as an activist, but the
creative act – the craft act – must be understood as an element of herself owned,
packaged and offered into the culture. The activist statement in her work History
is a Weapon (Figure 6.2, Plate 8), for example, is powerful and clear; but as soon as
we start talking about the process of creation, the journey of the creative act from
idea to physical object, we are using a conception of the human that relies on the
same misreading of self-ownership that became capitalism.
Again, this might seem nettlesome, since such a widely defined net will catch
almost everything in the act of being like capitalism. But the point would be equally
valid with Reichardt’s ceramic spray-paint can with Bansky-cum-Warhol overtones
titled Just my fucking luck, capitalism collapses as my work hits the art market, or
the mention on her website of ‘affordable, subversive souvenirs’ that ‘tapped into
the mood of national dissent’ opposing the patriotism stimulated by the 2012
Olympics.14 Even overt political monuments like Mary Bamber (Figure 6.3) enter
into the flow of public dialogue and consumption. The revolutionary socialist and
suffragette was vigorously anti-establishment, her actions were directly political.
And the statue does educate and excite contemporary reawakening of Bamber’s
activism; but we must acknowledge that the craftwork and the process of its

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FIGURE 6.2 Carrie Reichardt and The Treatment Rooms Collective, History is a Weapon,
2014, ceramic intervention, Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo: Peter Riches.

creation use Reichardt’s skill as property which is then objectified and discussed
accordingly. I believe that craftspeople can be activists and I admire Reichardt’s
work enormously. But the very act of craft, regardless of its political claims or
positioning in the political discourse, relies on the same conversion of self-
ownership and alienation that lie at the core of capitalism.
An even more pointed example appeared in Disobedient Objects, a large
exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2014–15. This exhibition collected
and presented a range of objects made as part of social movements and protests
aimed at bringing about direct political action: ‘Disobedient objects have a history
as long as social struggle itself. Ordinary people have always used them to exert
“counterpower.” ’15 There were many examples of objects the curators felt embodied
those struggles, from 2-litre plastic bottles turned into make-shift tear-gas masks,
to currencies defaced with subversive slogans. The creation of such objects is
often impressively improvisational and can be imaginative, witty, always serious
(however goofy) and vigorously political. But as soon as we start discussing the
skill or the object, we shift to evaluating it on the basis of capitalist property value.
I am not suggesting that this undermines or devalues the activism. But the craft
and the activism remain separate entities and however political the craft wishes
to be, it must acknowledge the ground on which it stands as an externalization

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FIGURE 6.3 Carrie Reichardt with Nick Reynolds, Mary Bamber, 2011, printed ceramic,
glass tiles and mixed media. Courtesy: Carrie Reichardt.

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of a creative impulse. Objects are an inert product of human creativity housed in

physical stuff. The same union banner or book-bloc shield is an object whether
waved confrontationally at the police, exhibited in a museum or stored under
the bed.
The making of protest objects is an extreme example in which the makers are
so immediately and directly engaging with anti-capitalist action that it can be
difficult to distinguish the craft from the action. But there is a difference and this
is what makes it all the more important that we are precise in our understanding
of craft’s pedigree. A teapot does not make a tea party, and attributing political
independence to an object is precisely what makes craft so easily co-opted into
neoliberal capitalism. If we can look at it and discuss it, if we can collect and
exhibit it, we are making an object of the original human property – this is what
capitalism does.
A clearer example to end this point is of Canadian-born, UK-based silversmith
Mary Ann Simmons, although her work is positioned at the opposite end of the
political making spectrum. She produces large-object silver, especially decorative
bowls intended as commemorative gifts. In 2008 she was admitted as a Freeman
to the 700-year-old Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths of the City of London
and became a Liveryman in 2013. When the company first accepted women, and
then foreigners, to their august milieu a decade ago, they stated that they did so to
recognise that the company’s role was to promote excellence in the craftsmanship
of silver and art metals.16 This is craft most certainly, and Simmons must have felt
the political relevance of her entrance to such an organization. And yet, all of the
language and all of the actions surrounding her activities as a maker tie up at that
original reading of skill as a tradable property of oneself (which is not what Locke
said, and is what helps define capitalism).
The point is that craft shares this heritage with neoliberal capitalism whether
the craft objects are intended for sale, exhibition, use, pleasure or anything else.
The conceptual process of bringing into the world is where the overlap occurs and
this is why if improvements are to be made in contemporary political economic
society, craft cannot remain oblivious to the limited assumptions about self as
property. This applies to craftivism just as much as it applies to expensive gifts for
the bourgeoisie. Let’s look now at another aspect of classical liberalism that might
empower craft to change if the assumptions are challenged.

The ‘I’ in Locke’s individualism

Pursuing these underlying principles further, I asked my students in the craft
and design program at Sheridan College about their motivations: why they came
to a studio-focused program to learn about ceramics, glass, furniture or textiles
practices. I received a clear sense of craft’s internal identity and with it another serious

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connection and drift between presumptions about Locke’s ideas in contemporary

society: individualism. I have, incidentally, heard the same thing from senior level,
highly successful crafts people, as from representatives anywhere else in the craft
agora. The students however, have an honesty and clarity that makes their voices
especially representative. They are also the future. And, practically speaking, they
encompass a broad range of craft-types: from intellectual thinker-makers engaging
the highest theoretical possibilities of craft with no thoughts about revenue all the
way across the spectrum to absolutely physical craftspeople – sick of or oblivious
to all the talk, interested only in making useful objects for sale. What we hear in
their comments are craft’s implicit modernist assumptions blaring out: I have a
right to do this; I have a responsibility to myself to do this.

‘I find pleasure in simple, thoughtful objects.’

‘I enjoy working wood with hand tools, as this allows me to feel the textures
I wish to create. For me, the art of furniture making is a visceral experience.’
‘I have ignored the countless times that people in my life have doubted my
drive and told me that what I wanted to be – a successful artist – was not a
realistic goal.’
‘Exploring glass has allowed me to release my inner creative mind and make
what I’ve always felt I needed to.’
‘The relationship I have with clay has always been therapeutic.’
‘I hope to one day be able to see people using my creations in everyday life and
think to myself “I made that”.’

When we discussed the underlying assumptions that appeared in this exercise,

we arrived at the question: From where did they derive this right? Makers feel
‘rights’ and ‘obligations-to-authentic selfhood’ due to perceived democratic-liberal
rights of all social individuals. But this emphasis on individualism is craft’s great
mistake – a mistake shared with original capitalism that has furrowed back in on
itself and become neoliberalism’s major fuel source.
Again, we have to look to Locke; by returning to the origins of liberalism, we
can see how tenets of the modern world overlap and distort in craft in particular
and in neoliberal society as a whole. Because Lockean liberalism constructs a
picture of sovereignty, power and liberty based on the singular person entering
political society, the assumption grew that liberalism requires some sort of absolute
individualism. But this is not why the individual was invoked in the original
construction of liberalism. Right from the beginning, the use of ‘the individual’ is
as a theoretical subset. Yes, the individual is the root of power (where sovereignty
is vested by nature and identified by reason) but political power does not have an

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external expression until that individual comes in contact with other individuals.
To Locke, it stands to reason that there is no state – and subsequently no politics
or power per se – until there is a collective:

Political power then I take to be a right of making laws … and of employing the
force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the
Common-wealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the publick good.17

Locke’s understanding of the individual is only as a piece of a community. In

fact, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that what we would imagine as
‘individualism’ would not even have crossed Locke’s mind. The atomistic, economic
and libertarian conception does not appear in Locke and as such, he would not
recognize the neoliberal societal assumption that we see echoed in the statements
mentioned earlier: ‘I have the right, and obligation even, to do anything I like up
to the point it interferes with anyone else’s right to do anything they like.’ This idea
emerges later.
Locke makes it clear in Section 87 of the Second Treatise. In order for
political society to function, it must be able to operate on behalf of the needs
of the composite members ‘there only is political society, where everyone of the
members hath quitted his natural power, resigned it up into the hands of the
community’.18 Locke’s notion of the individual, in the original liberal sense, was
an almost purely theoretical construct that allowed him to discuss the origins of
power. He did this to articulate and justify limitations on the English monarch’s
power. The ‘individual’ was not set up against the state or even to restrict a
definition of government,19 and it was certainly not a description of discrete,
semi-combative political atoms with rights of autonomy up to the boundaries
of any other individual that we are familiar with today. For craftspeople to
describe their practice as an exercise of a right or obligation of individuality, is
to take this latter day liberalism all the way into its current neoliberal capitalist
manifestation: individualism is the justification for action which is applied in all
of these quoted cases just as it is when advertisers sell us the next globalized,
mass-produced tchotchke – ‘I can buy. I must buy.’
Within neoliberal capitalism’s appropriation of individualism, each unique,
entitled, rights-protected atom must go out into society and bash against the
other self-contained particles in a constant competition for resources or the right
to take a day off. Craftspeople may be more friendly, collaborative even, but the
emphasis on authorship or the entitlement to make what they feel they want to
make, is precisely the same model of individualism as appropriated by neoliberal
capitalism. Robert Pippin has questioned this process in his book The Persistence
of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath by suggesting that if a historical epoch
can be said to have a philosophical context, then ours would best be described by
the slightly ironic phrase ‘Bourgeois Philosophy’:

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This would be a philosophy that explains how it would be possible (whether it

is possible) that individual subjects could uniquely, qua individuals, direct the
course of their own lives, why it has become so important that we seek to achieve
this state maximally … The basic philosophical claim underwriting such an
enterprise is the notion of the independent, rational, reflective individual, one
who can act in the light of such reflective results. This is the ontological and the
value claim that underwrites rights protection, claims of entitlement, and just
deserts, and that begins to make pressing new sorts of philosophical problems.20

This passage introduces ideas of individualism that began with the Enlightenment
and that turned into the sort of personalized experience of society that is now
the norm and assumption. What matters for craft here is in the understanding
of individualism as it was misread: if liberalism became neoliberalism, it was
because primacy was given to the atomistic reading of the individual, and craft
perpetuates that reading: ‘I must make!’ or ‘I must consume uniquely made things!’
Of course, this begins to overlap with the issue of ‘the authentic experience’, as if
such a thing exists. The unique experience and the authentic individual tie up in
craft’s current vogue. But even without getting into that, we can see that craft’s
pride in its Marx-like revaluing of labour and associated definitions of work,
not to mention the commoditized nature of authorship (which of course returns
us to the issue of property), all show that craft assumes that the individual as
constructed by capitalism is the root social element. It doesn’t make a difference if
craftspeople are working together or think of themselves as cosy communities: the
objects themselves and the entitlement to creativity rely on that same bourgeois
philosophy.
Look at the way artist craftspeople like Gord Peteran speak of their work.
He says, ‘I would like you to approach the pieces with a certain amount of trust
and that you will believe what I am saying to be true.’ This is a statement of the
individual at work. Peteran is a Toronto-based conceptual furniture artist, who has
pushed the definition of furniture in his exploration of human spaces (Figure 6.4,
Plate 7). Glenn Adamson discusses Peteran in Thinking Through Craft, where he
sees in Peteran’s work that ‘the handmade and the Readymade are locked in a
tight embrace’.21 This is conceptual craft and Peteran is undoubtedly an impressive
artist, and he speaks like one: ‘I thought that if I had five opportunities to make
five or six comments on the human condition, what would those be?’22 It seems
perfectly reasonable for makers to speak of their work in terms like these of
inspirations that deserve exploration and personal adventure through media
and concept. For Peteran or Reichardt, their individual creativity is the element
that makes them valuable to us personally and to society as a whole. Part of the
appeal is their unique position of intersecting experiences, ideas and skills. But the
celebration of absolute individualism of the artist or craftsperson and their work
is also the marching tune of neoliberalism. When craft celebrates authorship and

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FIGURE 6.4 Gord Peteran, Secret Weapon, 2011, violin cases, hand planes, velvet, 24”
w × 8″ d X 5″ h. Courtesy: Gord Peteran.

the expression of the individual, it accentuates one of the problems it might seek
to resolve – that the individual is given primacy over the community. Or, to go
back to Macpherson, that the individual is ‘the proprietor of his own person or
capacities, owing nothing to society for them’.23
This brings us right back to the neoliberal capitalist misreading of individualism.
Locke’s individual didn’t exist in the real world, certainly not as an active particle
outside the complete, integrated community. The economic model that developed
throughout the eighteenth century changed all that. The rise of democratic
capitalism and its emphasis on the individual parallels the development of
Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophies that separated art, then science and
then manufacturing into distinct disciplines, and away from the core concept of
craft. It was correct that the individual not be stamped or swamped by tyranny or
collectivism. But, as Macpherson said of individualism’s shift through history: ‘the
strength of the liberal theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries …
became the defect of that theory about mid-nineteenth century.’24 Now in the
twenty-first century the reading of individualism has become positively toxic.
Though several commentators have worked on this issue for over a century, it
is now worse than ever here in the heart of a neoliberal age, and craft is right
there too – from conceptual art craft to Etsy shop owners, craft is relished and
championed as an expression of individuality. Neoliberalism couldn’t have a better
example for articulating the cult of the entrepreneur individual than craft.

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How far we haven’t come

In this context we begin to note the many correlations between craft and
conservatism. Craft objects are often spoken of as numinous in the face of industry’s
soullessness, that is, they preserve a pre-scientific spirituality that has been
denatured by modernity and industry. Craft objects are said to embody or represent
familial and cultural lineage and they are meant to endure – that is, to be used and
inherited – craft objects often feature prominently in a family ‘estate’. Craft talks
about sitting and slowly enjoying family meals, contemplating the (finely wrought)
clothing and fabric and furniture of life, that is to say recovering the ceremonial
(however casual) within domestic acts and behaviours. This celebration of luxury
is of course the paradoxical obverse to craft’s other romanticized notion as pre-
colonialized, culturally pure or innocent. Of course, we could muse at length on
the role of nostalgia (the engine room of conservatism) in craft. What we have
seen here is that whether craft is intended for the shop floor, the art gallery or
for progressive politics, it still contains these powerful assumptions that must be
acknowledged and recognized for their connection to the political philosophies
that contemporary craft often claims to oppose.
Neoliberal capitalism and craft have inherited their positions from a long and
complex evolution of readings and misreadings. I haven’t focused specifically on
Locke here because the Second Treatise instigated all neoliberalism’s flaws, nor
because Locke is the only source to read craft’s correspondence to neoliberalism.
Rather, I have focused on Locke because it is specific misreadings of his ideas
that have contributed to how we understand the question of skill as economic
property, and because the individualism has become totally warped in subsequent
centuries. These are two of the cardinal sins of capitalism and they are two of the
defining characteristics of craft. By ignoring all this, craft risks not only making a
fool of itself like Molière’s character, but also committing a sin that falls right at the
heart of neoliberalism. By ostensibly situating itself outside the capitalist system,
while continuing to make the sorts of errors in true liberalism that are consistent
with neoliberal thinking, craft makes itself into a ‘positional good’ that further
aggravates the most objectionable elements of capitalism.
The term ‘positional good’ was introduced by economist Fred Hirsch in 1977,25
and more recently applied by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter to describe an
economic goal separate from material goods themselves. Positional goods allow
the owner to differentiate themselves from other parties in the same market.26
Positional goods appeal to snobbery. Like being able to walk to work, or wearing
the distinctly cool clothing item, positional goods allow us to demarcate ourselves
from the masses, and to show that though the waters of homogenization may be
rapidly rising, we are still dry and unique. Craft sales feed deeply from this. The
unique, the handmade, the local, the hometown maker all pretends to something

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different, not accessible to just anyone. This self-congratulatory sin is part of the
larger dialogue of authenticity: the belief that if we can only just get away from the
influence of social context our ‘real’ selves and beliefs can shine through. There
is no such place, as those who have gone looking for it in Anthropologie or Etsy
already know. What we haven’t confronted is the role played by craftivists, the role
played by an elevated conceptual, theoretical and often-academic craft discourse
that hopes to keep its own feet dry against these issues. When craft fails to take
into account that it relies on some of the same philosophies as neoliberalism, when
craft takes to the streets (either figuratively or literally) it risks further improving
the positional value of all craft and ‘crafted’ materials already for sale at a retailer
near you. This is not craft’s fault; but craft practitioners and commentators must
acknowledge it.

And so, back to the beginning

The satire of William Morris by his contemporaries was always fairly friendly if
a bit barbed – drawings by Edward Burne-Jones or Dante Gabriel Rossetti show
him at worst as a pudgy inattentive husband. But he might deserve worse. Morris
was the original conflater of craft and protest politics. He believed in good,
ennobling design and the value of the handmade; he believed that the labourer
could be freed from drudgery and he wrote socialist marching hymns and made
frequent important speeches at rallies – most notably on the November 1887
Bloody Sunday rally and at another point he was arrested for hitting a police
officer. But however much Morris was a craftsman and however much he was
an activist, the two remain separate. He fails the most where craft is expected to
service political ends. Almost all of the ways Morris believed that craft theories
or objects could render political change failed. If contemporary makers and craft
thinkers contend that yarn bombing a park bench is actively political, we make
the same mistake. But I want to end on a positive note: craft can be political.
Immensely so.
First, buying mugs and hats and chairs (when you need these things) from
people who own their own means of production and who are compensated at
reasonable rates, is better. It might change the shopping world. But buying any
object remains a capitalist gesture in a staggeringly complex interconnected
system of variables. Don’t forget that economies of scale (mass production) can be
more environmentally conscious and they can be far more labour efficient – those
are costs that must be considered in the handmade good. So only perhaps buying
handmade objects is better; either way it is certainly not an undoing of capitalism.
Second, more hopefully, are craft’s possibilities of limited expectations.
American art historian Cynthia Fowler offers the excellent example of textile artist
Sheila Hicks, who was living and working in Paris at the time of the 1968 student

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uprisings. These large political events contributed great inspiration to Hicks’s

subsequent work though, as Fowler specifically points out: ‘Hicks was not directly
involved in the political unrest in Paris but, as she summarized, “I lived through
it.” ’27 Hicks was a craftsperson, artist and citizen in Paris but she was not present
at the protests. But, later, when Hicks started making large-scale work, she played
a direct, specific role in the feminist movement’s challenge to the institutional
art world. Hicks herself denied any intentional connection to feminism but, as
Fowler says: ‘Women artists, regardless of their politics, needed exhibition space
in order to succeed as artists, connecting all women artists, including fiber artists,
to the feminist project of claiming space.’28 Hicks’s work became politically active,
perhaps even against her intentions. If her work played an activist’s role, it did so
as alienated, commoditized objects created by an individual author. This does not
change her achievements but rather allows us to position them in a broader system
of variables.
Craft can engage with direct protest. But artists and craftspeople like Carol
McNicoll and Carrie Reichardt who do engage with (often successful) activism
do so as activists. The crafts they bring to the cause are comparable to the law the
activist-lawyer brings to the protest – certainly it can work for the cause, but it is
not, in itself, against the system. As I have shown, the underwriting philosophies
are of and in the system.
Craft is aspirational, and there is much to aspire to in our world. But
craft must understand its own underlying philosophy. Otherwise the risk to
those aspirations is enormous, compounding the problem, leaving us at best
with only the fractured possibility that craft is the apogee of the bourgeois
society. It is the self-congratulation that must be quelled. There is too often an
obliviousness to the connection between craft and the system it purports to
counter and we end up looking admiringly at protesters with their homemade
gasmasks thinking ‘there’s the authentic; there’s the distinction’. This mantra
of distinguishing oneself by appealing to the ‘people of quality’ is the heart of
the bourgeois mistake and the aristocratic vanity that Molière lampoons in Le
Bourgeois gentilhomme.
Molière’s character doesn’t understand that the joke is on him: Monsieur
Jourdain doesn’t see that seventeenth-century French society was specifically
structured to make a ‘bourgeois gentleman’ an oxymoron. He might aspire, but
he was too unaware of his context to see that everyone else – including the court
of Louis XIV who first saw the play – was laughing at him. Pretensions must
be watched and understood, as good satire points out. Like a writer quoting in
the original French, there may be good reason to do so, but there’s a danger that the
reader will just find it conceited and that it obstructs the point. This is when the
laughter stops. Craft is ripe for satire because it takes itself seriously (rightly so),
but it hasn’t noticed its own pretensions. Craft is powerful and enjoyable, and it
can be political; but it is not the same as freedom.

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Notes
1 In the interests of historical storytelling, it begins with the Glorious Revolution
of 1688–1689: ‘The revolutionaries created a new kind of English state after 1689.
They rejected the modern, bureaucratic absolutist state model developed by Louis
XIV in France … Their state sought to transform England from an agrarian into a
manufacturing society, oversaw the massive military buildup that was necessary to
fight a war against the greatest military power that Europe had ever seen, and sought
to promote a religiously tolerant society. John Locke, often described as one of the
earliest and most influential liberal thinkers, was one of these revolutionaries.’ Steve
Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009),
8. That is part of the larger story that will have to wait.
2 Nathan Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), 1 (original emphasis).
3 For my discussion of Locke, I will be looking exclusively at his Second Treatise of
Government. Locke wrote extensively and to conduct this analysis fully would require
acknowledgement and consideration of his entire oeuvre. But the Second Treatise is
representative enough for our purposes here – especially as the text to which later
readers made reference.
4 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 268 (Second Treatise, section 3).
5 Christopher Hughes, ‘Locke: The Second Treatise of Government’, in The Political
Classics: A Guide to the Essential Texts from Plato to Rousseau, ed. Murray Forsyth
and Maurice Keens-Soper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 157.
6 Locke, Second Treatise section 123, 350.
7 Locke, Second Treatise 103.
8 Locke, Second Treatise section 6, 271.
9 I must note in passing that the presence of this God/People and Sovereign/Servant
tenet in the history of liberalism is of course of massive significance. How natural
rights, predicated on a relationship with a Judeo-Christian, or rather a Protestant
God, endure and develop as society secularized through the eighteenth, nineteenth
and twentieth centuries is a defining theme in the matrix of democratic capitalism. It
is part of the core assumption of liberalism and thus informs all of the issues between
Church and State and in justifying the wealth/power distribution within unequal
societies, not to mention being part of the philosophical context of my own argument
herein. But for our introductory purposes here, and to isolate the divergence between
property as it was meant and property as read, we have to step backward over the
secular shifts and understand the full conceptual housing of Locke’s word ‘property’ –
this means accepting as context the late-seventeenth-century assumptions in the
relationship between people and God.
10 Crawford Brough Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism
(Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.
11 I’m looking here specifically at James Tully’s emphasis that Locke’s sense of property
and self-ownership ‘is moral, political and military, not economic. It is not concerned
with the alienation of labor power but with political power or the power of self-
defense.’ Tully continues that in the original texts ‘the individual, as well as the state,

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is concerned with preservation, not consumption. Labor power appears here as the
means to preserve oneself, not as something that facilitates utility satisfaction.’ In
Tully, ‘The Possessive Individualism Thesis: A Reconsideration in Light of Recent
Scholarship’, Democracy and Possessive Individualism: The Intellectual Legacy of C.B.
Macpherson, ed. Joseph H. Carrens (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 29.
12 Locke, 383 (Second Treatise section 173).
13 ‘Carrie Reichardt’, www.carriereichardt.com (accessed 1 October 2015).
14 Ibid.
15 Catherine Flood and Gavin Grindon, eds., Disobedient Objects, exhibition catalogue,
Victoria and Albert Museum, 26 July 2014–1 February 2015 (London: V&A
Publishing, 2014).
16 The Goldsmith’s Company, ‘About the Company’, www.thegoldsmiths.co.uk/about-
the-company/ (accessed 1 October 2015).
17 Locke, Second Treatise section 3, 268.
18 Locke, Second Treatise section 87, 324.
19 Pincus, 1668, 8.
20 Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–2.
21 Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (New York: Berg, 2007), 37.
22 Both Peteran quotes are from ‘Gord Peteran Recent Works’, YouTube video, uploaded
2 September 2009, https://youtu.be/2RBos7tBK5l (accessed 26 September 2015).
23 Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 3.
24 Macpherson, ‘The Deceptive Task of Political Theory’, Cambridge Journal, no. 7
(1954): 560–8. Cited in William Leiss, C. B. Macpherson: Dilemmas of Liberalism and
Socialism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 61.
25 Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). See
esp. pp. 102, 123, 137.
26 Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed
(Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2005), 120.
27 Cynthia Fowler, ‘A Sign of the Times: Sheila Hicks, the Fiber Arts Movement, and the
Language of Liberation’, Journal of Modern Craft, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 2014): 35.
28 Ibid., 37.

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7 ZAHNER METALS:
ARCHITECTURAL
FABRICATION AND CRAFT
LABOUR
Peggy Deamer

In 2005, I visited Zahner Metals in Kansas City. I wanted to know what the
workers involved in building the rainscreen copper panels of Swiss architectural
firm Herzog & de Meuron’s San Francisco de Young Museum actually were doing.
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are known for their material manipulation
and for basing architectural design on the exposure of the chosen material’s
surface effects; hence, this building and its fabrication process were of particular
interest.1 The museum design, radical in its flat, plain façade of dimpled copper
panels (Figure 7.1) that formed a screen to the museum itself, shook conservative
San Francisco whose cultural institutions, especially in Golden Gate Park,
were always polite and classical.2 For me, the interest was less the design’s neo-
modernism than its fearless expanse of a single material displaying intricate but
subtle manipulation. How did the fabricators interact with the architects? How
much control did the workers at Zahner Metals have over the design of the panels,
none of which were identical? Who ran the CNC (computer numerical control)
machines? How many people did it take to work on one panel and what was the
division of labour? Was there an assembly line process that divided tasks and
segmented information? During my visit, I was struck by the cleanliness of the
work, the groups of workers dispersed in corners of the open workshop, the small
number of workers, the strange mix of ‘blue-collar’ workers manipulating digital
inputs and the ingenuity required to position the panels to enable multiple hands
to work on them simultaneously. And I was thrilled that Bill Zahner – the owner,
and someone who has gained a reputation for treating façade-related steel work
as an art – indicated the pleasure they all got from working with Herzog and de
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FIGURE 7.1 Copper facade installation at De Young Museum, San Francisco, 2004.
Courtesy: A. Zahner Company.

Meuron, who saw the interaction with the factory as one of mutual creativity.3
But I was most struck by what Zahner told me about the workers there. They
were the ones who had been interested in making the transition from mechanical
to digital production, and the same ones who, before that transition, had been
the best workers, inherently interested in quality and innovation. Yes, the work
was intrinsically different, but the attitude of curiosity was the same. Before the
switch to CAD-CAM (computer aided design-to-computer aided manufacturing),
Zahner knew who would survive the transition; it had nothing to do with training
or age, it had to do with the workers’ desire to craft something as impeccable as
possible. Likewise, the ‘seamless’ transition from drawing to fabrication that is part
of the CAD-CAM rhetoric was anything but. While the architects’ software gave
intricate information about the formal parameters for the copper panels, it had
no information about how those parameters related to assembly; how the panels
were to be moved, held up, turned and made accessible to hammer and screw
(Figure 7.2). Only the fabrication workers knew if the connections and supports
were sized properly, not just for installation but for the act of fabrication itself;
assembly had its own logic and software. It was heartening to know that craft
intelligence was not just alive and well, but smarter than ever.
This inquiry was stimulated by my own confusion about the relationship
between design and craft within architecture. On the one hand, I knew from my

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FIGURE 7.2 Copper facade installation at De Young Museum, San Francisco, 2004.
Courtesy: A. Zahner Company.

architectural practice that architects have great pride in being good ‘craftspeople’,
in knowing how to skilfully detail material connections and ornamental flourish
for aesthetic effect, even as we ignore the input of the tradespeople who actually
execute the directives of our drawings. On the other hand, I knew from my
academic work that there was, in the nineteenth century, an antagonistic divide
between ‘design’ (controlled by the architect via drawings) and ‘craft’ (executed by
the makers/producers). What had happened to the debate about design and craft
in our more labour-oblivious contemporary times? On top of this, new digital
programs, principally CAD-CAM, were changing the nature of fabrication. Not
only was there direct drawing-to-machine technology (by-passing shop drawings,
themselves a kind of craft) but the capacity of the new machine production and its
operator now needed to be known by the designer/architect up front in order to
be drawn correctly.
As someone dismayed by the general disregard that we architects have for our
builders, tradespeople and fabricators (the snobbery of aesthetic virtuosity over
blue-collar vocation and the lack of choice architects have over who will build
their designs), the changes brought about by these new kinds of production
seemed healthy. Our twentieth-century way of designing – giving kudos to
architectural ‘craft’ and absorbing it into our own, self-congratulatory rhetoric of

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‘good design’ – completely by-passes the producers’ contribution to and ownership

of craft. Indeed, the new forms of collaboration required by digital processes
seemed to finally address the suggestions of nineteenth-century architectural
theorists for overcoming the design/craft opposition: one thinks primarily of John
Ruskin, whose ‘The Nature of Gothic’, in The Stones of Venice was a plea for the
stone masons of his era to hold on to their freedom to ornament and detail in
the face of mechanized building production; of William Morris, whose workshop
aimed to integrate industrial technology with craft-based autonomy; and of Adolf
Loos, who proudly claimed to not make working drawings and instead direct the
builders on site. More than this, digital collaboration actually put the fabricators’
knowledge at the beginning, not the end of the process. Design and craft collapse.4
On reflection, it became apparent that the twentieth-century architectural pride
in being good ‘craftspeople’ was the erasure of labour from the craft discussion.
Yes, we architects have cared about material joinery and expression (ornamental
or otherwise), but we really didn’t know or care how it was done or who did it
and under what conditions. What is so remarkable about the current period of
digital fabrication is that labour is once again foregrounded. That this labour is less
‘manual’ is obvious, but the actual capabilities of the skilled workers who manage
the information and output is paramount. Indeed, one could also say that material
consideration falls by the wayside in this process, given that the machines –
largely laser-cutters, routers and drills – are materially neutral (that is, cut and
shape regardless of manipulating wood, plastic, metal or stone) in contrast to the
specific tools of, say, the wood carver or the stone mason.5 That is to say, the work
performed, rather than the tools themselves, had to adjust to the various material
demands.
The healthy reintroduction of labour into the design/craft dispute by way of
new forms of digital labour does not imply the reintroduction of the hand or
handicraft in the traditional sense. When Richard Sennett argues in The Craftsman
that craft relies on the body, the hand and tactile affect to convey the special
meaning it brings to objects,6 he overlooks the contribution the contemporary
digital craftsman makes through her procedural, not manual, know-how. Craft
moves from the manipulation of the object to the management of the fabrication
process. Indeed, even digital craft theorist Malcolm McCullough’s insistence that
contemporary craft is a sensual condition – because, he says, even in computer
work our hands and eyes are actively engaged – is too nostalgic; it equates ‘craft’
unnecessarily with the body. Rather, I want to argue, digital labour incorporates
craft because of the aesthetic risk that both designer and producer take on. As
McCullough does rightly point out, ‘In digital production, craft refers to the
condition where [we] apply standard technological means to unanticipated or
indescribable ends.’7 Because parameters and equations are configured in lieu of
descriptions of shape, neither designer not fabricator can predict the outcome;
both share the risk of formal indeterminacy. When Herzog and de Meuron spent

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days at the factory experimenting iteratively with the embossed dots and circular
cut-outs on the copper panels to determine the final double patterning approach,
they could only set the parameters for design permutations (Plate 9). When the
Swiss architects left, they knew the approach, but they didn’t know what any of
the 7,000 panels would actually look like; this was unclear until they were actually
produced. The task and the risk were equally shared by workers at the factory to
execute, and architects who had left with only parameters identified.
And yet, one can’t overlook that there is a difference between Jacques Herzog and
Pierre de Meuron and the men (yes, there were no women) working on the factory
floor at Zahner’s. It is not a distinction between blue-and white-collar, material or
immaterial work: these ‘social’ distinctions fall away as mutual dependency and
respect reconfigure these divisions. The distinction, rather, is the manner in which
both, with computer technology, have had to deskill and reskill. In an illuminating
piece by John Roberts entitled, ‘Art After Deskilling’, in which he describes the
change in art when modern artists such as Claude Monet and Marcel Duchamp
no longer made their work, he argues, first, that the ‘artist’s’ shift from artisanal to
executive is the point where the distinction between artistic creativity and craft-
skill is finally destroyed; second, that both executor/artist and producer/craftsman
experience a process of deskilling; and third, that the artist confronted with
deskilling in modern culture does not suffer the same creative marginalization
as the productive labour because, as Marx insists, the artist, designing one-offs,
is not subject to the real subsumption of labour associated with mass production
in the way the factory/office worker is.8 In other words, in the Zahner/Herzog
& de Meuron example, Zahner workers are more vulnerable to economic forces
resulting from the changes they experience than are the architects and their staff.
As previously ‘unskilled’ labourers upskill with computer knowledge and those
who do not catch up fall away, ‘unskilled’ becomes ‘unemployed’ and as fewer
workers in total are employed, the sense of precarity in the factory increases.
The architectural workers in their offices have learned new computer skills, but
they have not shifted their value proposition or taken on an industry-shaking
realignment. They have not, it could be said, been forced to shift their behaviour
despite a clear paradigm shift. If both architect and producer, as I have argued, have
assumed creative risk in sharing the new design/craft confluence, the financial risk
is felt much more directly by the factory workers. Architectural workers are merely
staving off an inevitable change that is just more blatantly apparent on the factory
floor now.
There are a number of secondary observations that can be made at this
point. One is that the fabricators’ economic vulnerability filters back into the
class distinctions that conceptually have been eradicated: the factory worker
stays ‘blue-collar’ because of that vulnerability, not because they work with their
hands. Another is that the factory worker should be held in greater esteem in this
deskilling/reskilling scenario for taking on more risk, not just in aesthetic output

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but in self-identification and income. A third is that the architectural profession

is, in the long term, worse off for not having organizationally adjusted to the full
implications of digital technology and clinging to a dysfunctional, nineteenth
century (gentleman’s) professional model. All of these conditions need to be
explored. Architecture suffers for not thinking through the new attachments
architects have to fabricators and construction workers, making us unable to
appreciate the common bond we share with the makers of our designs. Architects’
disgraceful attitude to construction workers in the Gulf – who, despite being
largely unskilled labourers unlike those in Zahner’s factory, are still essential to
the completion of a quality product – is an example of an outmoded ‘professional’
attitude of superiority.9 It suffers as well for not addressing the reconfigured
production relations in the architectural office where there are no longer
‘draftsmen’ sitting below the master designer but, in its place, a more horizontal
skill structure.10
But the larger points – that the hand is no longer the mark of craft and in its
stead, risk-taking in aesthetic outcome and organizational realignment define
‘craft’; that craft and design are no longer oppositional but share labour knowledge
and mutual respect; and that deskilling and reskilling should be not just technically
determined but economically and organizationally consequential – are issues that
architecture needs to address immediately. As long as we do not appreciate the
fundamental shift that has occurred in our design/craft capacity and downplay
our dependence on fabricators and other industry specialists, we will fail to
capitalize on the knowledge essential to innovation, especially when we equate
‘innovation’ not with angel investments to dubious social media monetization but
with technical, material dexterity. We tend to admire the work of Herzog & de
Meuron for their introduction of new materials to our architectural palette, but
their real contribution of collaboration with those who know how the materials
are manipulated is unacknowledged. This needs to be rectified.

Notes
1 The firm’s highest profile museum is the conversion of the Bankside Power
Station to Tate Modern in London, UK (2000) and today, the expansion of the
gallery and its surrounding areas with the Tate Modern Switch House. Herzog
and de Meuron are the architects of these other museums: The Goetz Collection
(1992); Museum Küppersmühle in Duisburg, Germany (1999); Schaulager Basel,
Laurenz Foundation: the Walker Art Center Expansion, Minneapolis, USA (2005);
CaixaForum, Madrid (2008); TEA, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, SantaCruz de
Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain (2008); Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland
(2010); Museu Blau, Museum of Natural Sciences, Barcelona, Spain (2012); the Parrish
Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, USA (2012); and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami
(2013).

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2 See various articles such as Julian Guthrie, ‘De Young’s Rebirth: It Had to Overcome
Design Challenges, Lawsuits and a Lack of Funds. S.F.’s New Museum Opens Today,
a Triumph of Creativity and Commitment’, SFGate, 15 October 2005, https://www.
sfgate.com/news/article/De-Young-s-rebirth-It-had-to-overcome-design-2564985.
php (accessed 27 January 2019). It describes the hesitation of San Franciscans with
regard to the project’s design when going through the review process, an objection that
lingered with many citizens after it was complete.
3 For ‘star’ architects, Herzog and de Meuron are singular for insisting that they are
not ‘artists’ but ‘technicians’. This contributes to a less ‘snobbish’ approach to design
production.
4 For more on the historical, economic and conceptual change that occurred between
the nineteenth-century architectural concern for the worker to twentieth-century
modernism’s dismissal of this concern see also my previous writing on this
topic: ‘Detail: The Subject of the Object’, PRAXIS: Journal of Writing Building, vol.
1, no. 1 (2000): 108–15.; ‘Work’, in The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the
Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, ed. Peggy Deamer (London: Bloomsbury,
2015), 61–81; and ‘Architectural Work: Immaterial Labor’, in Industries of Architecture,
ed. Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff and Nick Beech (Milton Park: Routledge, 2016),
137–47. Most of these observations have their origin in one made by Ford in which
he says:

Insofar as twentieth-century architects have concerned themselves with the

social consequences of their work, they have focused on the way in which
buildings affect the behavior of their occupants. Insofar as nineteenth century
architects concerned themselves with the social consequence of their work,
they focused on the way in which buildings (and particularly their ornaments)
affect those who build them. There is perhaps no greater difference between the
architects of the nineteenth century and those of the twentieth than that each
group was so indifferent to the social concerns of the other. Edward R. Ford, The
Details of Modern Architecture, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 9.

My essay, ‘Architectural Work: Immaterial Labor’, connects this observation to the

change in capitalism from a production-based economy to a service-based economy,
bringing with it the change of concern from the producer (the builder/craftsman) to
the consumer (the client/owner).
5 Of course, this is only true at the general level. The use of these computer-directed
machines requires knowledge of the material’s capacity to be cut, bent and so on.
6 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
7 Malcolm McCullough, Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (Boston: MIT
Press, 1998). McCullough here harkens back to David Pye who in 1978 provided a
definition of craftsmanship that also centres on risk:

Craftsmanship … means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or

apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends
on the judgment, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works. The
essential idea is that the quality of the result is continually at risk during the
process of making.

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For two excellent essays on risk and digital design, see both Branko Kolarevic’s and
Scott Marble’s essays in Building in the Future: Recasting Architectural Labor, Peggy
Deamer and Phillip Bernstein, eds. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).
8 See John Roberts, ‘Art After Deskilling’, Historical Materialism, no. 18 (2010): 77–96.
See also Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the
Readymade (London: Verso, 2007).
9 When Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) – an activist group asking architects
to address indentured construction workers building their projects in the Persian
Gulf – tried to get architects building in the United Arab Emirates to speak at their
symposiums, not one wanted to participate.
10 The Architecture Lobby, to which I belong, is working to address both lapses in the
profession (architecture-lobby.org).

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8 CAPITALIZING ON
COMMUNITY: THE
MAKERSPACE
PHENOMENON
Diana Sherlock

Perry and Lester invent things – self-replicating machines, robots, a franchise

of networked generative theme parks, fanciful personalized inventions for every
conceivable quotidian need and fantastical want.1 Brilliant enough to be at the
centre of industry, but smart enough to realize that there is no centre anymore, they
are just one node in a network of autonomous far-flung makers who constantly
develop, share and adapt Open Source software and 3D-printing designs to build
worlds of their own making from raw imagination, post-industrial ruins and
abandoned suburban malls. They and their collective of walkaways know that
capitalism, built on scarcity and control, has failed. Multinational corporations
cannot continually grow their profits and provide enough well-paying jobs,
and the ones that do exist are mind-numbingly technocratic; there is too much
waste and dwindling accessible raw resources. Young people pushed out to the
peripheries because of gentrification feel disenfranchised from the system, and so
become autodidacts and activists within their social media echo chambers, and
leaders of their own post-capitalist subcultures.
Perry and Lester know ‘Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and
when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything.’2 In the race to avoid
hitting bottom, ‘if you want to make a big profit, you’ve got to start over again,
invent something new, and milk it for all you can before the first imitator shows
up’,3 invent, make, sell and repeat. There is enough change built into the system
that it is counterproductive to be possessive about your intellectual property
(IP), protocols and designs. Might as well share it all for free, but market the
experience of social-entrepreneurial innovation; sell the social institution; sell
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the movement itself. But Perry and Lester aren’t interested in IP or money; they
just want to make things.
Author Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi characters from the 2010 novel Makers, are
leaders of the New Work movement. In this essay, Perry and Lester stand in
for thousands of real people who, like them, combine education, prototyping,
crowdfunding and light manufacturing to make the world anew in makerspaces,
Fab Labs and hackerspaces. Each of these is a type of membership-based co-working
space in which interdisciplinary makers make, fabricate and hack the world using
digital and analogue technologies. The purpose of this text is to chart the rise of
the makerspace and to consider how this model of collective production is being
utilized by hand- and industrial-producers alike, often to very different ends. As
social institutions, makerspaces have their roots in guild structures, alternative
pedagogical models, DIY movements and artist-run culture because they diffuse
particularized knowledge through a shared means of production, shared practice
and collective experimentation.
The rise of makerspaces certainly also relates to the ‘material turn’, a phrase
currently used in the social sciences and humanities that expands on the cultural
and linguistic turns of the 1980s and 1990s. It denotes a renewed interest in
the complex social and power relations that underlie divergent definitions of
materialism, materiality and matter – generally, these arguments seek to heal
schisms between the material and immaterial, subjectivity and objectivity, between
object and thing – to destabilize politically oppressive power structures.4 The
effects of these power structures, and perhaps even the desire to sublimate them,
are seen every day in makerspaces, in how people relate to material things, as can
be seen in the return to the handmade, and particularly explorations in digital
craft. The world can no longer sustain the mass production of material things as
separate from itself, so makerspace users attempt to remake the world for the mass-
customized, ever-increasing immaterial, user-based consumer; another endpoint
in American futurist Alvin Toffler’s ‘prosumer’ culture realized.5 Yet, these ideas
are easily romanticized in the utopian rhetoric of makerspaces, even though
they don’t necessarily limit capitalism’s reach or its often-devastating ecological
and social effects, such as expanding carbon footprints and urban gentrification.
Rather, makerspaces might, in fact, accelerate these effects in more individualized
forms, providing greater capacity for the consumption of craft on demand.
In this text, I explore the economic models being developed in makerspaces
in Canada, the United States and Germany, and the potential these models might
have for makers. I use three case studies: TechShop Inc., San Francisco; several
examples from the burgeoning makerspace ecosystem in Calgary, Canada; and
Fab Lab Berlin. In the time between the initial draft of this text and its publication,
much has changed in the accelerated world of maker culture. TechShop Inc.
declared bankruptcy in November 2017 and TechShop Global dissolved in January
2019. Name and facility changes followed for the other examples I cite in Calgary

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and Berlin. Thus these case studies demonstrate the ever-evolving knowledges,
values and economies shared in makerspaces, and stress how each organization’s
structure makes possible who can benefit and how these spaces impact makers in
their local communities. In some cases, I argue the makerspace clearly perpetuates
Richard Florida’s neoliberal ‘creative cities’ model.6 In others, I see the potential
for new hybrid, post-capitalist economic and social models, which might better
sustain future economic and social needs.
My case studies demonstrate that the fundamental difference between
makerspaces and democratic creative collective models, (such as artist-led non-
profits, design cooperatives or even communal workspaces in publicly funded
art schools), is their synergistic relationship to the capitalist economy; this is why
we are currently experiencing the makerspace phenomenon. While resources for
publicly funded, collective models of cultural production and distribution wither
under neoliberalism, the makerspace is a growing business model that capitalizes
on collective innovation and creative production, tied to education and industry.
This is not coincidental. Most makerspaces and fab labs divert public resources
formerly dedicated to research and development in health, education (particularly
art and design education), arts production, urban planning and small-business
development, into private for-profit businesses. Workshops, studio space and
laboratories are expensive for schools, so partnering with a makerspace that has
up-to-date gear and trained technicians, allows schools to divert saved space, staff
and funds to serve other urgent institutional needs. Significantly, more costs are
downloaded onto the student-user, and these facilities now operate outside of the
public educational system and are thus vulnerable to market fluctuations. This is
particularly true in TechShop’s case now. Furthermore, makerspaces then use these
and other public funds to support corporate research and development initiatives
that would otherwise be paid for by corporations. While businesses pay for these
services, it is still more cost-effective than maintaining their own labs, and they
have access to communally developed solutions that they otherwise would not.
Even former president Obama’s 7 administration made a concerted effort to
foster a broad-based, economically viable makers’ culture to diversify and grow
the American economy into a ‘nation of makers’ through increased investment and
promoting ‘the national week of making,’ which increased public access to STEM
programs and several national research institutions particularly for marginalized
youth. Here, makerspaces and fab labs as creative think-tanks are considered key to
turning the United States manufacturing economy around. They merge the social
and intellectual capital of the internet with real-time communal studios, and the
model makes money by exploiting capitalism’s ills and scarcities. However, these
spaces are filled with generalists, not specialists, and critical discourse around
what is being made and why is often lacking. On the other hand, there might also
be something important to learn from the makerspace model about sustainable
collective micro-economies that could potentially help rejuvenate traditional

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non-profits that are floundering to maintain their ethics and pay their members
living wages under neoliberalism.

The backstory
In his book Makers, Chris Anderson calls makerspaces the loci for ‘The New
Industrial Revolution.’ This revolution is fuelled by the democratization of access
to a proliferation of new, relatively inexpensive digital technologies, tools and
networks, readily accessible niche markets, crowdsourced venture capital and a
growing well-educated ‘creative class’ that often suffers chronic precarious (under)
employment, or too many creative constraints within their day jobs. Couple these
with the desire to solve the social and economic challenges of population, poverty
and recurrent man-made ecological disasters; and add in a renewed interest in
how things are made and in making things well – the material turn – and you have
the Maker Movement. The movement comprises dozens of regional, non-profit
umbrella organizations that host regional Maker Faires and related events. As of
2017, there are over 225 Maker Faires licensed in thirty-eight countries worldwide,
with two flagship events, in New York and the Bay Area, which draw 1.5 million
annual attendees.8 The movement, according to Mark Hatch—the former CEO
and co-founder with Jim Newton of the first commercial makerspace, TechShop
Inc. (discussed later) – should inspire us to ‘collectively use our creativity to attack
the world’s greatest problems and meet people’s most urgent needs’.9 However, my
analysis will show how Hatch’s optimistic rhetoric around ‘creativity’ is complicit
with entrepreneurial models of capitalist speculation, which paradoxically, often
underlie these very same problems and urgent needs.
Fab labs are not makerspaces per se, but a precursor to them. They emerged from
MIT’s Centre for Bits & Atoms after their director, professor Neil Gershenfeld10
recognized the potential of fab labs to match individual inventive applications
of new, networked digital fabrication technologies with real-world needs and
materials in his experimental course ‘How to Make (almost) Anything’ (1998).
Unlike most academic or corporate research and development labs, Gershenfeld’s
model demands open access to adaptable space and experimental fabrication
tools within an interdisciplinary community. Fab Lab Berlin belongs to the non-
profit Fab Foundation, which was formed in 2009 to facilitate the international
development and networking of 545 global fab labs to support education,
organizational capacity building, services and business opportunities. The Fab
Charter (October 2012),11 defines basic philosophical and technical requirements
needed to further their mission to ‘enabl[e]‌invention by providing access to tools
for digital fabrication’.12 Unlike Gershenfeld’s MIT Centre for Bits & Atoms, which
is primarily an educational space, Fab Lab Berlin is primarily a business, and a hub
for businesses that need space and access to prototyping tools.

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Case studies
TechShop Inc. was the bricks-and-mortar extension of Make: magazine13 and the
annual Maker Faire – each developed to ‘hack the physical world’14 and spread the
word about the movement. Techshop Inc. was the model makerspace, self-defined
as a ‘community-based open-access do-it-yourself workshop and fabrication
studio’,15 or what co-founder Newton characterizes as a ‘FedEx Kinko’s for geeks’.16
Hatch’s The Maker Manifesto outlines the meteoric rise of this makerspace within
the white, well-educated, tech-savvy Bay-area city of Menlo Park, California
in 2006. Built around an enthusiastic group of makers, TechShop grew into its
own industry. Shops of 16,000 to 20,000 square feet in several mid-sized cities
across the United States served approximately 7,000 members.17 In Europe,
the subsidiary TechShop Global headquartered in Dublin in 2014 opened a
TechShop in Paris in October 2015, formed technical partnerships with Dublin
City University and BMW Technical University Munich, followed by locations in
Abu Dhabi, Tokyo and Lille, France. In 2015, TechShop had its sights ambitiously
set on opening 1000 locations worldwide in the next ten years, with the help of
educational and government partnerships that see makerspaces as key economic
development partners that support the neoliberal creative cities model and new
light manufacturing.18
Makerspaces require two types of capital to get off the ground: infrastructure
capital for space and tools, and human capital in the form of a community of
makers, who while learning, also maintain and run the space and educate new
members. TechShop San Francisco was located in two rented San Francisco
Chronicle newsprint warehouses on an impoverished, and soon to be gentrified,
block of Howard Street. Since the 1990s, most of this neighbourhood had already
undergone the twin effects of gentrification – the rapid displacement of social
services, low-income single-room housing, working-class populations, and some
of the oldest gay clubs in the city; and their replacement by high-end hotels, art
galleries, software companies and other creative industries.19 Indeed, I was a bit
surprised to see how modest TechShop’s San Francisco locations were in this area,
but then found out that they too were soon to be displaced by the massive mixed-
use, light-manufacturing hub, 5M Project.20 TechShop’s main warehouse included
a retail shop, a large two-storey workshop with almost every conceivable tool,
digital and otherwise; while the smaller warehouse had additional storage and
rentable studios. In dollars, physical capital to launch a TechShop was between
USD$ 3–3.5 million drawn variously from tenant improvement allowances, long-
term low-interest loans from stakeholders, grants and pre-paid memberships.21
These resources are drawn from both the public and private sectors using many
public sector resources to support TechShop’s for-profit mandate and franchise.
Upon TechShop’s closure, Forbes magazine argued that it was their failure ‘to close

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or transfer unprofitable studios and actively seek enough partnerships with local
ecosystems (universities, companies, cities, etc.) to offset its operating costs’ that
resulted in its bankruptcy, demonstrating the reliance of their for-profit business
model on syphoning money from the public sector.22
TechShop’s human resources also used a hierarchical labour system that
relied heavily on contract and membership-based labour. It included the virtual
corporate team, which travelled constantly and lived all over the United States;
paid full-time employees (25–40), plus a large pool of contract instructors (150–
200). Up to 750–1000 members per TechShop – the San Francisco shop typically
consisted of young (ages 24–34) white male artists, engineering students, blue-
collar machine shop workers, programmers, and so on – had 24/7 access to shared
workspaces for USD$ 150 per month.23 Membership is key to makerspaces: each
TechShop aimed for a minimum membership of 300–500 makers to form a
critical mass of creativity to catalyse collaborations and add to the bottom line.
Member-instructors were paid to develop the curriculum and teach the 200–300
classes a month about mainly technical ‘how-to’ subjects. This very marketable
intellectual property earned TechShop San Francisco the bulk of their revenue, as
well as satisfying their mission ‘to engage, enable, and empower people to build
their dreams’.24 Other earned revenue streams included corporate events, tours
and a retail shop. Sponsorships and partnerships spanned a variety of corporate,
education, technology and training programs, including the U.S. Department of
Defense DARPA Veterans program, as well as construction (Lowe’s), manufacturing
industries (Ford) and civic partners.25 In the interview with Forbes, TechShop’s
CEO revealed their reliance on public funds through partnerships: ‘A for-profit
network of wholly owned makerspaces is impossible to sustain without outside
subsidy from cities, companies and foundations, often in the form of memberships,
training grants and sponsored programs. This kind of funding is readily available
to non-profits, and very rarely an option for for-profit enterprises.’26
TechShop was very successful in leveraging these partnerships, in part because
of the impressive record of innovative solutions that has emerged from these
environments in recent years. It is difficult to assess if TechShop had a higher
start-up success rate than regular business incubators because there is no hard
data, but in my interview with San Francisco TechShop’s Andrew Calvo in 2015
he maintained this wasn’t the point. He asserted that their primary role was
affordable access and education, not supporting start-ups: ‘What we do is make
things possible, not easier, but more possible.’27 Yet it is difficult not to consider
them one-and-the-same when the most persuasive arguments for makerspaces
emerge from Maker Movement start-up success stories such as those documented
in Hatch’s manifesto: Inventibles, MakerBot Industries and Sparkfun Electronics,
to name a few. TechShop fostered an on-demand, often crowd-funded, economy –
low volume, high quality, mass-customized, micro-manufactured – producing
products that Calvo observed would never get out of the concept phase in most

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corporate contexts. Square – a digital card reader that allows for mobile transactions
co-founded by artist James McKelvey and Jack Dorsey of Twitter at Menlo
TechShop – was turned down repeatedly by venture capitalists because they didn’t
have a prototype, and McKelvey lacked a finance background. TechShop allowed
them to tinker, make a prototype for $3000 and scale up to USD$ 10 million of
venture capital faster, while maintaining ownership and control over the product.28
Square, likely TechShop’s most successful story, is now a publicly traded $5 billion-
dollar company with 1000 employees. Square is indeed an innovative idea, but does
a credit-card reader ‘attack the world’s greatest problems and meet people’s most
urgent needs’? Square and TechShop, would likely argue that it does precisely this by
enabling independent entrepreneurship in any geographical locale thus disrupting
the dominance of monolithic corporations. In this respect, as a platform, Square
extends the same ideology animating makerspaces. This argument becomes a little
more tenuous when considering another TechShop success, the collapsible Oru
Kayak, that caters to those privileged enough to already have access to leisure time
and fresh recreational waters.29 And the same can be said for innumerable hobby-
craft lifestyle products – Lumio lamps, or laser-cut birch San Francisco Bay Area
models by Laurence Srinivasan – that allow individuals to make a marginal living
or supplement their income from other jobs. Do these types of innovations really
lead to systemic change and ethical alternatives, or do they merely fuel a cycle
of demand that is about the seamless integration of even greater consumption of
supposedly more ethical products into our existing economy?30

FIGURE 8.1 TechShop, Makerbot, Joseph Schell, 2015. Courtesy: TechShop.

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Although many makerspace projects presumably exist solely for the edification
of the maker, makerspaces are businesses and seem increasingly identified with
revenue generation. However, makerspaces differ from start-up accelerators like
San Francisco’s Highway 1, who mentor product development and invest in selected
hardware projects in exchange for a share in the company. Neither TechShop
nor any other makerspace I could find, have yet to institute IP agreements with
start-up companies. They have definitely thought about it, but, unlike Perry and
Lester’s fictional business partners, TechShop and others astutely recognize that
their success rests on open-access membership, where makers know that what
they make is theirs to keep. While it is a philosophical choice for TechShop to
remain committed to open-access education, practically, they also know that
start-ups are unlikely to deal away 3–5 per cent of the company for rent-relief and
shop-access, so they have little choice if they want to encourage these users. Large
makerspaces and some fab labs seem interested in moving towards providing
start-up support, but right now, most makers are more likely to end up partnering
with an independent start-up accelerator or being picked up by an investor trolling
the workshops for the next big thing.
The other part of TechShop’s business model followed Maker Faire’s in that it
too offered affiliate licensing. Instead of sharing in successful start-ups directly,
TechShop cleverly avoided messy IP legalities and investment gambles, and
instead made money from selling the TechShop model itself. Calvo explained
that, ‘we have already built the model, developed curriculum, we have essentially
the template as well as a lot of the underlying core IP, which has everything
including an internal customer relations management system and RFID badges
[radio-frequency identification badges are networked all over the USA to track
users].’31 TechShop started the MakerSpace Academy to teach people, who could
afford the hefty USD$ 4,500 fee, how to start their own TechShop in an intensive
three-and-a-half-day course.32 They saw this as way to spread knowledge of
the movement and apply it to other contexts, including civic centres, libraries,
schools and science centres. Note here how many of the targeted users are from
the public sector; many libraries and science centres, for example, already provide
mini-maker space opportunities to their members. ‘We want to be able to give a
complete brain dump on how we do it’, Calvo said. ‘Non-profits may also end up
with some of the IP’, he added,33 even though in many cases this is IP that these
non-profits are already generating in the public context. TechShop also started to
repackage content for San Francisco’s kindergarten–grade 8 AltSchool, a network
of micro-schools that offers personalized learning to wealthy Bay-area residents.
At the post-secondary level, Minerva Schools was to use TechShops globally to
help students complete course work. These multiple iterations of the TechShop
brand made it the prototype space for networked digital skill-based innovation
and learning, that Newton argues makes up for what lacks in consumer culture
and schools.34 Lacks, I would add, which are exacerbated by repeated cuts to the

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public sector and a rush to the bottom line in public education that TechShop and
others have recognized as a great business opportunity. Perhaps their recent demise
suggests public sector resources could not, or would not, sustain TechShop’s desire
for fast-paced global growth that attempted to monopolize the makerspace.

A makerspace ecosystem: Calgary,

Alberta, Canada
Calgary is an affluent western Canadian city of approximately 1.3 million people
located between the northern Rocky Mountains; the Athabasca oil sands; and
the Sweetgrass-Coutts’ Canada-US 24-hour commercial border crossing. It is
also my home. Here too, there is a rapidly growing ecosystem of makerspaces,
which illustrates how specialized makerspaces and networks develop within a
particular community. The Calgary network started with Protospace, diversified
to ARCHEloft and MakeFashion then expanded to planning for a very expansive
Calgary Makerspace which has stalled and been supplanted by the FUSE33
Makerspace.35 Most recently, in September 2017, Mount Royal University’s Maker
Studio opened to provide free community access to its facilities and training
programs with priority given to Mount Royal University academic work.
Started in 2009, Calgary Protospace Ltd., a privately held non-profit company
owned and run by its members, is the oldest and most well established. From its
meagre beginnings in a basement, Protospace now operates 6,500 sq. ft. of light
industrial space in northeast Calgary for the use of its 300-plus members. Although
the member-directors I interviewed – two sculptors, an IT specialist, a computer
scientist, an emergency services operator – identify the space as a makerspace, it
is closer in scale and philosophy to a hackerspace, a community-run space whose
members are often interested in counterculture invention, and consequently hack
technology to serve purposes for which it was not originally designed. It bases
its anarchist collective governance structure on one of the earliest hackerspaces,
San Francisco’s Noisebridge, and this also aligns it with smaller, urban collectives,
which because of a lack of affordable space for making things that do not have
recognizable markets, band together out of economic necessity. At Protospace,
I heard repeatedly about the importance of peer-to-peer interdisciplinary,
skill-based learning, 24/7 access to tools and space, the members’ discussion
Listserve, as well as future-thinking questions about what maker culture brings
to wealthy, often exclusive, urban centres like Calgary. Questions about ecological
sustainability, micro-economies and autodidactic pedagogy challenge dominant
assumptions many Calgarians hold about how to value one’s time, knowledge,
environment, relationships and material possessions, contrary to what a petro-
fuelled economy might encourage or allow. Protospace, like a mini-TechShop,
offers a communal opportunity for members of every skill level to ‘Tak[e]‌control

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of [their] environment and solv[e] a problem by making a thing that [they] want’,36
with solutions tailored to the individual, not the market.
Fundamentally, Protospace sees itself as an experimental makerspace where
members’ needs and community collaborations outweigh entrepreneurial
activities. Most of their members’ activities span custom designs, hobby products
and tech-geek experiments. Unlike TechShop, there is almost no professional
prototyping, and while a few members have made small runs of commercial
items, members do not pursue businesses. Logistically this is because the shop
is run by volunteer labour with donated/loaned equipment, so it is too small and
quirky to support the production necessary for businesses, but it is also because
Protospace’s members do not see their space as a business first. As with most non-
profits starting out, memberships of $55 per month account for almost 100 per
cent of the CAD$ 60–75,000 annual operating budget and all of it goes back into
running Protospace.37 As of this writing, they have very few formal partnerships,
but they are collectively deciding to develop some with vendors, related robotics
companies and donors who suit their members’ needs, and they continue to
showcase what they do at Maker Faire.
Protospace understands the need to diversify their revenues to keep membership
fees affordable and grow the facility, but they are also unsure of where they fit into the
non-profit landscape, and leery of the inevitable strings attached to non-member-
related sources of funding that might negatively impact members’ access. Non-
profits that rely mainly on government grants tie themselves to administratively
heavy bureaucracies that often dictate what is possible within given frameworks,
restricting organizations’ experimentation to keep them competing for ever-
smaller portions of a shrinking pie. Corporate and private sponsorships also come
with strings attached to particular projects, research and reciprocal support of the
company’s image, mandate and market. The reality is that most non-profits must
use all of these sources, multiplying the strings to form a tight noose. A purely
member-based funding model can alleviate these dangers, and potentially open up
organizations like Protospace to develop new administrative and financial models.
Already Protospace’s members use consensus decision-making, share-and-trade
economies around equipment, training and labour to facilitate member access.
Yet, Protospace knows these economies rely on the re-appropriation of surplus, so
they are working to actively recruit and diversify its membership base beyond the
white, affluent, male members that have the privilege to participate and determine
their direction.
An IT guy by day and a director of Protospace at night, Shannon Hoover and
partner Maria Hoover started ARCHEloft/MakeFashion, originally known as
Endeavour Arts (2010), to pursue a more disciplinary-focused vision. It started
out as a mixed studio/exhibition space, wearables laboratory and mini-makerspace
in downtown Calgary that combined both of their interests. ARCHEloft was a
for-profit business where regular members could access textile tools, electronics

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and 3D printers in a clean co-work project space for $50 per month. ARCHEloft
dissolved in the summer of 2017, while MakeFashion, a non-profit founded in
2012, continues at FUSE33 Makerspace in southeast Calgary. MakeFashion
combines the ingenuity of individual artists, designers, engineers and programmers
in a fashion think-tank to produce wearable tech garments and touring events.
Through MakeFashion, the Hoovers negotiate agreements with core-member
fashion designers who pay $450 a month and facilitate related workshops and
events to maintain access to dedicated 24/7 studio spaces. Core-members work in
teams to develop new technological applications in fashion, such as 3D-printed,
scanned components, laser-cut fabrication, LED-lit fibre optic details, heat- and
motion-sensor systems. MakeFashion generates revenue by securing exclusive
permission to tour the designs for one year following their initial launch, while
makers retain control of their IP. MakeFashion’s most recent iteration moves it one
step closer to becoming a for-profit smart textiles design incubator that focuses
on IP agreements and business development assistance with designers. One can
assume MakeFashion will wield more control over IP and hold a larger financial
stake going forward. MakeFashion has reduced its overhead by only running
an office out of FUSE33. Some of the ARCHEloft designers have moved to
independent spaces, some use FUSE33’s studios and equipment, so the potential
for creative brainstorming in open-access, communal studio environments seen
at ARCHEloft now seems less of a priority. MakeFashion continues to launch and
display their members’ smart garments at MakerFaires and their own MakeFashion
runway shows internationally. A growing list of technology partners, such as Zyris
Software and Solarbotics, clearly recognizes future demand for such applications
in the fashion industry.
One could question whether MakeFashion is a makerspace, or if it has crossed
over to becoming a specialized business accelerator for the fashion-technology
industry. If so, this does not negate the importance of the work, but rather serves
as an example of how new organizational concepts, which are often broadly
defined at the outset, are refined over time to settle into particular market niches.
MakeFashion seems to have found their niche, and I argue that it is an early
example of the type of project or disciplinary specialization that we will encounter
more of as the makerspace movement becomes more widespread and monetized.
The economic viability of makerspaces and the access they can provide to
promising start-ups was of foremost concern for Calgary Makerspace, a for-
profit social enterprise incorporated in 2014 whose goal was to provide affordable
access to reliable digital fabrication tools for individuals, businesses and schools.
Calgary Makerspace planned to open a central 40,000 sq. ft. location after initially
raising CAD$ 1.2 million through bond sales.38 Modelled, in part, on TechShop,
Calgary Makerspace, it developed its mandate relative to the local ecosystem.
With some overlapping members, Calgary Makerspace looked carefully at how
it could position itself amongst existing makerspaces, Protospace, ARCHEloft

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and MakeFashion, and how it could extend its services beyond these spaces to
assist start-ups or other makerspace-type initiatives that are developing through
the Calgary Board of Education, public libraries, science centres and nearby post-
secondary educational institutions, like Alberta University of the Arts (formerly
the Alberta College of Art + Design) and Red Deer College. Projects that start off
at Protospace or Mount Royal University, could migrate to Calgary Makerspace to
scale-up production. Other revenue streams model TechShop’s workshops, events,
project storage, retail, corporate sponsorships, partnerships, small business grants
and donations. Profits will be split between owners, operating costs and seed
grants or shares awarded to meritorious projects, without sharing in IP.
In the end, Calgary Makerspace could not secure city space or funding and
collapsed. In January 2018, it was supplanted by FUSE33 Makerspace in Forest
Lawn, Calgary, an ethnically diverse and economically depressed area in the
city’s southeast. FUSE33 is a strategically located social enterprise started by the
Hoovers and several investors who work with Calgary’s International Avenue
Business Revitalization Zone (BRZ), the economic development organization
emergeHUB, the social and economic development agency momentum and
other community organizations and businesses to advocate for positive social
change and economic development within Forest Lawn and Calgary. Like Calgary
Makerspace, it keeps at its core the idea of a physical production space in which
members can share research and knowledge, network and build new innovations,
experiment and develop new processes, and engage in informal and unscheduled
activity, but perhaps with a renewed interest in incubating new small businesses.
Steven Pilz, who for many years worked as a project manager for IBM and led the
Calgary Makerspace team, observed: ‘Big companies make amazing technology,
but [they] don’t know how to use it.’39 If like MakeFashion, FUSE33 can support
‘extreme hobbyists’ or interdisciplinary projects to figure out how to apply and
personalize new technologies that larger tech companies aren’t nimble enough to
discover, it is assured of some success. If six billion users can learn to adapt one
piece of technology in a makerspace six billion different ways, the increasingly
segmented technology market, will get a lot longer and shallower, faster than ever
expected.
What is clear thus far in analysing the rapid expansion and change of makerspace
models in Calgary is that they are becoming increasingly market driven and this will
have consequences for the maker movement’s more progressive ideals. Protospace
and former Calgary Makerspace member-director David Bynoe suggests that,
ideally, all of these organizations will become interdependent in this ecosystem,
but admits this will not happen without gains and losses for each: ‘Protospace
is more chaotic [than Calgary Makerspace and other similar makerspaces], but
it will be where all the innovation happens. Once you have to pay for use on a
tool, it really limits what you can do with that tool.’40 Significantly too, once public
education, health and other non-profit resources are contracted out or privatized

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by for-profit makerspaces, these resources are lost to the community because they
become too expensive to reinstate.

Fab Lab Berlin

Fab Lab Berlin is strategically located at the centre of a new technological and
cultural hub that encourages a live-work-play lifestyle that has proven increasingly
productive for innovative individuals, corporations and cities alike. Or so Professor
Hans Georg Näder, owner of Ottobock orthopaedic technology company, has
been trying to convince the city of Berlin, in order to leverage public support for
his project. He recently hired British architect David Chipperfield to redevelop
the nineteenth-century Bötzow Brauerei in the now-gentrified Prenzlauer Berg
district of the former Berlin, German Democratic Republic. In cooperation with
Ottobock, Fab Lab Berlin (established in July 2013) moved into this new facility
in June 2015, increasing their monthly operating budget from €15,000 to €50,000
in just six months.41 Temporarily closed in July 2018 to prepare for their move to a
larger, permanent facility in the historical buildings that will also house Ottobock’s
Future Lab, an Open Innovation Space connected to the Human Mobility Medical
Centre, a culinary centre, spa, club, boutique hotel and beer garden. Näder,
a contemporary art collector, will top all this off with a public gallery for his
collection that will help ensure his access to this historic cultural site.
Their partnership is economically synergistic: Fab Lab Berlin gets purpose-
built infrastructure with a built-in community, while Ottobock outsources their
engineers to the lab for research and development that would otherwise be more
regulated and expensive in a corporate lab. Ottobock taps into the maker network
at Fab Lab Berlin too, which includes four full-time staff, eleven part-time staff
and paid interns who run a laboratory with a comprehensive set of standardized
fabrication tools, and every possible 3D printer for additive prototyping (Figure
8.2). In this digital think-tank, unusual ideas and processes can adapt to create
orthopaedic solutions, among other innovations. Again, what Fab Lab Berlin
members make is theirs to keep with no IP strings attached, but Fab Lab Berlin
will negotiate relationships with makers on behalf of Ottobock if they are
interested in taking a prototype to the next level, and most Fab Lab Berlin projects
are autonomous of Ottobock. Fab Lab Berlin director, Wolf Jeschonnek respects
The Fab Charter,42 which states that commercial activities should grow beyond
rather than within the lab, but this doesn’t preclude pursuing a venture capital
office in the future. Here, the economics seem to be at least equally important as
the charter’s ethical mandate.
Fab Lab Berlin is, after all, a for-profit limited liability company. Except for open
days, members – mainly well-educated, tech savvy men, between 20–40 years of
age who make up 70 per cent of the membership – pay to play.43 Public tool access

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FIGURE 8.2 Fab Lab Berlin, i3, 2016. Courtesy: Fab Lab Berlin.

FIGURE 8.3 Fab Lab Berlin, Workshop, 2016. Courtesy: Fab Lab Berlin.

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sells by the minute and users pay for consumables. Others rent basic co-work
office space for €450 a month. Partners include freelancers, university partners and
small-medium businesses that outsource products for fabrication. Main revenue
sources beyond laboratory rental include workshops, individual consulting and
tutoring, corporate events and major fabrication projects (Figure 8.3). The as-yet
underdeveloped non-profit arm of Fab Lab Berlin is designed for community
and education projects supported by sponsorships, government grants and
philanthropy, different streams of revenue for public audiences that lever particular
legal and tax advantages. Educational partnerships with Berlin Weissensee School
of Art, NYU Berlin and several art and fashion programs are already underway,
underscoring that, more and more, public educational institutions are outsourcing
their students to labs that are better able to provide flexible and up-to-date service-
oriented digital fabrication.

The sum of these parts

Mark Hatch writes in his Maker Movement Manifesto:

In a mass-customized society with computer-controlled production – or with

access to low-cost, short-run tools – we enter a new era in which the tools
for production are cheap enough that labor can, for the first time, buy or rent
capital as needed. This is revolutionary. It flips Marxism on its head. Capital is
rented as needed, not labor.44

Yet any powerful social movement knows that the power is in the people, not just
in the technology and the tools. Makerspaces, fab labs, hackerspaces and other
co-work spaces know their greatest asset is in peer-to-peer learning and in building
communal knowledge that can be networked for free. Whether makerspaces and
fab labs are socially or politically powerful is yet to be seen, but this generosity,
this sharing of content and the creativity it inspires, is valuable and is precisely
what they are capitalizing on. As Tim O’Reilly rightly observes: ‘It’s quite clear to
me that there is a new economy of content that is quite possibly larger than the old
one, but just not as well measured, because we measure value captured, not value
created for users.’45
So how do we measure the value created for users in this new economy of
content? Makerspaces exist in what Chris Anderson calls the ‘long tail’ of the
economy.46 As editor-in-chief of WIRED magazine from 2001 to 2012, Anderson
followed the bubble-and-burst dot.com economy closely. His 2004 article, The
Long Tail, analyses the segmented market economy, which refers to the market
shift away from the top of the curve, where supply-and-demand manufacturing
models rely on mainstream products and markets, towards multiple exchanges

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(hits) in diverse niche markets in the longer, shallower tail of the market curve.47
Amazon, for example, operates in the long tail of the market. It is a huge market
for small entrepreneurs: each of them serves a segment of the market, but they
all pay Amazon. Makerspaces operate in a similar manner, wherein a seemingly
inexhaustible number of makers make as many or as few items as they want and
may or may not sell, but the makerspace gets paid for the service it provides.
Makerspaces are also synergistic with the long tail of the market for three other
reasons. One, they take advantage of capitalism’s ills exacerbated by austerity,
underemployment, job dissatisfaction and unsustainable production and
consumption. Two, makerspaces encourage makers to experiment with diverse
applications for new technologies, develop mass-customized products for the
segmented market, and help to rejuvenate the light manufacturing sector in cities.
And three, makerspaces efficiently tap the creative class – a large population
with disposable income and advanced education who have been socialized and
self-identify as creatives. Many of them are digital natives or at least tech literate,
and most are self-conscious about consumption and want to do something good
for the planet and future generations. All fear ennui.
Makerspaces belong to a class of creative entrepreneurship first developed from
Charles Landry’s creative cities model in the 1980s and subsequently discussed by
Richard Florida as the creative class.48 Under these models, creative hubs become
magnets for urban redevelopment. TechShop was routinely approached by state
redevelopment agencies because, ‘People have figured out that a TechShop is a net
economic benefit to a city or region’, Calvo said. ‘Other cities who are redeveloping
urban cores, Pittsburgh, D.C., Arlington, are coming to us to try and figure out how
to work it into their development plans because it is advantageous to them.’49 But
while creative solutions are undoubtedly beneficial to urban centres, the creative
cities model often ends up sacrificing social and creative capital for financial gain.
For example, the creative cities model accelerates gentrification as the creative class
displaces vulnerable urban populations. Often this includes artists, craftspeople
and designers whose labour does not pay enough for them to share in the ‘creative
ethos’ co-opted from them by the creative class. One can criticize Florida’s creative
class for perpetuating these paradoxical structural inequities in class, gender and
race, which include problematic redevelopment patterns and social hierarchies
that could hold true in the future of makerspaces.50 Paradoxically, the rise of the
creative class coincides with a decline in public funding for education and culture
in many Western countries including Canada, the United States and Germany.
As Newton observes, these are precisely the societal lacks that makerspaces like
TechShop rushed to fill. Formerly publicly funded activities in non-commercial
research facilities, education or cultural centres now compete with private
enterprise for these same dollars.
It is not coincidental that the rise of the makerspace coincides with the aftermath
of the dot.com collapse of 1999–2000 and a floundering US economy. Governments

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in Western Europe, the United States and elsewhere are supporting makerspaces
as solutions to job loss and weak economies.51 Anderson and others argue that
makerspaces encourage innovations that spawn local start-ups and lead to light
manufacturing and local supply chains that will reinvent manufacturing in the future.
Distributed and networked digital manufacturing takes a maker’s idea directly to
the consumer, while keeping everyone, and their dollars, at home. Downloadable
designs already exist on websites such as Instructables, and Thingiverse, and
prosumers download, modify and upload redesigns to their communities for further
alterations with Open Source software (Figure 8.4, Plate 10). So, even though the
maker movement supposedly has a political conscience about consumption – often
arguing for a financially kinder, ecologically gentler, circular economy – makerspaces
do not necessarily mean less production or consumption. Rather they simply shift
who produces what, and where and how it will be consumed.
Importantly, this shift qualitatively impacts multiple types of capital – not only
financial but physical, human, social and intellectual – and this is important.
Zaid Hassan in his book The Social Labs Revolution, recognizes that makerspaces
generate new forms of capital and that this is essential to prevent the collapse of
complex social systems.52 He writes, recalling Michael Greer’s theory of catabolic
collapse:

Human civilization is built on our ability to generate multiple forms of

productive capital, which serves to meet societal needs for a period, before

FIGURE 8.4 Fab Lab Berlin, Samples, 2016. Courtesy: Fab Lab Berlin.

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being converted to waste … When the rate of waste being produced outstrips
the rate of capital being produced – also known as the rate of consumption –
then civilizations head toward ecological breakdown (what Greer calls catabolic
collapse).53

Sadly, our overriding concern for financial capital has left us at the brink of collapse
at the end of late capitalism. The question that remains is whether capitalism
will cannibalize the maker movement, or whether a mass of digitally networked
makers can remake capitalism itself.
Makerspaces capitalize on what many of us have known for a long time;
making money is necessary, but alone is not enough to sustain a civilization. Even
though makerspace models remain mainly in step with market capitalism, Hatch,
Gershenfeld, Anderson and others are powerfully aware of the need for a shift in
the economy that can capitalize on different modes of work and abundant new
digital and information technologies. As Hatch notes, Techshop had ‘begun to
shift [members’] nonproductive, disposable, discretionary income and time into
potentially productive investments while maintaining the same level of spending’.54
This post-capitalist idea is gaining traction, but can only succeed for makers if
fundamentally different economic models emerge.55 Whether this can happen and
improve the economic realities for makers remains to be seen.
Makerspaces are part of the late capitalist system, but the work that is happening
within them points to a sharing economy beyond capitalism. By making available
and reorganizing existing resources in the system, the power of makerspaces
is in exactly what they don’t own – the creativity of the maker community and
re-appropriated public resources – but are levering against for the purpose of
selling the idea of the makerspace and all it professes to bring to communities.
Indeed, some in the US financial community have argued that TechShop’s rapid
bricks-and-mortar expansion and slow movement towards increased licensing
agreements made their downfall.
In Doctorow’s Makers, Disney wants to buy Perry and Lester out, but their
friend Suzanne understands that they don’t want the ride or the town; they just
want the creativity.56 In makerspaces too, the communal creativity is capital;
the makerspace’s creative sharing economy is so intertwined with neoliberalism
that it cannot exist outside entrepreneurial capitalism. TechShop and other
makerspaces understand this too, and this is precisely what they have put a price
on. Makerspaces are sites in which capitalism seamlessly melds with creative
makers and the sharing economy. At the end of Doctorow’s Makers, Lester goes
back to work with his life-long creative partner Perry and tells the financial gurus
to go home: ‘Perry Gibbons is the sharpest entrepreneur I’ve ever met. He can’t
help but make businesses. He’s an artist who anticipates the market a year ahead
of the curve.’57

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Notes
1 Cory Doctorow, Makers (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2009).
2 Ibid., 11.
3 Ibid., 45.
4 Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce, eds., Material Powers. Cultural Studies, History and
the Material Turn (London: Routledge, 2010).
5 Alvin Toffler’s famous books Future Shock (Random House, 1970) and The Third
Wave (Bantam Books, 1980) could be understood as precursors to Chris Anderson’s
Makers: The New Industrial Revolution and Doctorow’s novel Makers.
6 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
7 ‘President Obama Speaks on manufacturing and Innovation’, at TechShop Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, The White House YouTube Channel, 17 June 2014. Also see
Andrew Coy’s ‘Making the Maker Movement’, the White House President Barack
Obama Blog, 14 July 2016, at 5:29 PM ET, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/
blog/2016/07/14/making-maker-movement (accessed 15 April 2019).
8 Make: How to Make a Maker Faire, https://makerfaire.com/global/ (accessed 8
April 2019).
9 Mark Hatch, The Maker Movement Manifesto (New York: McGraw-Hill Books, 2014),
10. Since this article was first written, TechShop has closed its locations in the United
States and Hatch is a Maker Movement Advisor, speaking, writing and consulting on
the Maker Movement.
10 Neil Gershenfeld, FAB (New York: Basic Books, 2005). See also Neil Gershenfeld,
Stuart Kestenbaum and Phyllis D. Klein, ‘Digital Fabrication: Implications for Craft
and Community’, in Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture
(New York/London: Smithsonian American Art Museum/Bloomsbury, 2015),
184–201.
11 FabFoundation, http://www.fabfoundation.org/index.php/the-fab-charter/index.html
(accessed 8 April 2019).
12 The Fab Charter, http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/charter/ (accessed 8 April 2019).
13 Make: magazine (founded in 2005) and the original Maker Faires were started by
Dale Dougherty and Sherry Huss of Maker Media, with the support of Dan Woods
and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, which has made its fortune identifying trends
and repackaging open-source content for big-name-roster conventions for corporate
executives.
14 Mu-Ming Tsai, Maker: A Documentary on the Maker Movement (San Francisco,
2014).
15 TechShop Overview, TechShop, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150803223524/
http://invest.techshop.ws/ (accessed August 2015).
16 Jim Newton, interview in Maker: A Documentary on the Maker Movement.
17 Andrew Calvo, interview with author, TechShop, San Francisco, 29 September 2015.
18 Ibid.

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19 Tanvi Misra, ‘Mapping Gentrification and Displacement in San Francisco’, The

Atlantic CITYLAB, 31 August 2015, http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/08/
mapping-gentrification-and-displacement-in-san-francisco/402559/ (accessed
June 2016).
20 5M Project, http://www.5mproject.com (accessed October 2015).
21 TechShop Overview.
22 Jean Baptiste Su, ‘Report: TechShop Shuts Down, Files for Bankruptcy Amid
Heavy Losses, Unsustainable Business Model’, Forbes, 17 November 2017, 7:33
pm, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2017/11/15/techshop-shuts-
down/#36bd04876c26 (accessed 18 April 2019).
23 Andrew Calvo, interview with author.
24 TechShop Overview.
25 The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) develops new military
technologies for the United States Department of Defense. On 1 April 2015,
Greg Petro for Forbes characterized Lowe’s Companies Inc. as a Sci-Fi DIY home
improvement company. The Ford Motor Company, founded by Henry Ford in 1903,
developed large-scale manufacturing using assembly lines and engineered divisions
of labour that are now known as Fordism.
26 Jeb Su, ‘Report: TechShop Shuts Down, Files For Bankruptcy Amid Heavy Losses,
Unsustainable Business Model’. Forbes, November 15, 2017, 7:33 pm EST, https://
www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2017/11/15/techshop-shuts-down/#2b2e04ff6c26
27 Andrew Calvo, interview.
28 Ibid.
29 From Kickstarter to Today – Oru Kayak, https: //www.orukayak.com/pages/about
(accessed June 2020).
30 Craft’s use as a market branding strategy, or craftwashing, is an idea introduced and
elaborated upon by editors Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch in Chapter 1 ‘From
Craftivism to Craftwashing’ in this volume.
31 Andrew Calvo, interview.
32 TechShop Makerspace Academy, http://www.techshop.ws/Maker_Space_Academy.
html (accessed June 2016).
33 The TechShop Overview also outlines a three- to six-month Market Development
Process for USD$ 100,000 that aims to get new TechShops up and running in less
than two years with a projected 100 per cent growth compounded annually and new
spaces to green in the first year. Andrew Calvo, interview.
34 Mu-Ming Tsai, Maker: A Documentary on the Maker Movement.
35 ARCHEloft Makerspace ran from April 2015 to June 2017. The Calgary Makerspace
Project dissolved in June 2017.
36 Byron Hynes, interview with author, Protospace, Calgary, 13 October 2015.
37 Ibid.
38 Steven Pilz, interview with author, Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary, 21
October 2015.
39 Ibid.

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40 David Bynoe, interview with author, Protospace, Calgary, 13 October 2015.

41 Wolf Jeschonnek, emails to author, 5–6 November 2015. For 2015 growth is
approximately 100–200 per cent, with projected revenue figures €650,000, up from
just €50,000 in 2013.
42 The Fab Charter.
43 Wolf Jeschonnek, emails to author, 5–6 November 2015.
44 Mark Hatch, The Maker Movement Manifesto, 40 (original emphasis).
45 O’Reilly, ‘About’, www.oreilly.com/tim/ (accessed 3 November 2013).
46 Chris Anderson, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (New York: Crown Business,
2012), 61–81.
47 Chris Anderson, ‘The Long Tail, in a nutshell’, About Me, http://www.longtail.com/
about.html (accessed 3 November 2013). Steven Pilz and the author discussed this
with regards to Calgary Makerspace.
48 Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class.
49 Calvo, interview with author.
50 There is a lack of hard data regarding the demographics in makerspaces.
51 Derek Thompson, ‘A World Without Work’, The Atlantic (July/August 2015): 50–61.
52 Zaid Hassan, The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach to Solving Our Most
Complex Challenges (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2014), 83.
53 Ibid., 84 (original emphasis).
54 Hatch, The Maker Movement Manifesto, 37.
55 Paul Mason, ‘The End of Capitalism Has Begun’, Economics: Guardian, Friday, 17
July 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-
capitalism-begun (accessed 17 July 2015). Mason’s book, Postcapitalism: A Guide
to Our Future, was subsequently published in 2015 by Allen Lane, an imprint of
Penguin Random House, Great Britain, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (Great
Britain: Allen Lane, 2015).
56 Doctorow, Makers, 388.
57 Ibid., 413 (original emphasis).

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9 M
 OREHSHIN ALLAHYARI: ON
MATERIAL SPECULATION
Alexis Anais Avedisian and Anna Khachiyan

In July 2014, as ISIS, the self-appointed worldwide caliphate, consolidated its

hold on Mosul, reports began to surface of the group’s demolition of surrounding
Shiite mosques and shrines. These reports were swiftly corroborated by its release
of videos showing the extent of the damage. Since then, ISIS has targeted more
than two dozen cultural heritage sites in Iraq, Syria and Libya, including Christian
churches, ancient and medieval temples and complexes and contemporary
cultural institutions, including the Mosul Museum. The spree culminated with
the demolition of parts of the ancient city of Palmyra in May 2015. In what has
become the group’s calling card, these events and others were heavily documented
with footage designed to be streamed and shared on the internet, going viral as it
was picked up by citizen journalists and international news outlets.
The unprecedented if bewildering use of social media to disseminate its
message and recruit new followers by ISIS has earned it the nickname the ‘digital
caliphate’. Yet this use of media differs from other state propaganda organs in that
it does not seek to cover up or sugar-coat the brutality of its actions, which include
a spate of well-publicized beheadings of foreign journalists and aid workers and
mass executions of ‘enemy combatants’. Indeed, this nihilism is part of their appeal
for a dispersed contingent of alienated and disenfranchised youth. To justify its
barbaric acts, ISIS appeals to Salafism, an ultraconservative reformist doctrine that
promotes a literal and rigid interpretation of Islam’s holy texts. Where visual culture
is concerned, this means the elimination of all historic examples of polytheism
across the realm, including but not limited to depictions of people and animals.
Although ISIS sees itself as operating in accordance with the Muslim faith, it
has taken advantage of its media portrayal as a band of lawless thugs that flouts
international conventions of statecraft and warfare. In fact, this surface-level moral
arbitrage provides a tactical upper hand: rather than being defaced or demolished
outright, certain portable and therefore more prized items are looted, smuggled
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and flipped to finance the group’s activities, ending up in private collections and
perhaps even cultural institutions.1 Indeed the widespread speculation on the
part of archaeologists, art historians and government officials that ‘ISIS probably
sells whatever it can and destroys large, famous treasures as a publicity stunt’
was seemingly corroborated by a recent US-led raid on the home of a top Syrian
operative which turned up ‘gold coins, silver dirhams, old beads, terra-cotta
fragments, an ivory plaque, an ancient manuscript and heavily corroded copper
bracelets – mixed with fakes among his personal belongings.2
This is the reality confronted by Iranian-American artist Morehshin Allahyari
in Material Speculation: ISIS, (Figures 9.1–9.3, Plate 11), an ongoing project that
uses 3D modelling and printing to reconstruct selected antiquities destroyed
by ISIS in Iraq, namely, a series of objects from the Assyrian city of Nineveh
(2900–2600 BCE) and a suite of statues from the Roman-period city of Hatra

FIGURE 9.1 Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS, Eagle King, 2016, clear
resin, flash drives and memory cards. Courtesy: Morehshin Allahyari.

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(200–100 BCE). Going beyond metaphoric gestures, Material Speculation offers a

practical and political archival methodology for endangered or destroyed artifacts.
Allahyari’s reconstructions preserve the details and proportions of the originals –
mainly individual stone figures and figural fragments depicting courtly or divine
subjects as part of larger sculptural programs – but on a notably smaller scale,
minus their historic context and in a transparent synthetic material that differs
from their familiar stone fabrication to uncanny effect (Plate 11). The result is that
the facsimiles exist in a kind of associative isolation, much like museum gift shop
souvenirs. At the centre of this initiative is the figure of the Lamassu, an Assyrian
protective deity depicted as having the head of a human male and the winged
body of a bull or lion, that typically adorned the entry gates of cities and palaces
(Figure 9.2). As an avatar of crimes against culture by ISIS, it is also symbolic of
Allahyari’s rehabilitative practice.
In line with Allahyari’s previous work, Material Speculation also proposes 3D
technologies as a tool of resistance. For this project, a flash drive and memory card
containing data such as images, videos, maps and PDF files with information on
specifications and provenance, is embedded within each of the objects – creating

FIGURE 9.2 Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS, Lamassu, 2016, clear resin,
flash drives and memory cards. Courtesy: Morehshin Allahyari.

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FIGURE 9.3 Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS, Marten, 2016, clear resin,
flash drives and memory cards. Courtesy: Morehshin Allahyari.

a kind of time capsule, sealed for future generations to discover (Figure 9.3). The
historical materials used to develop Allahyari’s designs are sourced through an
intensive research process involving archaeologists, historians and museum
specialists from Iraq and Iran. In the project’s final stages, the 3D-printable
files are made available online for download and unrestricted use by the public,
changing the creative and economic terms of how we interact with and value
cultural heritage – at a time when intellectual property traditionally held in the
public domain is being aggressively privatized.
As ISIS has shown, the potential futures that digital technology promises
almost always teeter on the ethically ambiguous – trapped in a crossfire of
discourses that vary depending on who’s doing the talking. In January 2016,
responding to President Barack Obama’s public statements that technology
is allowing extremists to ‘poison the minds of people’, technology journalist
Kashmir Hill wrote:

Technology and the internet are being invoked in fearful terms because it is
easier to point the finger there than unpack the multifold and complicated
reasons behind these acts – the growth of hateful ideologies, racial and
ethnic tensions, the ease of buying semi-automatic weapons, the long-term
effects of an ongoing war waged by drones and twisted minds that embrace
violence.3

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Allahyari refuses to accept this hypocrisy, which conveniently ignores the many
intimidations and aggressions precipitated by the West. She recognizes that what
has traditionally been considered public history is often made vulnerable: subject
to co-option by organized violence and radical politicking in which both sides
are equally implicated. The campaign of destruction by ISIS at the Nineveh
Museum in February 2015, for example, can be seen as a means of using chaos
and disorder to enforce social control, fabricate the historical record, and ‘create
a new reality for the present and future’, as Allahyari recently told technology and
science magazine Motherboard.4 On the other hand, when Hillary Clinton, then
acting as secretary of state in December 2015, urged the United Nations to partner
with Silicon Valley to restrict suspected terrorists from gaining online access,
she was effectively enforcing an equivalent form of control by chipping away
at internet freedoms, as ISIS did to the artifacts of Assyrian and Greco-Roman
civilizations.5 Against this anxious geopolitical backdrop, cultural institutions, and
encyclopaedic museums in particular, are seen as sanctuaries for knowledge that
is continually being refined by academic scholarship, and gateways to narratives
that are successively being refreshed by the societal urges of each generation.
This makes forays by cultural institutions into the digitization of archives and
collections seem like a natural next step in their overall function as custodians
of history. Yet this, in and of itself, constitutes a process of authority building,
and is therefore not immune to bias. Allahyari’s work imbricates visual culture
and global politics in a way that goes beyond the surface-level shock tactics and
representations of protest art. Instead, she advances an elastic, phantasmagoric
and mutually complicit conceptual critique of the cultural stakes.6
Over the past few decades, digitality has proffered a new form of history, one
that is as much about self-documentation as it is about collectives, movements
and other solidarities; increasing our investment in digital culture makes us
more exposed, more self-aware, and putatively more accountable. In this shift
Allahyari sees a potential for cultural archives to become accelerated: distributed,
democratized and, paradoxically, more like data centres, which in themselves
challenge the myth of the internet’s immateriality with their necessarily physical
existence. Contrary to techno-utopian narratives that capitalize on the art world
and general public’s technical ignorance of the physical infrastructures that
enable digital spaces, Allahyari’s work suggests that emancipation comes from
an acceptance of materiality not the fetishization of dematerialization. In the 3D
Additivist Manifesto, co-authored with artist and academic Daniel Rourke, she
writes of 3D manufacturing technology in similar fashion: ‘Its potential belies
the complications of its history: that matter is the sum and prolongation of our
ancestry; that creativity is brutal, sensual, rude, coarse, and cruel.’7 In a video that
accompanies the online version of the text, an assortment of objects ranging from
the organic to the ready-made – a horse, a mushroom, an oil rig, a Duchampian
urinal – are seen bobbing in a quicksilver seascape (Figure 9.4). Suspended in this

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FIGURE 9.4 Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke with sound design by Andrea Young,
The 3D Additivist Manifesto, 2015, video essay, still. Courtesy: Morehshin Allahyari.

primordial soup of dreamlike associations is a cyborgian figure, the tubules that

connote its bloodstream pulsing with pastel phosphorescence.
To concretize the metaphor, Allahyari and Rourke have spoken of crude oil being
deepwater drilled out of the ocean floor and, later, converted from ‘bacterioles’
into the ‘petrochemicals’ that are used to make 3D plastic filament. A 3D-printed
object – including Allahyari’s own crystalline sculptures – thus retains the aura
of a biomorphic prehistory, as if it has a memory of its own. In such a way, the
3D Additivist Manifesto goes beyond revealing the electronic processes that make
tangible products out of digitally rendered models; it fundamentally attempts
to expose histories that are concealed in service of upholding the hyper-fiction
that technology is a cure-all for the world’s social, ecological and economic ills.
Additivism does not re-inscribe structural power dynamics that are responsible
for countless human and environmental tragedies. Instead, it considers material
reproduction as a humanist endeavour, one that merits the same safeguarding
as flesh and blood. The concept of 3D printing as symbolic of corporeality and
mortality is defined in the Manifesto as ‘infatuation,’ following the idea that the
human body will undertake cyborgian evolution.8 We want to become physically
and cognitively immersed by matter, we want our data to be immortal. In Rourke’s
words, the Additivist practice exists in ‘the space between the material and the
digital; the human and the nonhuman’.9
Blind faith in digital technology is contingent on the belief that such advances
are always made for human progress, when contrarily, they are often more
indicative of aggressive intrusions designed to extract user data and pad corporate
bottom lines. As an example of Rourke’s in-between space, data analysts began

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employing advertisement algorithms to search for emotional clues from Facebook

users, a tactic which may allow social media networks to pre-emptively dissuade
someone deemed at risk of being radicalized by ISIS.
Consequently, the hypothesis that 3D printing could launch an imaginative
form of archiving, as each object in Material Speculation series seems to do, is
subversive because it challenges conventional Western methods of archiving and
preservation. It also reflects recent calls for cultural institutions to ‘professionalize’
by absorbing the market logic of technology start-ups rather than relying on an
increasingly dried-up pool of state funding and charitable donations. As cultural
institutions have scrambled to incorporate the gospel of disruption into their
business plans and cultural programming, a growing critical discourse led by
writers such as Astra Taylor, Jill Lepore and Jaron Lanier raises the question of
whether Silicon Valley is an appropriate model for a sector that is largely non-
profit and significantly non-Western.10 In part, this nascent body of institutional
critique examines the problematic nature of digital archives, which run the risk
of being privatized and compromised, through such partnerships with the profit-
making data-harvesting behemoth Google or its smaller competitor Artsy.
Allahyari and Rourke’s conceptualization of Additivism embraces its own
contradictions: that 3D printing employs plastic, a cheap, Fordist material which
wreaks havoc on our environment; that it threatens to glorify industrial reproduction
as yet another kind of ‘sex organ’, upgrading the body’s inevitable mortality into a form
of fetishist anthropomorphism; that its materiality, to some degree, dematerializes
its own economic conditions. It is these kinds of covert and contradictory impulses
that can be used as radical practice, perhaps the very thing that is needed to
recognize the reasons behind various forms of cultural and physical violence
and, alternately, provide a level of security against them. Allahyari is attempting
to redefine the radical, not as a byword for violence – be it carried out by Islamic
fundamentalism or Western capitalism – but as a strategy for changing the world
around us through the advancement of ideological multiplicities.
The subjects of history are often defenceless from those who set out to record
and revise it, but objects embedded with an Additivist framework retain some
material agency even as their status and meaning shifts over time through ever-
evolving contexts. As Allahyari continues to develop Material Speculation: ISIS, in
part as an emotional and material response to terror, she also continues to develop
her own experimental theory of preservation, simultaneously protecting objects
from object-hood while navigating the materiality of digital information.

Notes
1 Contrary to the popular perceptions of ISIS as a rogue entity operating in a
geopolitical vacuum, these circumstances point to a complex network of complicity

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that spans national borders and time zones (the Salafi movement, which also
encompasses other Sunni jihadist organizations like Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram, is
globally sponsored by Saudi Arabia, the chief ally of the United States in the region).
2 Ben Taub, ‘The Real Value of the ISIS Antiques Trade’, New Yorker, 5 December 2015,
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-real-value-of-the-isis-antiquities-
trade. See also: Steven Lee Myers and Nicholas Kulish, ‘ “Broken System” Allows
ISIS to Profit from Looted Antiquities’, New York Times, 9 January 2016, http://www.
nytimes.com/2016/01/10/world/europe/iraq-syria-antiquities-islamic-state.html?_
r=0 (accessed 15 November 2017)
3 Kashmir Hill, ‘Let’s Stop Blaming “the Internet” for Terrorism’, Fusion, 11 December
2015. http://fusion.net/story/243993/the-internet-and-terrorism/ (accessed 15
November 2017)
4 Ben Valentine, ‘3D Printing vs. ISIS’, Motherboard, 25 May 2015, http://motherboard.
vice.com/read/isis-vs-3d-printing (accessed 15 November 2017).
5 David E. Sanger, ‘Hillary Clinton Urges Silicon Valley to “Disrupt” ISIS’, New York
Times, 6 December 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/us/politics/hillary-
clinton-islamic-state-saban-forum.html (accessed 15 November 2017).
6 Chloe Wyma, ‘Hito Steyerl Shatters Reality, Pieces it Back Together’, Blouin ArtInfo,
23 (March 2015). http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1120599/hito-steyerl-
shatters-reality-pieces-it-back-together (accessed 17 November 2017).
7 Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, 3D Additivist Manifesto (2015), http://
additivism.org/manifesto (accessed 15 November 2017).
8 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
(New York: Routledge, 1991).
9 Allahyari and Rourke, 3D Additivist Manifesto.
10 Jill Lepore, ‘The Disruption Machine: What the Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong’,
New Yorker, 23 June 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-
disruption-machine (accessed 15 November 2017). See also: Astra Taylor, The People’s
Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Toronto: Random House
of Canada, 2014), and Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2014).

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10 FROM MOLTEN PLASTIC

TO POLISHED MAHOGANY:
BRICOLAGE AND SCARCITY
IN 1990s CUBAN ART
Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano

In the early 1990s, Havana resembled a post-war scenario where food staples were
hard to find and buildings were decrepit.1 From 1989 up until the definitive fall
of the USSR in September 1991, relations between the Soviet Union and Cuba
gradually deteriorated for both ideological and economic reasons, and in 1991,
president of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev announced the end of the four
to five-billion-dollar annual subsidy to Cuba, as well as the withdrawal of Soviet
advisors and troops from the island. The effects of these measures were dramatic: 80
per cent of Cuban imports were lost between 1990 and 1993, causing the island’s
economy to contract by 34 per cent.2 The end of socialism in Europe resulted in
severe isolation and economic hardship in Cuba, which was exacerbated by the
reinforcement of the American embargo, delivering ‘nearly existential shocks
to the Cuban system’.3 The recession directly impacted the material culture of
Cuba, which underwent significant changes during these years: shortages of fuel,
electricity, food, water and medicine turned into dramatic permanent features of
everyday life. The limited supplies, changing cityscape of Havana and emerging
local art market informed the materiality, style and subject matter of Cuban
art during that period; and the 1990s appear as a turning point from which to
re-examine the past, present and future of the nation, and reconsider the role of
art and material culture on the island.
The bricolage phenomenon that emerged in Cuba after the revolution in 1959
and the beginning of the US embargo grew exponentially during the Special
Period in Time of Peace, as the years roughly between 1991 and 1997 came to be
known.4 Since no new goods were entering Cuba, existing objects were recycled,
156

transformed or repurposed.5 In order to address the deterioration of material

goods on the island, the government strongly encouraged do-it-yourself family-
based practices in Cuban homes. Between 1990 and 1991, the army published
El Libro de la Familia (The Family Book) and Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos
(With Our Own Efforts), two volumes on domestic tips focused on adapting to
the shortage of goods. The manuals covered almost everything from agriculture,
energy, transportation and construction to medicine, cleaning, clothing, toys and
leisure; and included instructions on how to make myriad, sometimes fantastical,
objects such as rice-peel bricks and a grapefruit ‘steak’. These manuals promoted
a return to traditional ways of life, and supported recycling and the creative
re-adaptation of resources. They also obscured the necessity for such approaches,
instead elevating Cubans’ resilience to a matter of national pride. However, while
these state publications backed responsible consumption both for ideological and
economic reasons, they avoided any mention of the illegalities masked by most
self-made creations, which ranged from stealing materials to skipping quality
inspections.
Cuban material culture of the 1990s was impacted not only by bricolage as a
consequence of scarcity, but also by the reforms package that corresponded with
the Special Period, including the introduction of a series of austerity measures,
the development of tourism and the opening of the island to minor private
initiatives. The longing for foreign imports and need for outside revenue made it
an inescapable state priority to render the Caribbean island more attractive to both
international visitors and international investors, and it was during these years
that the restoration and beautification of Havana’s historic colonial quarter took
place.6 The opening of new, or renovated, resorts, hotels, museums, restaurants
and bars made the island more appealing to foreigners, but it was perhaps the
idea of Cuba as the last remaining bastion of pre-neoliberalism, pre-globalization
and pre-internet media times, that was most attractive to people outside of the
nation. The Old Havana restoration project brought about the recuperation of
traditional artisan techniques that had long been in disuse, and trained several
hundred young people as masons, carpenters, painters, plumbers, electricians and
gardeners. Indeed, the program generated a network of training establishments
that produced young specialists to perform the restoration work, re-establishing
the status of these various artisanal skills.7 The number and variety of modified,
refurbished items and buildings increased to the point that these enterprises –
both those improvised by citizens and those planned by the state – not only
significantly altered Havana’s cityscape, but also impacted the work of many visual
artists. During these years, many Cuban artists used the image of Havana as a site,
source and idiom for their work, creating a form of art inspired by ruins, recycling
and craftsmanship, yet also largely conditioned by the scarcity of materials.
In this context, many artists turned to bricolage – the do-it-yourself process
of constructing an object from odds and ends – as a formal and conceptual

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language that best reflected the position of the visual arts at the heart of the
Cuban revolutionary project. Recalling French anthropologist Claude Lévi-
Strauss’s conceptualization of bricolage, the Cuban citizens’ combined use of the
different materials at hand, which ranged from colonial furniture to Soviet vehicles,
passing by 1950s American appliances, generated a unique cultural identity
through the subversive intertextuality of artefacts across historical contexts.8 Often
regarded as a manual folk skill, devoid of the intellectual sophistication of the fine
arts, bricolage was appropriated by 1990s Cuban artists as the most adequate
language to reflect on the changing relations between art, society, market and
the state.9 This approach allowed many artists to work comfortably with the few
materials available then and to establish a dialogue between their oeuvre and the
improvisational nature of material culture in Havana. Furthermore, since bricolage
in 1990s Cuba was already intrinsic to everyday life and domestic space, many
artworks from that period were in dialogue with the home as a complex place
where individual freedom, frustration, resistance and resilience often intertwine.
This essay analyses the myriad approaches to bricolage in the work of the
collectives Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica, Los Carpinteros and Gabinete
Ordo Amoris, who respectively engaged in restoration practices, experimented
with traditional handicrafts and studied Cuban vernacular design in their work.
Further, it will reflect on these artist groups’ take on the development of the
revolutionary project and on the changing social status of the artist in Special
Period Cuba. Two works by Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica (Through a
Pragmatic Pedagogy) illustrate the shift in artistic practices in Cuba over the
course of one decade: La Casa Nacional (The National House) from 1990 and La
Época (The Epoch), produced nine years later, illuminate the profound changes
in Cuban material culture and the impact of Special Period reforms on Cuban
society.
In 1989, artist and professor René Francisco Rodríguez founded Desde Una
Pragmática Pedagógica, an artist collective and horizontal pedagogic project,
which included himself and a number of fine arts students at the Instituto Superior
de Arte.10 The group dissolved in 1990, and was re-formed by its creator in 1997
under the acronym DUPP. Following in the wake of 1980s Cuban art collectives –
such as Hexágono, 4x4, Puré, Grupo Provisional and Arte Calle – their goal was
to ‘make art cut into social life’, and their actions often developed outside the
academic milieu.11
La Casa Nacional was located on a land lot in Calle Obispo 455, in the heart
of Old Havana. René Francisco Rodriguez, his colleague Ibrahim Miranda and
his students María del Pilar Reyes, Acela, Dianelis Travieso, Tania Alina, Tania
Rodríguez, Lucía Rodríguez, Alexander Arrechea and Dagoberto Rodríguez
(the last two soon-to-become Los Carpinteros), remodelled an old building in
La Habana Vieja and restored the inhabitants’ belongings. The group performed
daily chores for the tenants including laundry, cleaning and cooking – tasks that

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were not easily accomplished during a period of material scarcity. The artists
also partnered with residents to attend to their home renovation needs, such as
repainting entrances, repairing furniture, adding apartment numbers to the front
doors, hanging a cork bulletin board at the community meeting room and painting
devotional images upon request.
A black-and-white photograph documenting the action shows two young
artists sitting on a wooden bench in a domestic interior. Armed with long
paintbrushes, they lean over an old, large seat cushion that they hold across their
laps. With a look of extreme concentration, both women meticulously repaint the
worn-out cushion with its original flower pattern designs as if they were restoring
a precious antique. The scene seems absurd because of the painters’ deteriorating
surroundings – the fading colours of the scratched, cracked and chipped floor
tiles, the precarious state of the bench where the seat cushion belongs and the
scaffolding-like shelf in the background – makes their improvement work seem
less urgent than other repairs. However, the image also illustrates how certain
signifiers of social status, or the aspiration to reach them, were not relinquished
despite times of scarcity in Cuba. On the contrary, they were cherished as symbols
of dignity.
Rodriguez described the project as a ‘political work of social reconstruction’ and
as ‘the university of the street’.12 Indeed, the artwork demonstrated the resident’s
needs, alongside the significance of the group’s desire to learn aesthetic and
conceptual lessons through experimentation with materials and techniques that
were, at that time, more typical of a construction site than of an art school. Thus,
the students’ reparative project challenged the canonical definitions of fine art,
and perhaps more importantly, subverted the official distribution of employment
by industry and occupation in Cuba. On the one hand, it could be argued that
the guerrilla manoeuvres of DUPP recalled Michel de Certeau’s formulation of
‘tactics’ as the common people’s everyday resistance to power structures through
the seizing of unexpected opportunities. On the other hand, the fact that this action
happened under the auspices of a state institution like the national graduate school
of arts made the event less inflammatory than it might first appear.13 Finally, the
title of the piece, La Casa Nacional references both the building residents’ duties as
the Revolution Defence Committee of their block, and the flag colours and paint
they chose to evoke the significance of the house as a microcosm of the Cuban
society.
Los Carpinteros were influenced by their experience in DUPP’s La Casa
Nacional in the development of their interest in home improvement skills.14
Founded by Alexandre Arrechea, Dagoberto Rodríguez and Marco Castillo at the
Instituto Superior de Arte in the mid-1990s, in their early work Los Carpinteros
experimented with manual remodelling and refurbishing techniques. They used
found wood and adapted traditional carpentry techniques to create sophisticated
pieces of furniture with academy-style oil-on-canvas scenes. These scenes

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reflected race and class differences in Cuban history through references to

colonial times, and the period from the 1950s to the Special Period. The resulting
exuberant artefacts were a comical inversion of the domestic transformation
of junk into utilitarian items that was so common in Cuba at the time. Their
working process was often the same: Arrechea and Rodríguez, who trained
with a professional carpenter upon the suggestion of professor René Francisco
Rodríguez, did the woodwork and Castillo painted the scenes, in which his two
colleagues were often depicted as the protagonists.
For the Fifth Havana Biennial in 1994, the collective presented a series of five
works, called Interior Habanero (Havana Interior). Each work featured a painting
framed by a cabinet-like wooden structure. In most cases, the artists obtained the
wood from the luxurious chests, dressers and bureaus found at the abandoned
mansions in the area of the art school, while in others they chopped down the
mahogany trees on campus. The oil paintings on canvas were often carried out
in an academic classical style that resonated with the elegant yet conservative
fashion of the cabinetwork. The piece Vanite (Figure 10.1, Plate 12), titled after the
Dutch and Flemish still-life genre that depicts the transient nature of all earthly
life, consists of a lavishly carved dressing table, with drawer legs shaped as lion
paws and a pristine marble top. In lieu of the mirror is a painting of the three
group members, crowned by the word ‘vanite’ carved in wood. In the painting –
an embodiment, performance and representation of craft by craftsmen – Arrechea
holds a candle to illuminate Rodríguez, while he carves the acronym MAD with
a chisel on Castillo’s back.15 MAD was the group’s first name, composed of each
member’s initials, and therefore, although the scene also alludes to the scarce
materials for art then available in Cuba, it perhaps more importantly serves as
an embodiment of the sacrifice of individuality for the sake of the collective, not
only in Los Carpinteros, but in revolutionary Cuba as well. As art critic Janet Batet
has observed, ‘the notions of guild and craft implicit in their work, also implied
the examination of concepts such as participation and democracy’.16 Overall,
the contrast between the splendour of the dressing table and the darkness of the
painting mimics the disparity between pre- and post-1959 Cuba, yet the title of the
work unifies both elements. The work establishes a parallel between the excessive
‘vanity’ of those in power during both periods’ regimes, perhaps in their ignorance
of the people’s needs.
Another work from the series is Marquilla cigarrera cubana (Cuban Cigar
Label). Like a gigantic replica of a cigar box, this work displays a relatively small
painted scene framed by a large piece of carved wood. The top and left sides of
the frame present a decorative geometric pattern of rhomboids and flowers. The
right side depicts a carved coat of arms: the emblem of Los Carpinteros, with two
hammers, a paintbrush and the group’s acronym. Below a text vignette captions
the painting to read: ‘Lord, we have lost everything in the game. Everything?
Everything but one thing. What? The desire to gamble again.’17 In the foreground

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FIGURE 10.1 Los Carpinteros, Vanite, 1994, wood, marble, oil painting. Courtesy: The
Farber Collection.

of the image, Arrechea, naked from the waist up, smokes a Cuban cigar while,
far behind him, a nude Rodríguez runs in the background. The scene is set in
an ornamented museum similar to the Hermitage, elegantly decorated with
marble columns, glass ceilings, Turkish carpets and large, richly framed paintings
resembling those of the European Old Masters. This piece pays homage to the
handmade labour of cigar factory workers, traditionally Afro-Cubans, by elevating
cigar manufacturing – from cigar rolling to box crafting – to the realm of the
fine arts. Moreover, Marquilla cigarrera cubana challenges racism on the island by
placing the naked body of a Black man, Arrechea, in the centre of the image, and by
showing him as both artist and smoker, two roles from which Afro-Cubans were
historically excluded.18 The work is a statement of Los Carpinteros’ determination
to climb right to the top of both the social ladder and the art world, despite the
local difficulties in making art.
Los Carpinteros presented Interior Habanero as their graduation project in
1995. After seeing the interest of international collectors in contemporary Cuban

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art at the Fifth Havana Biennial first-hand, the group added a performance to
the work that spoke to the recent phenomenon of the Cuban art market. When
presenting the series to the thesis committee, Arrechea read aloud the letter of
a Miami-based collector who was interested in acquiring Interior Habanero. In
fact, Los Carpinteros had written the letter themselves but they did not reveal
this until the hoax had spread through the media. This act illustrated how the
possibility of earning a living in dollars fostered a relationship between Cuban
artists and wealthy Cuban exiles.19 The letter pointed to the paradox of how the
increasing social differences in contemporary Cuba not only replicated those of
the pre-revolutionary past, but also strengthened the link between islander and
mainlander Cubans, one of the revolution’s greatest enemies. Moreover, the fact
that the action was also titled Interior Habanero called attention to the fetishization
of the historical image of Cuba during the Special Period, which coincided with
the renewed interest in the biennial of members of the social class whose once-
opulent Cuban lifestyle was being addressed by the artists.
The title Interior Habanero also reveals how the domestic space became a
metaphor for, and a refuge from, a feeling of disappointment with the public sphere
in Special Period Cuban art. The use of stolen wood and small canvases in these
works calls attention to the lack of available art supplies, and the recuperation of
carpentry techniques that had long fallen into disuse, but that were partly being
recuperated for the restoration of Old Havana, questions traditional media-based
distinctions between craft and fine art, while also challenging the racial politics
of job distribution on the island. Finally, the flamboyant yet academic style of the
series was intended to be a provocation, although as scholar Rachel Weiss has
argued, it might also partly reflect many Cuban artists’ struggle then to ‘contend
with an artistic legacy of political critique, a rising art market and revolutionary
exhaustion’.20 In relation to this, Marco Castillo explains that they made ‘pieces
that appeared conservative’ because they ‘would be aggressive in that socialist
climate’.21
The work of Gabinete Ordo Amoris also draws from Cuban domestic design,
although the group found inspiration in the do-it-yourself practices of the
Special Period, rather than in 1950s mansion furniture. Gabinete Ordo Amoris
was founded in 1994 by Ernesto Oroza and Diango Hernández, two students at
the Institute of Design of Havana (ISDI). Later in the same year, designers and
artists Juan Bernal and Abel Francis Acea joined them.22 The first solo show of
Gabinete Ordo Amoris was the two-part exhibition Agua con Azúcar (Sugar
Water) and La Muestra Provisional (The Provisional Show) organized by the
Ludwig Foundation,23 and held simultaneously at the Centro de Desarollo de las
Artes Visuales in Havana between January and February 1996.24 Agua con Azúcar
included a collection of vernacular design objects gathered by the artists in Havana,
while La Muestra Provisional presented a series of sculptures and installations
based on the Cuban culture of bricolage and carried out by the collective. This

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was the first time that an exhibition by Gabinete Ordo Amoris included both
found objects and objects they crafted that were not considered furniture or
artworks but rather, in their own words, ‘design solutions that carry the aesthetic
language of provisionality’.25 The double project Agua con Azúcar and La Muestra
Provisional was presented as a reflection and open debate on the state of design
in Cuba, and the exhibitions were accompanied by lectures and panels. The wall
label at the entrance of the exhibition explained the provisional character of the
objects displayed in the galleries: ‘Working as archaeologists of the contemporary
quotidian … we wish to set order in a new form of Cuban visuality, which is
based on the study of “provisionality” as an aesthetic and ethical category that we
think should be recognized as part of our culture.’26 Thus, while bringing to mind
Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s discussion of ‘adhocism’ in their efforts to give
experimentation and spontaneity the weight of architectural theory, Gabinete
Ordo Amoris did not consider their objects of study as the offspring of individual
choice and aesthetic pluralism, but rather as the inevitable response to privation.27
Most of the objects gathered by Gabinete Ordo Amoris in the exhibition section
Agua con Azúcar were fabricated in Havana and bought on the city’s black market
in 1995. These creations were either made with a material that had been returned to
its malleable state, reassembled from different parts, or repurposed; and although
craft techniques were sometimes used in their production, people generally worked
through the complexities of operating borrowed or stolen industrial machinery in
a home setting.28 Many objects were based on standard Soviet objects, but many
also included parts from American goods accumulated since the beginning of the
revolution, as well as ‘new’ items to the island, such as beer cans and Monoblock
chairs, that had appeared with the recent development of tourism. Moreover, in
the words of Ernesto Oroza, these popular creations followed the same pattern
because of the ‘standardized’ material culture, the ‘standardized’ poverty, and
the ‘standardized’ education on the island, while each of them was also unique
because of the singularity of its creation.29 Following Oroza, these processes of
active accumulation, recycling, reassembling and repurposing not only resisted
the temporality of the capitalist object through ingenuity, but they also attacked
the authority of the ‘original’ item by disobeying its unity and its sole function, and
by seeing instead the potential of its bits and pieces.30
The objects in Agua con Azúcar included recycled flip-flops, cutlery, dishes,
hair accessories and toys, shaped from molten plastic which displayed decorative
colour swirls from original casts as reminders of the previous life of the object.
A mouse trap built from carefully selected and cut-out pieces of a Lagarto beer
can attached to a chunk of wood demonstrates how these objects searched for
beauty in their design in spite of also satisfying urgent necessities. A champagne
glass made from an eroded glass flask – an attempt at luxury when no champagne
could be found on the island – indicates that desire could operate within
necessity and yet exist outside the logic of capitalism by re-signifying the relation

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between producer and consumer. A photograph of a three-section Russian Lada

automobile constructed by merging several separate cars together points to the
audacious inventiveness and the technical mastery of these creations. This image
was printed in one of the first multi-page photocopiers in Cuba; a procedure that
mirrored the fragmented constitution of the Lada.
La Muestra Provisional, the other part of the two-sided exhibition, was installed
across from the Agua con Azúcar gallery.31 This exhibition was a critical response
to the new object-archetypes engendered by Cuban vernacular design, and
it emphasized that there is not a single truth to an object. While some works
amounted to an ironic take on how scarcity could push people to ridiculous –
sometimes even violent – limits in order to survive, most of the pieces responded
to the group’s admiration of the ingenuity of Cuban bricolage, both from a
technological and a design-oriented perspective. Sofá Provisional (Provisional
Sofa) (Figure 10.2, Plate 13) features a group of random objects often used as
temporary seats while waiting in line – unfortunately a typical situation in Cuba –
joined under the phantom silhouette of a pencil-drawn couch. A blazer on a
hanger suspended above a sack of sugar seemed to be an improvised solution for
a closet, and was also a play on words since blazer, bag and the words ‘I extract’
are all expressed by the word saco in Spanish. Moreover, the blazer, an emblem of
bureaucracy and business, appears to be supported by the sack of sugar, almost
as if it were a statue on a pedestal, or a mannequin sustained by the labour of
sugar harvesting. A large banner taken from a gas station and included in the

FIGURE 10.2 Gabinete Ordo Amoris, Sofá provisional, 1995. Courtesy: Ernesto Oroza.

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exhibition reads Hay aire (There Is Air). At first sight, this decontextualized sign
for pumping up tires looks like an advertisement for relief: at least there is air
to breath. However, when the viewer continues reading, the fine print reveals a
20-cent charge.
As a large-scale installation, the quasi-encyclopaedic collection of Cuban
vernacular design, and the creations by Gabinete Ordo Amoris were presented
as two wings of a Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities; as rarities waiting
to be classified, testimonies of the charged, charted and defamiliarized micro-
economies of Special Period Cuba. The two-part exhibition could be considered
an artwork itself; it challenged the limits of the traditional ‘white cube’ gallery by
blurring not only the boundaries between fine arts, design and crafts, but perhaps
more importantly, between official and non-official Cuban visual culture. Thus,
the collective’s desire to incorporate handmade vernacular objects into the history
of Cuban graphic and industrial design was twofold: first, it was a sincere tribute
to the inventiveness of these creations, and second, it was also a sardonic comment
on how pandemic scarcity had to be recognized as a defining condition of the
island’s recent past and present. By reminding the viewer that the bricoleur speaks
both through things and with things, their pieces also illuminate new relations
between art and the everyday in Cuba. Finally, Agua con Azúcar and La Muestra
Provisional revealed the fraught ethos in Cuban inventive self-made design: though
born out of necessity, it was also an impulse for creative freedom and autonomy.
As the decade was drawing to a close, Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica’s
1999 collective performance La Época (The Epoch), exemplified the evolution of
bricolage in art from Special Period Cuba, and reveals the changes in the social,
economic and political position of the artists over the decade. Between 1998 and
2002, Rodriguez took up his teaching workshop once again, this time under the
acronym DUPP. Together with a number of students, he organized a two-day
action at La Época, a mid-1950s modern style building located on Calle Neptuno,
Centro Habana area’s main artery, and one of the city’s few shopping malls with
dollar-only stores selling imported goods.32
The action was composed of a series of performances and installations scattered
among the articles for sale on the mall’s ground and first floors. The goal of La
Época was to highlight the ambivalent role of the artists, both as creators and as
retailers, and of the people, both as audience and as consumers. Moreover, La
Época pointed to the increasing market value of Cuban art, while the futile and
ephemeral nature of the action allowed the work to remain outside of the market
logic. Furthermore, the ‘poor’ aesthetics present in most students’ pieces, using
found objects from the mall such as white plastic hangers and recycled nylon
shopping bags, was in dialogue with Cuban do-it-yourself material culture, yet
the elements of most works, such as the hangers and shopping bags were ‘new’
items to the island, and not accessible for many Cuban families. Thus, the artwork
called attention to the disparities in wealth between the Cubans at the end of

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the decade: it illustrated the violence of such social differences with seemingly
absurd actions that wasted expensive goods in installations that resonated with the
provisionality and improvisation of Cuban vernacular inventions. Finally, the title
La Época was another reference to the changes that occurred over the course of the
1990s on the island, and an invitation to reflect on how Special Period economic
measures had left a deep impact on the people, the city and the arts in Cuba.
Both of the works by Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica/DUPP – La Casa
Nacional, 1989, and La Época, 1999 – were collective actions that make use of
non-traditional art media and techniques to interact with audiences outside of
formal gallery spaces. However, they were almost opposite in their procedures
and, more importantly, in their intentions. These differences exemplify changes
over a decade in the Cuban art world brought about by economic measures that
also deeply affected the social organization of the island. In La Casa Nacional, there
was only one collective action in which all students participated, while in La Época
each artist had his or her own individual project. In the first work, the relation
between the artists and the building’s residents was based on verbal agreements
and on the free interchange of knowledge, its purpose to satisfy the necessity of
restoring the old. In the second work, however, the use of a shopping mall as the
setting for the action, turned the viewers into consumers, making their relation to
the works seem like potential commercial transactions. In turn, it presented the
artworks as fetish commodities; as products that are only desired for their exchange
value. The location of the group’s actions shifted from the private domestic space
of the home to the public space of the store; from the realm of socialism and the
Revolution Defence Committee, to a space symbolic of capitalism, the shopping
mall. The differences between the two projects emphasize the dramatic transitions
from the conditions before and after Special Period Cuba.
If the two actions by Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica illustrate the changes
that took place in Cuba from the beginning to the end of the 1990s, Los Carpinteros’
Havana Interior, and Gabinete Ordo Amoris’ Agua con Azúcar and La Muestra
Provisional exemplify the mid-decade turmoil. Indeed, these works belong to the
years when most economic and social reforms to temper the effects of the financial
crisis were implemented: the introduction of dual currency, allowing private
initiatives, the development of tourism and the restoration of Old Havana. While
both artist collectives resorted to forms of canibaleo, taking the pieces of one
device to use them in another,33 their works responded to this changing climate
through different engagements with Cuban design. Los Carpinteros’ work evokes
the luxurious lives of 1950s American and Cuban elites on the island, through the
recuperation of fine cabinetwork traditions. In contrast, Gabinete Ordo Amoris’
two-wing installation presents an aesthetic of the poor through provisional objects
and Soviet standardized goods that were transformed out of necessity using
improvised domestic technologies. Further still, Los Carpinteros’ Havana Interior
consists of non-functional furniture replicas, while Gabinete Ordo Amoris’ double

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exhibition is composed of functional original items.34 Despite these differences,

both Los Carpinteros’ and Gabinete Ordo Amoris’ projects demonstrate the
artists’ concern with the effects of Special Period on Cuban material culture, and
their engagement with bricolage practices.
Indeed, Cuban art in the 1990s was shaped by material scarcity, the
transforming cityscape of Havana and by the change in the social status of the
artist. Many Cuban artists experimented with aspects of craft in their work from
this decade because the functionality, the collective authorship and the relation
to vernacular traditions allowed them to reflect on the direction of Cuban arts
from an almost outsider position. On the one hand, the return to the quotidian
and domestic sphere meant a detachment from the island’s pervasive rhetoric
on the collective ethos, while on the other hand, it also represented a search for
answers at the heart of society and the revolutionary project. The artists’ use of
bricolage as a means to reflect on material culture and artistic practice in Cuba
evolved throughout the 1990s in relation to the changes brought to the island
by the Special Period reform package. In sum, through their engagement with
bricolage practices, these artists reflected on the need, the purpose and the role of
art in pre-turn-of-the-century Cuba.

Notes
1 Elzbieta Sklodowska summarizes reporter Lydia Chávez’s memories of the Cuban
capital as they appear in Chávez’s book, Capitalism, God, and a Good Cigar
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) as follows: ‘a post-apocalyptic city, where
waste itself became a rare commodity’. Chávez cited in Skolodowska, ‘Reinventing
the Wheel: The Art of Survival in Post-Soviet Cuba’, Figure in the Carpet, vol. 11, no.
3 (November 2012): 4. Kevin Power refers to the pervasive joke in Cuba then which
went ‘little, less, nothing, nobody’ (original in Spanish: ‘poco, muy poco, nada, nadie’).
Kevin Power, ‘Cuba: One Story After Another’, in While Cuba Waits: Art from the
Nineties, ed. Kevin Power (Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1999), 41.
2 Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 132.
3 Julia E. Sweig, Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 126. The 1963 US embargo was reinforced in October 1992 by the
Cuban Democracy Act sponsored by Robert Torricelli – which prohibited foreign-
based subsidiaries of US Companies from trading with Cuba, travel to Cuba by
US Citizens, and family remittances to Cuba – and by the 1996 Cuban Liberty and
Democracy Solidarity Act (known as the Helms–Burton Act) which extended the
territorial application of the embargo. The Helms–Burton Act imposed further
penalties on foreign companies doing business in Cuba, and allowed US citizens
to sue foreign investors who use American-owned property seized by the Cuban
government. Mick Hillyard and Vaughne Miller, ‘Cuba and the Helms-Burton Act’,
House of Commons Library Research Papers, vol. 98, no. 114 (2000): 3.

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4 The term ‘Special Period in Time of Peace’ borrows from the military jargon ‘Special
Period in Time of War’. The Communist Party first used this designation for a series
of austerity measures in Cuba en el mes on 27 August 1990. On 28 September 1990,
in a speech to the Committees of Defense of the Revolution, Fidel Castro announced
the inevitability of the Special Period: ‘Without doubt we are entering the Special
Period. It is almost unavoidable that we will have to experience that special period in
a time of peace.’ There was no official end to the Special Period, and many argue that
it is still ongoing. See Ariana Hernádez-Reguant, Cuba in the Special Period: Culture
and Ideology in the 1990s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 17–18. In contrast
with the term ‘Special Period in Time of Peace’, and in reference to both the
crumbling aspect of Havana and the massive exodus of people post-1989, many
artists dwelt on the idea of a post-war scenario in their work then, most notably
Tania Bruguera in her 1993–94 project Memoria de la Postguerra (Postwar Memory).
5 Note that in this context, recycling refers to the act of returning an object to its
original compound, that is, melting plastic; it does not necessarily imply having an
environmentalist conscience.
6 Unanimously declared a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO in 1982, by 1993
the Decree Law 143 declared the city nucleus of Havana (known as Old Havana)
a Conservation Priority Zone, and granted external funding for its restoration.
The restoration area encompassed 214 square kilometers with 3,370 buildings
ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, including 551 architectural
monuments of exceptional value, and a population of 66,742 people living in
22,623 homes. See Patricia Rodríguez Aloma, ‘La Rehabilitación Integral de La
Habana Vieja: Una Responsabilidad de la Nación’, in Patrimonio Cultural y Turístico
Cuadernos 19-Políticas Públicas y Turismo Cultural en América Latina: Siglo XXI
(Mexico City: CONACULTA, 2011), 132.
7 According to historian Antoni Kapcia, ‘the impact on skills has been enormous,
the focus on artisan rather than artistic activity generating a network of training
establishments to rival ISA [the Graduate Institute of Arts] in the arts … Artisan
skills have been developed more broadly … and with greater opportunity for
prestige, purpose, and a sense of belonging.’ Antoni Kapcia, Havana: The Making of
Cuban Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 185.
8 Bricolage was first theorized in 1962 by Lévi-Strauss in his book The Savage Mind.
See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1968). Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman.
9 With the founding of the San Alejandro Academy in the early nineteenth century,
a clear division was drawn between artist and artisan in Cuba. Cubans of African
descent were not allowed to enter the academy for decades, and craft and manual
trade teaching was rejected at San Alejandro for not being considered appropriate for
the Academy’s well-off Caucasian students.
10 The Instituto Superior de Arte, known by its acronym ISA, is the National Graduate
Institute of Art. Located in Havana, it was founded in 1976.
11 Chema González, ‘Entrevista a René Francisco’, 13 August 2008. http://
blogcentroguerrero.org/2008/08/entrevista-a-ren-francisco/ (accessed 10 June 2015)
12 La Casa Nacional exhibition brochure, January 1989.
13 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988). Translated by Steven Rendall.

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14 The collective Los Carpinteros was founded in 1991 in Havana by Marco Antonio
Castillo Valdes, Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez, and Alexandre Arrechea. Arrechea
was part of the group until 2003, which dissolved in 2018.
15 Los Carpinteros explain the origin of their name in Gudrun Ankele, Daniela Zyman,
Francesca von Habsburg and Paulo Herkenhoff, Los Carpinteros: Handwork –
Constructing the World (Köln: König, 2010), 16–17.
16 Janet Batet, ‘Los Carpinteros: Mecánica Popular’, Arte Cubano, no. 2 (1998), 68.
Original in Spanish: ‘las ideas de gremio y de artesanía implícitas en su obra implican
también un revisión de conceptos tales como participación y democracia.’ All
translations by the author unless otherwise noted.
17 Original in Spanish: ‘Señor, lo hemos perdido todo al juego.’ ‘¿Todo?’ ‘Todo menos una
cosa.’ ‘¿Cuál?’ ‘Las ganas de volver a jugar.’
18 For an extended discussion of race in Los Carpinteros’ early works, see Beth
Tamar Rosenblum, ‘From Special Period Aesthetics to Global Relevance in Cuban
Art: Tania Bruguera, Carlos Garaicoa, and Los Carpinteros’ (PhD diss., University of
California, 2013).
19 In an effort to make their guild economically more profitable, in 1993, artists, among
few other sectors, were granted the permission to be freelance and self-employed,
and to earn a living in US dollars. See Dominick Salvatore, ed., The Dollarization
Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
20 Rachel Weiss, ‘Between the Material World and the Ghosts of Dreams: An Argument
about Craft in Los Carpinteros’, Journal of Modern Craft, vol. 1, no. 2 (July 2008): 255.
21 Ankele, Herkenhoff and Zyman, Handwork, 27.
22 The group lasted until 2003, but since 1996 only Diango Hernández and Abel Francis
Acea were active members of the collective. The original name of the group was
Gabinete de Diseño Ordo Amoris, as a purposeful way to distinguish their work
and their aspirations from those of fine artists. The term ‘cabinet’ evoked the type
of think-tank, laboratory-like experience that the group wanted to develop and
according to which all ideas were shared with certain tasks individually assigned,
while it also brought to mind a body of high-ranking state officials. The Latin
words ordo amoris (the ordering of love) were a direct reference to Saint Francis’s
philosophy about the harmonious relation between all elements of nature.
23 The Ludwig Foundation is a private foundation dedicated to contemporary Cuban art
headquartered in Havana. Its founder, Peter Ludwig, was a Belgian chocolatier and
one of the main international collectors of Cuban art since the 1980s.
24 The show traveled in September of the same year to the Museum of Contemporary
Art and Design in San José, Costa Rica, as a combined show titled Evento Vernacular
Design and curated by Gerardo Mosquera.
25 Original in Spanish: ‘soluciones de diseño que portan el lenguaje estético de la
provisionalidad.’ As stated in the wall label of the exhibition.
26 Original wall label text in Spanish: Criterios de curaduría muestras Agua con Azúcar y
La Muestra Provisional: se pretende concluir de forma provisional, ya que forman parte
de una investigación todavía en desarrollo, acerca del ordenamiento de una “nueva
visualidad” cubana, investigación que se sustenta en el estudio de la provisionalidad
como la categoría que genera no sólo una estética sino también una ética, y que el
Gabinete de Diseño Ordo Amoris decide validar por su importancia para nuestra

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cultura y con el conocimiento que ante el cambio de las circunstancias desaparecerá.

Por esta razón es que utiliza procesos museográficos referidos a la arqueología, sólo que
en este caso pretende ser una arqueología de la cotidianeidad desde el presente, para a
través de esta perspectiva comenzar a observar, en calidad de objet trouvé, los objetos
que no solamente consumimos sino también los que muchas veces creamos.
27 See Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).
28 Ernesto Oroza explains his understanding of the concepts of reparation,
refunctionalization and reinvention in his blog. See Ernesto Oroza, ‘Desobediencia
tecnológica. De la revolución al revolico’, last modified 6 June 2012, http://www.
ernestooroza.com/?s=refuncionalizacion&searchsubmit= (accessed 24 January
2014). The artist has further reflected on the courage of the people to face complex
technology, and to disrespect the object’s authority, through the concept of
‘technological disobedience’. See: Manuel Cullen and Ernesto Oroza, ‘Revolución de
la Desobediencia’, Hecho en Buenos Aires, vol. 14, no. 161 (December 2013): 9.
29 See Oroza, ‘Desobediencia tecnológica’.
30 See Ernesto Oroza, ‘Réactions en chaîne: Interview with Ernesto Oroza by Baptiste
Menu’, last modified 2011, http://www.ernestooroza.com/tag/nececity/ (accessed 1
April 2019).
31 Substantial information on this double-sided exhibition has been provided by
Ernesto Oroza, to whom the author is very indebted. Additional material has been
provided by the Ludwig Foundation, Diango Hernández, and Francis Acea, to whom
the author also expresses her gratitude.
32 Among the participants were Yunior Mariño, Ruslán Torres, Mayimbe, José Miguel
Díaz, Wilfredo Prieto, Beverly Mojena, Juan Rivero, Iván Capote, Glenda León and
Inti Hernández.
33 In Cuba, the term ‘canibaleo’ often refers to the stealing of parts of a vehicle to use
as spare parts in another or to sell. By extension, the term applies to getting hold of
something on the quiet.
34 Sklodowska compares Los Carpinteros’ and Gabinete Ordo Amoris’ works in
terms of objetos imposibles (impossible objects) and objetos de necesidad (objects of
necessity), respectively. Elzbieta Sklodowska, Invento, luego resisto: El Período Especial
en Cuba como experiencia y metáfora (1990–2015) (Santiago de Chile: Editorial
Cuarto Propio, 2016), 405.

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11 THINGS NEEDED MADE

Nasrin Himada

Khiam (2000–2007) is a documentary film by Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas

and Khalil Joreige that features on-camera interviews with political prisoners who
were released from Khiam, the infamous detention camp in South Lebanon.
The film documents and archives the experiences of six prisoners inside a
detention camp, alongside the story of their objects. The film’s strength is the
narrative it develops between the prisoners and the things they made while inside.
The filmmakers focus on this relation between subject and object. Through the
documentary form, a narrative is produced that honours the prisoners’ work –
they made a lot of things with little resources, risking their lives when gathering
material, and in turn, the things made generated new ways of staying alive. As
a viewer and writer, watching this film compels me to think about the relation
between materiality and ethics, form and affect – specifically, in relation to how
images tell stories, how they communicate information.
Khiam engages with the material process of making objects, and this focus on
craft drives the story of the six former prisoners. The film’s focus on the handmade
pushes me to question how I want to be with these images of crafted objects, and
reminds me of what it is about affect that makes this encounter of writing about
art and craft genuinely insightful.
In Khiam, I am compelled to ask: How is the making of objects a poetics, a
poetics that forms life? Poet and theorist Fred Moten writes: ‘Poetry investigates
new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret. Poetry
enacts and tells the open secret. Getting together and doing stuff is a technical
term that means X. Something going on at the sight and sound center of sweet
political form.’1 While Moten writes these lines specifically for the practice of
poetry, I want to extend on his thoughts to include the practice of craft as it is
documented in Khiam. Inside this prison, people got together and did stuff in the
open, and in secret. They gathered material, in secret, to make together in order to
have what they needed; the making of things emerged out of urgency, poetry in
the form of object.2
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To take Moten’s thought of ‘sweet political form’ further, while thinking

alongside this film, and writing alongside the testimonies of the detainees, I’d like
to draw on the scholarly work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, in particular, her concept
of the ‘poethical’. As da Silva writes: ‘The intention is in itself ethical. Poiesis –
the ability to make the world and to make the world anew, to create – guided by
the ethical intention.’ In Khiam, the prison, the political form of the handmade
object clearly defines a relation that is contingent upon context. The intention, she
continues, ‘is to obliterate anything and everything that is deployed to justify (to
render both morally acceptable and legal) colonial/racial violence’.3 The prisoners’
intention is to create to survive, and to challenge, question and resist the repressive
powers of the prison system and culture. The prisoner’s intention is to obliterate,
in a mere instant and through processes of making, the effect of confinement. The
poethics of Khiam in thought and in practice, conjoins art and life, object and
subject. They are rendered inseparable here: craft as survival.
The documentary follows a traditional talking-heads format. The camera is
set up as a close-up that tightly frames the prisoner’s head and upper body. Each
sits on a high chair, the background just a white wall. The viewer is not privy
to the interviewer’s questions. The editing is composed of quick cuts with each
frame giving space to each prisoner who responds to the same question. They are
each telling their story; but the composition of the mise en scène subtly builds
on an overarching narrative of what occurred inside by using key moments that
emerge from each prisoner’s experience. The editing divides the film into parts
that lead up to the story of the objects. In this way, the film begins by introducing
each prisoner and how they got detained, and takes viewers through to life inside
prison as it unfolds in the different spaces of interrogation, solitary confinement
and the general population cell. Khiam creates a narrative, a story about prisoners
who had to make things inside prison, the things they made were made in order to
survive, to live through it all, to keep busy, to work, to write, to think, to experience
love, solidarity, connection and intimacy in a place that tried not to let them do
any of these things. Their story of survival is told through the process of making
objects: the time it took to make them, the resources they needed to salvage,
and the techniques and tools they used. The objects are evoked in great detail to
contextualize the experience of each prisoner. The objects are given life again, and
memorialized, through the stories told, and the images made here, in Khiam.
The prisoners are Rajaé Abou Hamaïn, Kifah Afifé, Sonia Baydoun, Soha
Béchara, Afif Hammoud, Neeman Nasrallah who were all detained between
the years of 1988–1998. Soha spent the longest inside Khiam, ten years, six of
which were in solitary confinement. All were part of the resistance movement in
South Lebanon that protested Israel’s military occupation. During the 1982 Israeli
invasion and occupation of South Lebanon, as Soha explains on camera, there was
a rumour spreading about a detention camp called Ansar, which was infamous for
torturing people with electricity and whips. In 1985, when Israel withdrew from

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Sidon and Tyre, in South Lebanon, they closed Ansar and the army relegated their
presence to the border, where a security zone was set up. There, a new camp called
‘Khiam’ was built, which quickly became notorious for its horrendous conditions.
And as Afif, another prisoner, describes to the camera, Khiam was known to be
‘as something mysterious, sombre, with lots more torture. There was a lot of talk
about it but it can only become clear if you’ve been inside Khiam’. Kifah, however,
had never heard of this infamous detention camp before. When she entered it for
the first time, she was shocked to learn that it was controlled by Israel.
As spectators, we learn that upon arrival each prisoner was blindfolded, with
a sack put over their head, and immediately taken to see an investigation officer.
Each prisoner was assigned a number and could no longer use their name. As
spectators, we learn that no sentence was ever given, so no prisoner ever knew
when or how they were going to get out. Some stayed for ten, fifteen years, other
stayed for more than twenty. We learn that the torture began right away. ‘Because
I refused to talk’, Sonia tells the camera, ‘I was whipped, made to remain kneeling,
drenched in water, obliged to remain outside, to kneel in the toilets, they would
come to piss near me, to humiliate me. Often, the man in charge would kick me
and say: “Now, spill it.” ’ Neeman, a male prisoner who would get hit with a barbed
wire, said that, ‘where the spikes fall, they perforate the skin, you bleed. They use
electricity too or they pour cold or hot water on you, the skin gets cracked.’ But,
Soha tells us, that worse than all this was the dark cell: ‘I had heard about it, but
didn’t know it yet. It’s like a tomb. It reminds you of the solitude of a tomb, of death.’
The dark cell was 80 centimetres square. We learn from Rajaé that the longest a
man stayed in there was fifty-two days.
The filmmakers allow each interviewee to answer the questions in detail, but
don’t linger on each one for long. The editing technique is used to allow each
person to contribute to the telling of the story of Khiam. The filmmakers are
constructing the story using each prisoner’s response, as they cut, and edit, and
cut again, to form a collective oral telling of the story, rather than an individual
one. As spectators, we get to hear about each person’s experience, but also get a
sense of their collective camaraderie and kinship through the testimony, in having
survived such a place. This editing technique works most powerfully when each
edit cuts to each prisoner, as they describe the different techniques and methods
used to make each object. It culminates in the effect of suspense as the audience
waits to hear how each object was made in such a clandestine way, inside prison
and under torture.
After having explained how they ended up in Khiam, and the beginnings of
imprisonment and torture, the next part of the film delves into their interrogation
sessions, then enduring solitary, boredom in the general cell block, and the need
to start doing things besides just talking or passing the time.
All six prisoners decided that to survive, they need to figure out how to live
inside, under such extreme conditions, and feel useful. In the film, there is a

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part about feeling out time, thinking through time and passing time. In one
scene, Rajaé says: ‘Okay, we’re through with talking, what do we do now? You
can count eight or ten years of your life in one week. And repetition breeds
boredom.’ And in the next scene, a cut, Soha elaborates on this point, and
says: ‘How can one work on themselves to evolve within four walls? On the
second day, I said: “Anything that comes into the cell must be put to use.” ’ Kifah
continues, in the next scene, another cut: ‘Everything was forbidden in the camp.
Talking through the windows to the girls was forbidden, manual work, means
of amusement too. Everything was forbidden.’ Afif continues: ‘No needle, no
comb, no pencil, no paper. Nothing. These elementary things that enable one to
live, to get along, not to forget, such as a pencil, don’t exist. They say necessity is
the mother of invention … the fight begins within yourself: the needle must be
created, it’s needed.’

The needle
Once inside the detention camp, as viewers we learn, each prisoner is immediately
given trousers and a shirt, but without attending to anyone’s measurements. As
Neeman explains, ‘At the outset, the needle is to fix the clothes. You’re given
trousers and a shirt, the trousers may have belonged to a man who’s 100 kilos
when you weigh 50.’
The men first tested out an orange stem: ‘We peeled it, dried it, rubbed it
against the wall, pierced the top, and managed to get a thread in’, Afif explains.
Later, they found pieces of plastic from a Halweh box, that once contained a
popular Middle Eastern sweet. Whereas Neeman describes another use: ‘We
broke them into small bits, rubbed them against the wall to thin down to half
a centimetre. We sewed with that.’ There were many trials and errors before
perfecting a functional needle that didn’t ruin clothing. They used tie-twists from
a bread bag. In Soha’s block they made needles from the tooth of a comb and used
screws from Scholl slippers to make the hole. Finally, in the men’s cell, they got
a hold of cement wire. Neeman explains, ‘We managed to obtain cement wire in
small bits. We’d get a small piece, hold it at both ends and twist it. We didn’t fold
it into two, we kept it straight then twisted it. It became harder.’ Then a cut to
Soha, explaining her process: ‘I had to make a hole in that piece of metal, which
was ten millimetres. But how? The idea was to flatten it with my teeth.’ Then
another cut, Neeman continues, ‘We got two stones from a man outside serving
hard labour. He smuggled in two stones that large [size of hand], and I used them
to hammer the cement wire between the two stones. It becomes so thin you can
put a nail through it.’ The narrative flows, and as viewers we’re on edge, Soha
continues, ‘We noticed one of the women wearing Scholl slippers, and there are
screws in those Scholl. We could perhaps try to make a hole in the metal screw.’

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FIGURE 11.1 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Objects of Khiam, 2000. Courtesy: the
artists. Photo: Alfredo Rubio, Two Suns in a Sunset at the Sharjah Art Foundation, 2016

Next, Neeman goes on to describe his process of perfecting a functional needle,

‘We started turning left and right. Finally, by turning, the nail pierced the iron. It
took a lot of time, but necessity goaded us on. Finally, I made a hole in the first
one. The first one is always difficult, the second easier.’ Suddenly, the camera cuts
to a close-up of Neeman’s face, and he says, ‘I made 300 needles. That’s a lot!’
And then, another cut to Soha: ‘At last, we had an efficient needle, and used it for
everything. To mend jeans, to sew, for our handicrafts’ (Figure 11.1, Plate 14).
Neeman continues, ‘The guard saw it, the Israeli commander saw it, all the
investigators saw it, they wouldn’t believe it was handmade, they wanted to know
how it had been done. They got 20 people out of their cells, tortured them for
information. Luckily, I’d been very discreet.’

Thread and beads

The next part of the film focuses on what the prisoners were then able to do with
a needle, besides mending clothing. And even with a needle, they still needed
thread. As Afif tells it, ‘We used undershirts and socks. If someone had socks
we would unravel them, pull a thread. In the beginning, every time we pulled
on thread, we’d get a bunch tangled up. We’d cut them, they were that short. We
improved with time, we’d pull one thread from the toe up to the ankle, and we’d pull
one or two threads unbroken.’ Then a cut to Soha, explaining that someone had

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mentioned a string of beads made of olive pits from the days of the other torture
camp, Ansar. Neeman then says, ‘I didn’t know you could make beads out of olive
stones. I grabbed an olive stone and rubbed it on the wall to shape it like a heart. It
was too small, it wouldn’t work. I took another olive stone, rubbed it at both ends,
it got holes.’ Then another cut to a headshot of Soha, ‘That’s where artistry comes
in: the way I rub it, sharpen it, make it even smaller.’ Kifah continues, ‘We rubbed
the stones until our fingers bled. They were so hard.’ Then Neeman says, ‘I pulled a
thread from the blanket, threaded the olive stones, made a string of beads. I used
to play with it, count the days.’ Soha continues the story, ‘The quantities increased,
the blanket shrank, but it was no problem, it symbolized our will to last out in this
camp.’ A cut to Kifah, she says, ‘We had coloured towels, we’d pull threads out and
wind them around the olive stones to decorate them.’ Each prisoner describes how
valuable the actual process was to keep their spirits alive, and what other forms of
life the object itself enabled. The relation between process and object here, as the
prisoners describe it, constituted a way of life that kept harmful situations at bay. As
Neeman says on camera, ‘I found out that work is best to last out, because I didn’t
want to get involved in political discussions.’ Furthermore, as Soha articulates,
beyond function, the process of making is also engaged in skilled craft, in artistry.
The artistic process is thought of in relation to the experiential, the sensible as the
methodology for an aesthetic, that emerges out of duration, endurance, felt time
(Figure 11.12).

FIGURE 11.2 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Objects of Khiam, 2000. Courtesy: the
artists. Photo: Alfredo Rubio, Two Suns in a Sunset at the Sharjah Art Foundation, 2016

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The pencil
This section of the film is the most moving. There is a cut to Soha, who expresses
the most acute need, ‘We have spoken of the needle, the tooth brush, … there
are many other things, but the most important was the pencil.’ In this section,
as viewers, we learn of how important the pencil is as an instrument for many
occasions. As Sonia puts it, ‘There was an illiterate girl with us. She would have
liked to study, but her parents didn’t send her to school. We had an iron bar door.
With a bar of soap – we were given one every 15 days – we wrote the alphabet, the
letters on the door. She learnt them, and she memorized it. Then words and more
words till she could write.’ The camera cuts to Soha, ‘We felt we needed a more
efficient pencil, more rapid, practical.’ Afif chimes in, ‘We found a small battery. In
it, there is a kind of coal piece we used for writing … We would [also] wet cigarette
ash and shape the orange stem as a pencil.’ Neeman says, ‘Rice bags are sealed
with a small piece of lead, we used it to write on bits of cloth or floor tiles. We
obviously obtained all that secretly.’ The gathering of material is revealed in this
scene as key to any successful production, and as viewers, we find that it was always
a clandestine act. As Afif explains, ‘I may need this I bring it, I hide it. A small
metal piece, part of a zipper, staples from cartons … may prove useful someday.
Finally, we had a kind of small stock.’ Once again, many different materials, tools
and objects were used to test out what would make the perfect pencil, one that
is practical, functional and long-lasting. Soha says, ‘Later, we found out it was
more convenient to use the aluminum foil wrappers of Picon cheese. They were
really effective. Even if you used tiny characters, you could still read them. The
paper was small, but could take many sentences.’ Then the camera cuts to Sonia,
‘She rolled very tightly the aluminum foil from the cheese box, giving it a pointed
shape. She got the cardboard out of the box and made as if writing. As she was
scribbling, letters appeared suddenly. She went crazy with joy. The writing was
very fine, better than with a pencil. She started shouting: “Come here, and see how
this writes.” She had invented something.’

Conclusion
As a writer, I have felt a need to tread lightly when engaging with the subject matter
of torture, especially in writing and thinking alongside Khiam, when my focus is
on objects made by prisoners for survival. The practice of writing with a film and
not about it allows me to think about the ethical implications of engagement and
spectatorship. In this case, I am not only engaging with the artists’ work, but with
the political prisoners’ testimonies of making that are documented and shown on
screen. I want to make visible, in words, the effects of perceiving and receiving
information while listening to and honouring the prisoners’ stories as they retell

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their experiences of having been tortured, giving accounts of daily routines of

violence inside. How does responding to this film influence my ability to act, think
and make? How does this practice affect my own craft and expand the definition
of craft itself? How do we as writers and spectators engage with experiences of
violence – and in particular, of torture – that are not our own, as they are made
visible through contemporary art and craft works?
My aim is not to treat Khiam as a film, a document to be analysed, but as a work
that encourages the practice of writing alongside: to write with the content of the
film, with what the image and objects are doing. I want to be honest and forthright
about my decision to write, my intention is to work from da Silva’s notion that ‘art
must be thought of as poethical, with the obvious emphasis on the ethical, … on
one intention – the poet’s (as creator, maker, composer), on the principles guiding
it, on whether or not they attend to what I call founding violence (past and present
expropriation of lands and labour) that produces/is State-Capital.’4 What happens
when an artwork is forcing us to think, and how do we then articulate that force
in regards to a film that is documenting an experience, in this case, of six political
prisoners who have been detained in a torture camp? Writing alongside that image
involves thinking about how the image also forms the content for that which I am
trying to articulate as affect. My intention is to produce a new composition of
relation that honours what the work is doing. In this way, the ethics of a writer is
revealed in the process. To create solidarity with the image and what it is doing, in
order to tell a new story that is relevant to the struggles of our time.
On the one hand, the film documents and memorializes the prisoners’
experience, and the objects made inside this infamous prison. In 2006, during
the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, the prison was destroyed. The building was
completely razed and turned to rubble. The stories of the survivors, as they have
been documented in Khiam, and the objects they were able to bring outside upon
their release are the only material proof that this prison existed. On the other
hand, the film is significant because it communicates, by building on narrative,
how the artistic forms of life enter into the everyday experience of the prisoners.
In this case, context is key. The everyday is structured around the torture sessions
and interrogations that take place intermittently, by the general manifestation of
imprisonment, by prolonged solitary confinement, by the management and control
of each body, each life. The film is important to consider because it documents
how skilled craft is conditioned by this particular event. Craft emerges out of the
immediacy of experience as each political prisoner encounters the trauma and
violence of confinement. The film documents the ways in which forms of life
emerge in an environment as restrictive as the prison and details the story, not just
of survival, but of solidarity. The things that were needed were made, knowledge
was passed on, techniques shared, objects used.
What it took to survive the conditions inside Khiam created the conditions
for making: there was torture, but there was also the world of objects made

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under duress to live just a little better. To think alongside the film Khiam and the
prisoner’s process of crafting objects of survival is to write through the urgency of
making that is life forming. The film reveals that the making of objects constitutes
a process of solidarity, not just with each prisoner, but with the persistence to live
as the power to will. Forms of solidarity are accessed through and by and for the
making of things. The artistic process in craft is a practical response to the lived
experience inside Khiam, specifically, it is a response to creating sensible methods
of survival that happen to engage the aesthetic in practice.

Notes
1 Fred Moten, ‘Barbara Lee’, in B Jenkins (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 84.
2 I would like to acknowledge that much of craft production for survival in other
contexts is private, domestic, and/or undervalued labour, and that most of what
is considered political craft is related to its emergence into the public sphere. Of
course, notions of private/public are dramatically altered in the context of prison.
This is why it is important to consider the work that documentary film does when it
brings these issues to the screen, engaging a broader audience. The power of making
a documentary film like Khiam is in how information can be disseminated and
circulated through various media, and in many contexts, like the cinema or an art
gallery.
3 Nasrin Himada, ‘Interview with Denise Ferreira da Silva’, Counter-Signals, no. 1 (Fall
2016): 11.
4 Ibid.

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12 SECRET STASH: TEXTILES,

HOARDING, COLLECTING,
ACCUMULATION
AND CRAFT
Kirsty Robertson

Several years ago, I went to Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism,
an exhibition by artist Allyson Mitchell at the Textile Museum of Canada.1
Mitchell had covered an entire floor of the gallery – including floors, ceilings and
walls – in blankets, doilies, cushions, shag carpeting and other thrifted, knitted
and crocheted articles. The installation played on the term ‘hungry purse’, a slang
reference to female genitalia, and visitors entered through a doorway of pink
blankets (Figure 12.1, Plate 15) – the vulva – before making their way through
several rooms to the centre, the G spot. It was a deeply layered installation that
commented on gender relations, desire, capitalism, consumption and waste,
but also offered opportunity for relaxation and discussion in its woolly interior.
Hungry Purse, according to writer Mary Smull, ‘merge[s]‌the sensual with issues
of production and consumption, creating a surreal and dichotomous portal of
insight into the contemporary appetite for “more.” ’2
The experience of being inside of Hungry Purse was completely overwhelming.
The once familiar gallery faded to the background, swathed in a multicoloured,
suffocating blanket environment, a ‘living room fort’ made of ‘enchanted vines’,3
atop orange and brown shag carpeting, and housing a few interlopers: a hot pink,
fun fur squirrel; two fuchsia deer heads. It was disorienting and claustrophobic,
but at the same time whimsical and comforting. Though not directly about
hoarding, the hundreds of rescued blankets and cushions spoke implicitly of out
of control collecting, of hanging onto what might otherwise be discarded and of
objects saturated with the memories of their former makers and owners.4 Being
there made me want to both lie down and run away.
182

FIGURE 12.1 Allyson Mitchell, Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism,
detail, installation, Toronto Alternative Art Fair International, Gladstone Hotel, Toronto,
Ontario, April 2006. Photo: Cat O’Neil.

My experience of Hungry Purse was actively influenced by a very different

encounter with hoarding that took place around the same time. In one of my
classes, a visiting speaker gave a talk about his uncle, a well-known local artist
who had recently died, leaving behind him a house crammed with boxes of slides,
photos, magazine clippings, sketchbooks, half-finished paintings and diary entries,
blankets crocheted by his mother, and far too much furniture for the small space,
all carefully catalogued but coded in a way known only to the now-deceased artist.
After the artist’s death, the nephew had inherited the house and its contents and
was given the Herculean task of sorting through, deciding what was important to
memorializing the artist’s career and what was not. He made decisions on the spur
of the moment, boxed up what he felt was valuable, and moved it all to a room in
his own suburban house, which he packed from floor to ceiling.

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As the nephew continued his talk, it became clear that the accumulated stuff made
him incredibly uncomfortable. The slides were covered in mould, which threatened
to break out of the boxes and infect the rest of the items, some of the books seemed
a little damp, there was dust everywhere. Though the amassed stuff was kept behind
a closed door, it refused to stay put, seeping into the environment of his house.
Eventually he was saved by a local curator who offered a tax receipt for a donation
of what now changed from ‘stuff ’ to a ‘collection’. The nephew accepted the offer, and
the process of sorting through the collection, cleaning the slides and disinfecting the
documents began. Carefully catalogued and moved first from a tiny damp house,
then to a bedroom in a suburban home and finally to an archive, the accumulation of
five decades of material was given a stamp of approval – it was no longer evidence of
a psychopathology of hoarding, now it was a carefully curated life history.
These introductory narratives present the complexity of hoarding. In this
essay, I look first at the history of hoarding and bring this discourse up to date to
examine the recent pathologization of hoarding as a mental disease through its
2013 acceptance into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM-V). Second, because my interest is specifically in textiles, I examine the
mass accumulation of yarn, textiles and other goods by crafters. Though fabric and
yarn stashes can result in feelings of guilt, they are also understood as storehouses,
loaded with the memories of past handmade items and the potential for future
projects. Descriptions of craft hoards complicate understandings of hoarding as
a ‘curable’ mental illness. Third, I consider how artists such as Mitchell have used
hoarding and/or the representation of hoards as a strategy to address excess, waste,
emotional attachments to objects and overconsumption. In the final section, I bring
these threads together to ask whether the increasing presence of hoarding is simply
symptomatic of changing patterns of consumption, and whether ‘hoarding [is]
less of a mental illness located in the brain and more of a socialized phenomenon
located in the world at large’.5 In other words, given the ease of accumulation
under late capitalism, is it possible to think about hoarding as a creative response
to the amount of stuff circulating in the world as much as it is a pathology? Does
it provide a way of thinking through the full (long) life cycle of consumer objects,
from their making through to their eventual disintegration? And can we do this by
acknowledging that the line between hoarding and overconsumption is a porous
one, granted seeming impermeability only insofar as the ambient accumulation of
material objects symptomatic of late capitalism is pushed to the background? My
overall goal here is to complicate the oversimplified discourse around hoarding
through a discussion of the pleasures and guilt of ownership, collecting and use.
Walking through Hungry Purse while thinking about the story of the hoarding
artist, I was struck by what had been kept and what had been thrown out in each case.
While Mitchell’s work resurrected textiles from the thrift store graveyard, in the case
of the nephew and curator, everything that had been saved was document: slides,
sketches, books and newspapers. The textiles – the clothes the artist wore, the blankets

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that were all over the house and visible in the photographs and slides – were all gone,
considered unimportant and too difficult to maintain in the archives. They had been
packaged up and either thrown out or sent to charity stores. In turn, of course, they
may have even provided the source material for Mitchell’s installation. The lusty/
dusty and comforting environment of Hungry Purse thus comments obliquely on
the politics of what is kept and what is thrown away. Hungry Purse is made entirely of
liminal objects; as Mitchell suggests, thrift stores are often replete with sentimental
items, such as handmade blankets. The act of saving and displaying them en masse
questions choices made in keeping and throwing items away and it also singularises
and elevates their making, refocusing the quiet act of knitting and crocheting into a
riotous cacophony of colour and a sumptuous consideration of desire and appetite
that is both comforting and intense.6
Textiles are often replete both with memories and more physical traces of
ownership: holes, tears, moths, bacteria, mould and mildew. ‘Hungry Purse is
loaded with history’, writes Ann Cvetkovich, ‘including history as the dust and dirt
of the items that come from other people’s pasts’.7 Bringing Hungry Purse back into
conversation with the hoarding artist, one finds sentiment, value, memories, gifts,
accumulation, collections, clutter, health and safety, hoarding in both: all of these
threads unravel across and through these two stories, which are held together by
wider assumptions about what is welcomed into galleries and archives and what
is not, what is worth saving and what is not, what is an archive or a collection and
what is a hoard.8

***
Until the mid-twentieth century, the term ‘hoarding’ was associated with keeping
money rather than spending it. It connoted miserliness, penny-pinching and
refusing to part with one’s wealth. Hoarding as a practice was generally the
purview of the already-rich.9 Only in the mid-twentieth century was the hoarding
of goods rather than gold, or trash rather than cash, recognized as an anomaly, and
even then, it was regarded largely as an eccentricity. Somewhat later, in the early-
to mid-2000s, the symptoms of out of control hoarding were regularized, and
hoarding was pathologized. Over that decade, television series, books, websites,
as well as social-workers, advocacy groups and the medical establishment worked
to reveal the disorder in the disorder. Finally, in 2013, hoarding was classified as a
mental disorder, and is now thought to be widespread, affecting as much as 5 per
cent of the population and characterized by extreme accumulation coupled with
an unwillingness to part with goods.10 Pleasurable feelings are often associated
with amassing and saving, but these are accompanied by extreme guilt and anxiety
about parting with items. According to psychologists Randy Frost and Gail Steketee,
hoarding is also often associated with disordered impulse control, compulsive
buying and sometimes kleptomania. They characterize hoarding as mania and
pathological collecting, often provoked by other mental health conditions or

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trauma.11 The work of Frost and Steketee and others has done a great deal to bring
hoarding out into the open. However, the increasing medicalization of hoarding
comes with its own set of problems, discussed later. It is perhaps the seeming
ubiquity of hoarding that is unsettling, as its terminology is simultaneously used
to describe mental illness and, in a much looser sense, overconsumption. As we
shall see, the line between out of control consumption and hoarding as disease is
a hazy one indeed.
The original hoarders, if they might be called that, were two New York
brothers. Their story has been fictionalized (most notably in E. L. Doctorow’s
novel Homer & Langley), and mythologized, and then oft repeated as the
archetypal example.12 Homer and Langley Collyer were born to a wealthy
New York family in the 1880s, in an area of the city that would become
Harlem.13 Issues of racism and classism cut through the Collyer narrative: the
two brothers, who became increasingly isolated from family and friends, were
vocally critical of the racial changes in their neighbourhood, including the
flight of upper-middle- and upper-class white people and the influx of poorer
African Americans into the area. They repeatedly expressed fears of invasion
and Langley talked openly of installing traps to prevent thieves entering the
house.14 This had the unwitting result of suggesting that the house contained
great wealth, and even during their lifetime, the brownstone house in Harlem
attracted a great deal of attention.
In 1947, the NYPD received an anonymous message about a body in the
Collyer mansion. Police visited the house, but found the front door jammed
shut, blocked by a giant pile of paper, metres thick. After eventually entering the
house through a second-floor window they found the body of Homer Collyer,
emaciated and recently dead. Homer, who was blind and paralysed, had starved to
death completely surrounded by stuff (Figure 12.2). The house was packed floor
to ceiling, with rooms accessible only through what came to be known as ‘goat
paths’ – narrow paths leading precariously through the piles of stuff, much of
which had been booby trapped. It wasn’t until eighteen days later that police found
Langley’s body, only about ten feet from Homer’s. He had accidentally triggered
one of his own booby traps; piles of paper had fallen, crushing him.15
The Collyer brothers’ story has a macabre edge that has fascinated people for
decades. Through their story, a very clear depiction of hoarding came into mid-
twentieth-century consciousness: hoarders were eccentric, and that eccentricity
was tinged with threat that was at once fascinating and repellent. Until recently,
hoarding was seen as a kind of withdrawal from society, a passion for stuff and
collecting and a refusal to confront everyday reality. Over time, the Collyer story
has been associated with a few other famous examples. First among these is the
story of the reclusive Big and Little Edie Beale (cousins of Jackie Onassis) at Grey
Gardens. Though not technically hoarders, in that the decline of their property
was forced upon them through penury, the presence of massive piles of garbage,

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FIGURE 12.2 Policemen locating the body of Langley Collyer, Collyer Brothers’ house,
1947, New York Public Library. Getty Images.

feral cats and pet raccoons in a now decaying and ramshackle former mansion
added a sense of fading glamour to the popular perception of hoarding. Such
melancholic depictions of hoarding were exacerbated following the death of
artist Andy Warhol, whose ‘frenetic shopping’, and ‘obsessive secrecy about his
collection’ meant that at the time he died, most of his friends had not crossed
into the domestic space in which he housed his hoard.16 Following his death, a
Sotheby’s auction of his things (ranging from Picasso drawings to a vast collection
of cookie jars) attracted a media spectacle.17
More recently, and in keeping with the DSM-V inclusion of hoarding as a
mental disorder, the famous cases have given way to explorations of the mundanity
of hoarding. Since 2009, television shows such as Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried
Alive have introduced numerous hoarders to the public through formulaic
story lines that delve into the impact of excessive collecting and accumulation,
before offering a ‘solution’ through intervention. Such contemporary narratives
dealing with the seeming ubiquity of hoarding are far removed from descriptions
of the Collyer brothers’ story, though less than seventy years have passed since
the discovery of their bodies.18 Their collecting, like that of Warhol, was seen as

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fascinating, but rarely did contemporary accounts describe any of the ‘famous’
hoarders as mentally ill or in need of treatment, the now-favoured descriptors and
solution for out of control collecting.
In contrast, author Scott Herring sees hoarding as a moral panic, a fake (or at
least overdiagnosed) disease conjured through the regulation of domestic material
culture and the pathologization of abnormal relationships to stuff.19 Herring argues
that our anxieties about acquisition have resulted in the medicalization of the
accumulation of stuff, which is funnelled into a search for physical or neurological
symptoms, thus rendering obsessive accumulation diagnosable and treatable.
Hoarders, he writes, ‘function as visible reminders of how we should not engage
with things’.20 Herring draws on Foucault to show how ‘psychiatry historically
colludes with other policing systems to reproduce these discourses of “perversity
and danger.” ’21 In other words, except in a very few cases, which can probably
be explained by other conditions (such as obsessive compulsive disorder), for
Herring, hoarding as a mental illness does not exist as such, but is the result of a
fear of others’ abnormal attachment to objects.
I agree with Herring’s argument that hoarding has been overpathologized.
However, his argument is constrained by the messiness of defining hoarding itself.
For Herring, hoarding is a static thing, an accumulation of already extant objects
in semi-acceptable environments such as the home or in storage units. If, however,
we take hoarding to include the full life cycle of the object – from making, to
ownership, to being discarded – Herring’s analysis leaves gaps for further
contemplation. Seeing hoarding in a broader sense means expanding the question
beyond the Collyer house to ask where the stuff came from, to see, as Allyson
Mitchell does, that the blankets and cushions in Hungry Purse had a place in the
world long before they ended up in her installation. Hoarding is supported by a
whole process that moves from the extraction of resources, through the making of
objects, past their accumulation and into the places where they are discarded. In
short, there is a larger context that must be taken into consideration.
We live in a world overrun with stuff. In her popular book The Story of Stuff,
Annie Leonard notes that in 2004–2005 US Americans spent two-thirds of their
$11 trillion national economy on consumer goods,22 while the LA Times reports
that there are 300,000 items in the average US American home,23 and the average
North American throws away 65 pounds of clothing a year.24 According to Leonard,
these statistics are true not only of the United States; globally, we consume twice
as much stuff as we did fifty years ago.25 The repercussions for environment,
labour and the distribution of wealth are difficult to calculate.26 The stuff we
make and discard does not leave the world, but remains in both measurable and
immeasurable ways – in landfills, in toxic effluent, in objects cluttering houses
and closets. Many of these objects enter an ever-quickening cycle of purchase,
discard, replace. But while the above statistics and facts are shocking, they do, in
fact, illustrate acceptable norms of consumption, particularly in North America.

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There is one community where both Herring’s theory of moral panic

around attachment to objects, and the buy/discard, buy/hoard relationships are
corroborated, undermined and challenged. That group is the craft community.
Crafting has created a socially acceptable form of hoarding, one that is both
celebrated and tinged with guilt. Crafters are implicitly encouraged to create
‘stashes’, or collections of raw material that can be used for future projects. Buying
yarn, or wool or textiles means purchasing both the object and also its potential to
be made into something else. The stash thus has a past, present and a future.
A quick search of the discussion boards on Etsy.com, an online marketplace for
handmade goods, reveals more than two hundred threads devoted to the discussion
of yarn and fabric stashes.27 Ravelry.com, another popular site for sharing knitting
patterns and building community, has hundreds of pages devoted to confessions
about stashes – what they consist of, competitions for who has the biggest stash,
projects to ‘de-stash’, descriptions of the mundane and bizarre places where
crafters hide their stashes, and tips on how to sneak in new acquisitions. These
websites reveal the specific language of stashes: participants on Ravelry discuss
their fabric-aholism, their WIPs (Works in Progress), SEX (Stash Enhancement
Expedition, i.e. buying more yarn), their stash busting techniques, and SABLE
(Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy – the ownership of so much yarn or
fabric that there is no possibility of turning it all into useable objects during a
single lifetime). Collections are willed, they are insured and they are discussed in
the semi-secret space of Ravelry as a guilty pleasure.28
The most conspicuous quilters, knitters and other hobby crafters in North
America and on Ravelry are older middle- and upper-class white women, with
significant leisure time and buying power.29 Stashes are clearly indicative of
overconsumption – these are not rag rugs or scrap quilts made from salvaged
fabrics; the Ravelry stashes have very little connection to austerity, making do
or thriftiness.30 At the same time, in her article on the textile stashes of quilters,
sociologist Marybeth C. Stalp argues that acquiring textiles on the sly and hiding
them is actually a strategy for reclaiming time and space.31 Stalp concentrates
on an older cohort (similar to that found on Ravelry), for whom the third wave
feminist focus on seizing leisure time as an emancipatory gesture does not really
resonate. For the quilters and hobby crafters in Stalp’s studies, crafting tends to be
an individual pursuit, far removed from the communal aspect of the quilting bee,
or the more recent Stitch ‘n Bitch sessions, and often heavily focused on pleasure
and consumption as well as production (which may actually be secondary to the
accumulation of fabric).32 Such pleasure is often hidden or ‘stolen’ from family time
or other communal activities. Thus, community on Ravelry is a virtual addition or
extension to individual time that importantly takes place in the same domestic
space in which the stashing and creating is also located.
Yarn and fabric stashes are thus rarely about their owners behaving as ‘pack
rats’ and ‘chronic savers’, as in the standard hoarding narrative. Instead, the

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culture of hoarding associated with yarn and fabric stashes is much more closely
associated with what is known as a magpie aesthetic: a wish to own and possess
objects perceived to be beautiful. On Ravelry, there is a celebration of the liminal
space between being a good consumer or a good capitalist with a collection that
can inspire creativity, and having a problem with overconsumption, debt and
credit. Online posters often oscillate between the two, documenting projects,
and then guiltily admitting to having bought even more to add to their stashes.33
For the most part, the tone on discussion boards is light, and users joke about
their purchasing habits: ‘It’s not a stash. It’s limitless potential captured in fibre.’34
Occasionally though, there is evidence of conflict: ‘I sometimes get my online
orders delivered to work so there won’t be confrontations at home’, writes a regular
poster on Ravelry.35
While a stash of yarn from leftover projects has long been a component of
knitting, the gigantic stashes documented on Ravelry are a new phenomenon. In
part this has to do with more leisure time, more disposable income and greater
access to yarn. In keeping with the statistics just mentioned about the amount of
stuff circulating in the world, the global trade in textiles and apparel increased by
a staggering 68 per cent between 2004 and 2013.36 In turn, those increases were
primarily, though not entirely, due to the outsourcing of textile manufacturing
from the global North to the global South, a process that began in earnest in
the 1980s, and resulted in low prices, greater volume of textile goods and easy
accessibility.37
Consumption practices rise rapidly with industrialization, but interestingly
they rise even more rapidly with deindustrialization. As factories are replaced
with immaterial labour, consumption actually skyrockets, in part because access
to cheap goods made elsewhere increases as well.38 But consumption also goes
hand in hand with rising levels of debt and its corollary, anxiety.39 In 2007, at
its height, consumption in the United States equalled on average 96 per cent of
income.40 Similar figures from other countries that belong to the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development demonstrate extremely high levels of
debt, driven by consumption large (mortgages contributing to household debt)
and small (luxury goods such as a ball of yarn contributing to consumer debt).41
Debt is increasingly the norm across the globe, such that consumer debt is rising
rapidly both in producer countries and in consumer countries. The conclusion to
be drawn is that at least in terms of textiles, as production has grown, so too has
consumption, often followed by debt and anxiety.42 If hoarding has only recently
been recast as a mental illness, then this transformation must also be seen within
the context of an increase in the availability of goods and credit.
What does this mean for crafters? First there is much greater accessibility of
both high-end and mass-market craft goods. In the grey space between shopping
addiction and hoarding is the mass availability and immense choice in yarns,
textiles and other crafting goods. As such objects are added to stashes, the grey

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space becomes even murkier, suggesting that it is really only the approach
(language, joking, defensiveness) and acceptability of craft collections that
‘redeems’ the crafter as a collector rather than a hoarder. The photos of hoards on
Ravelry suggest a certain normalization of wealth and conspicuous consumption.
Though the process of buying and storing echoes the symptoms of pathologized
hoarding, the possibility of making and transformation acts as the hedge against
diagnosis. Indeed, some of the fears that underlie the pathologization of hoarding
in the Collyer story and elsewhere – racialized fears of invasion, storing against an
uncertain future, using goods as a ballast against poverty, are not typically present
here.
But, on the other hand, the stores of potential in the stash also speak to a joy in
making, to a vast history of unappreciated and uncompensated women’s labour. Is a
criticism of stashing just one more dismissal? As Ann Cvetkovich notes, discussing
the pharmaceuticalization of depression and the introduction of drugs such as
Valium and Prozac, ‘the middle-class white woman has been central to medical
histories of mental illness’,43 an observation that can be extended to crafting, which
has been seen, over the years as both a symptom of and a cure for mental illness.44
Thus, if the discourse around and diagnoses of hoarding are expanding via the
kind of moral panic described by Herring, then it would be possible to imagine the
extension of that anxiety into the now protected confessional culture of Ravelry.
But it is also equally possible to imagine the strength of community and shared
experience, as well as the joking about acquisition acting as a barricade against
pathologization.45 For now, yarn stashes exist in a place between guilty pleasure
and celebration, with relatively few negative associations.
One rhetorical strategy that crafters use to explain and legitimize stashing is to
positively contrast the handmade with the ‘shoddy craftsmanship’ of cheap and
accessible clothing and other goods. Perhaps it is not surprising that Ravelry and
Etsy both emerged in the midst of a flooding of the textiles market. In short, as
cheap clothing became available in ever-increasing quantity, new spin-off markets
also developed for those wanting to resist this trend. Crafters who make for pleasure
and crafters who make for profit often add a moral dimension to their actions,
positioning the handmade as an ethical alternative to mass-produced goods and
poor labour conditions.46 Such sentiments are equally apparent in conversations
on Etsy, Ravelry and elsewhere online, where the handmade is associated with
thriftiness (despite the often extravagant cost of supplies) and in some senses with
anti-capitalism. Online posters talk about ‘getting back to basics’, about ‘not buying
mass-produced goods’, about ‘living from the land’, and so on. Many talk about the
love and work that goes into making garments or toys, discussing how this might
affectively transfer to the recipient of a handmade sweater or teddy bear.
Thus, on the surface, niche-marketing sites such as Etsy resist the allure of fast
fashion and overconsumption through encouraging the purchase of individual
goods and micro-capitalism. Nevertheless, as noted in the introduction to this

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book, as the importance of micro-capitalism has grown, Etsy, which has moved
crafted goods out of the home and into marketplace, represents both a resistance
to capitalism and an overt capitulation to it.47 If working outside of the home
could be, in Betty Friedan’s infamous argument, an answer to the ‘strange feeling
of desperation’48 plaguing middle-class women, the return to the home through
‘passion’ labour, which involves making in the spare moments around domestic
and career tasks, seems a perturbing reframing of a feminist argument that has
been both disavowed by some contemporary third wave feminists and reclaimed
by others.49 On the one hand, marketplaces such as Etsy create venues for kinds of
labour that have been consistently undervalued.
On the other, there is a high price to pay. Message boards on Etsy clearly
demonstrate the weight of handmade careers. There are hundreds of threads
documenting guilt at working, which at first seems at odds with the other guilty
threads I mentioned earlier – those associated with buying and stashing. But in
fact, they fit together nicely. Posters document their purchases, and they document
their working hours, which include time spent away from family updating shops,
labouring, making and selling their work. Maintaining a shop on Etsy means not
just making products and hoping for the best, but time-expensive strategies of
constant marketing, such as commenting on posting boards, advertising products
and making online connections. It is a process that is infinite.50 Further, most
posters document how their stores are either ‘hobbies’ or secondary jobs that
get fitted into the time around other, more stable employment. As money drips
in, however, the hobby-jobs and passion work become essential, and numerous
posters weigh out the costs of spending time with children or other leisure
activities against the labour of making handmade goods that can be sold to pay for
the stuff wanted by their families.
In a controversial article written in 2008, journalist Sara Mosle argued, ‘What
Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts … but also the feminist promise that
you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible,
reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative
career’.51 Though more sympathetic in his coverage, New York Times reporter Alex
Williams called it a psychic tax, a hoarding of time by a system that demands
high commitment for low pay.52 The yarn stash, passion work, niche capitalism: all
of them are replete with conflicting meanings and messages. But perhaps this
statement at least is verifiable: a fabric or yarn hoard, no matter how it is construed,
is inevitably a part of the system it might seek to subvert.
The late capitalist demands to accumulate money and goods, and the demands
of entrepreneurial labour to push oneself to achieve material wealth coexist in
extreme antagonism in the craft world. Though there are a handful of people who
have turned their Etsy shops (and other sites like it) into six figure salaries, for the
most part this is not the case. The demands of the micro-capitalist system are too
great, and the result is often a biopolitical one – the body shuts down, gets sick or

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gives up.53 The panacea and guilty pleasure of shopping, with the consequent rise
of consumerism in periods of deindustrialization must be seen as a part of this.
Shopping and buying have been oft noted as responses to anxiety and depression,
as have hoarding and stashing.54 Actual hoarding is the limit point, the site where
the system is revealed as broken. I suggest that hoarding has received a great deal
of coverage because it illuminates the dysfunctional limits of accumulation. ‘At
least I’m not at that point’, many posters on Etsy and Ravelry joke.
It might seem that the answer here is to avoid the marketplace and its greedy
management of time. After all, in Stalp’s argument, time was something that
was carved out and treasured. Craft is there described as leisure, as time away
from tasks. And certainly, in this sense, craft does seem a seductive charm – a
productive leisure-labour that allows for the pleasure of stash collecting, but
that also unleashes the potential of the stash in the making of other objects. In
turn these objects are often gifted, thus bringing additional pleasure and good
feeling. Unfortunately, the trap here is the continued devaluing of women’s
labour (something Stalp certainly notes), and the reality that the undervaluation
of craft-as-hobby limits attempts at turning professional, meaning that crafters
can rarely recoup their own labour costs (not to mention the cost of assembling
the stash). Craft solely as leisure means that it must entirely be a pursuit of the
wealthy.
To begin to bring together my points, I’d like to return to hoarding and to craft
as a discipline. Real hoarders, those who might be seen to have a diagnosable
problem, break the typical cycle of purchase and discard – the rhythm gets
interrupted so that the material goods, which are accorded very little value in a
traditional cycle of obsolescence, are accorded importance far beyond their actual
worth. The hoard of a hoarder is one over-replete with the memories accruing to
each object.
Without the repetition of purchase and discard, hoarding represents not an
anti-capitalist state but a kind of fugue of broken capitalism. Thus, the solution of
garbage bags and therapy, the forced completion of the cycle, is too simple, for it
denies the connection that most people feel to their possessions. Craft stashes, in
turn, create a new category that encompasses past memories (in the leftovers from
completed projects) and possibilities of future use that complicates discourses
on hoarding, overconsumption and waste (in terms of thrift and environmental
destruction). The line where things get out of control (the extreme SABLE) is
fraught, both celebrated and masked.

***
To conclude this essay, I’d like to return to Allyson Mitchell’s Hungry Purse.
Mitchell’s critique of capitalism in Hungry Purse is located firmly in the fact that
these handmade objects, which visibly document labour, were discarded, but
were not actually thrown out. There remains some kind of residual affect that

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takes handmade blankets, cushions, and textiles to the thrift store rather than the
dump. In valuing that resonance by rescuing the blankets, Mitchell intervenes in
the cycle of buy and discard, while also creating an entirely different environment,
one that illustrates what might be seen as the creative side of hoarding, a hint
that austerity is perhaps not the only answer to current social problems, and
pathologization might not be the only interpretation of hoarding.
In Mitchell’s work there is a tension between a wish to accumulate and a wish
to withdraw, a wish to fully participate in capitalism and a wish to break the cycle.
Mitchell’s work speaks to abundance, but it also refuses to separate that abundance
from the process of making the work. Ultimately, acknowledging and celebrating
the labour of the object, whether it is a handmade blanket or a cheap T-shirt,
actually unsettles the cycle of buy/discard more effectively than does transforming
latent waste into actual waste and adding its slow-decaying bulk to a permanent
hoard of the landfill, the waterways and the environment. Completing the cycle
turns the world into a hoard. Halting it offers a different alternative.
Thus, I return to where I began, with the two collections – one belonging
to the hoarding artist, the other to Allyson Mitchell. In the case of the artist,
his hoarding was an unwillingness to classify, a failed connoisseurship that was
corrected by the curator and archivist who gave his collection a taxonomy and
therefore a right to exist in the framework of the museum. In the case of Allyson
Mitchell, the questions her work raises are much more complicated. Mitchell
begins with something more like a discarded hoard – the detritus of a society
uninterested in the handmade and in women’s work – and reassembles it into an
environment. And yet, in that it captures the wealth of emotion and the affective
impact and potential memories of those objects, it more accurately reflects the
emotional connections of a person to their things than does the archiving of the
artist’s collection, where emotions, and memory were erased in favour of clean
and aesthetic storage. The archival collection of the artist is a slippage, an erasure
of the personal engagement that he had with consumption. In Mitchell’s work,
the opposite is the case – the immense effort of sewing together the installation
is everywhere present. It is a massive celebration of all that might be erased –
labour, community, gender, desire, hoarding. Hoarding is not always clear cut,
and it often spills over into other realms. Hungry Purse is right on a line: ‘[It]
fluctuates between being gross and being gorgeous’,55 between being the beautiful
stash of hand-dyed wool and a repellent, dirty, dusty hoard. Perhaps, in this
sense, we would do well not to forget that the Collyer brothers’ house was greeted
not just with a kind of voyeurism, but also with fascination, as was Warhol’s
collection. Imagining the hoard around him, the blind fictionalized Collyer notes
in Doctorow’s novel ‘although with our riches as yet uncatalogued, the curating
still to come’, a sentiment that closely echoes Walter Benjamin: ‘for what else is
this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an
extent that it can appear as order?’56

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Notes
1 Some of the ideas for this essay were developed as a part of Secret
Stash: Accumulation, Hoarding and the Love of Stuff, an exhibition I curated in
2012 at the McIntosh Gallery, featuring the work of Allyson Mitchell, Kelly Wood,
Germaine Koh and Payton Turner.
2 Mary Smull, ‘Allyson Mitchell: A Room of Once Owned’, Fiber Arts, (Spring
2011): 28–29.
3 Ibid., 28.
4 Allyson Mitchell, Hungry Purse. Available at http://www.allysonmitchell.com/html/
hurgry_purse.html (accessed 1 November 2015).
5 Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 5.
6 One avenue left unexplored in this essay, but deserving of more attention, is the
relationship between hoarding and appetite. Allyson Mitchell writes: ‘the Hungry
Purse is not only the vagina dentata as it represents mortality and fear of women’s
bodies, but also the fear of all voracious, out-of-control appetites, whether for
junk food, credit card debt, global commerce, or agri-business … keep making,
keep buying’, quoted in Smull ‘Allyson Mitchell’, 29. See also Ann Cvetkovich,
Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 185, and
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 91–93.
7 Cvetkovich, Depression, 186.
8 Hungry Purse was shown twice more, and is currently in a storage locker in Port
Perry, Ontario. Author, Correspondence with Allyson Mitchell, November 2015.
9 Gail Steketee, ‘From Dante to DSM-V: A Short History of Hoarding’, International
OCD Foundation (2010). Available at http://www.ocfoundation.org/hoarding/dante_
to_dsm-v.aspx (accessed 1 November 2015).
10 Ibid.
11 Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).
12 E. L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley (New York: Random House, 2009).
13 Ibid., 5; Kenneth J. Weiss, ‘Hoarding, Hermitage, and the Law: Why We Love the
Collyer Brothers’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online,
vol. 38, no. 2 (2010): 251–57.
14 Scott Herring, ‘Collyer Curiosa: A Brief History of Hoarding’, Criticism, vol. 53, no. 2
(Spring 2011): 159–88.
15 Ibid.
16 Michael Lobel also follows Wayne Koestenbaum’s suggestion that ‘collecting is a code
for homosexual activity and identity’, in the case of Warhol. While I have left this
unexplored in my brief mention of Warhol, it is worth noting that the same kinds of
shaming explored by Mitchell in Hungry Purse with regards to fatness and queerness
are here explored by Lobel in terms of Warhol’s hiding of his collection. Michael
Lobel, ‘Warhol’s Closet’, Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 44.

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17 Lobel, ‘Warhol’s Closet’, 42. See also John Taylor, ‘Andy’s Empire’, New York Magazine,
vol. 21, no. 8 (1988): 40–60.
18 See Herring, The Hoarders, 2011.
19 Ibid., 7.
20 Ibid., 8.
21 Ibid., 9.
22 Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the
Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health – and a Vision for Change (Toronto: Free
Press, 2010).
23 Mary McVean, ‘For Many People, Gathering Possessions is Just the Stuff of Life’, LA
Times, 21 March 2014. Available at http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/21/health/
la-he-keeping-stuff-20140322 (accessed 1 November 2015).
24 Mattias Wallander, ‘Closet Cast-Offs Clogging Landfills’, Huffington Post, 27 June
2010. Available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mattias-wallander/closet-cast-offs-
clogging_b_554400.html (accessed 1 November 2015).
25 Annie Leonard, Story of Stuff, Reference and Annotated Script, 2007. Available at
http://storyofstuff.org/wp-content/uploads/movies/scripts/Story%20of%20Stuff.pdf
(accessed 1 November 2015).
26 Leonard, Story of Stuff, 146.
27 Discussion boards are no longer as central a part of the Etsy community as they were
in 2012 when this research was done. An updated 2015 search, however, still shows
nine pages of results for the search term ‘stash’, most of them blog posts from Etsy
users documenting projects for upcycling or using objects, yarn, wool and textiles.
28 Also see Marybeth C. Stalp and Theresa M. Winge, ‘My Collection is Bigger Than
Yours: Tales from the Handcrafter`s Stash’, Home Cultures, vol. 5, no. 2 (2008): 197–
218, on how collections are assembled.
29 Marybeth C. Stalp, ‘Hiding the Fabric Stash: Collecting, Hoarding, and Hiding
Strategies of Contemporary US Quilters’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture,
vol. 4, no. 1 (2006): 106.
30 These crafters are different from those who tend to be covered in texts on ‘crafting
revivals’. Stalp’s 2008 research shows that they tend to be older, more conservative,
and wealthier than those participating in a third wave feminist craft revival. However,
both, for different reasons, have largely disavowed second wave feminism, often
because its call to leave the home is interpreted as disavowing domestic crafting
(though in fact, this was not the case). For a discussion see Janis Jefferies, ‘Crocheted
Strategies: Women Crafting Their Own Communities’, in Textile: The Journal of Cloth
and Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, (2016): 14-35; Stalp and Winge, ‘My Collection is Bigger
Than Yours’, 2008. See also Cvetkovich, Depression, 172–73. It should also be noted
that Mitchell’s Deep Lez Manifesto is skeptical of such divisions.
31 Ibid., 106–10.
32 Ibid., 116.
33 Discussion boards on Etsy.com and Ravelry.com were searched in December 2012,
March 2014 and July 2015. Search terms included ‘stash’, ‘stashing’, ‘hoarding’, ‘hoard’
and ‘hoarding problem’.

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34 Jinniver, ‘Ah, So This Is How You End Up with a Stash’, 3 June 2015. Available at
http://www.ravelry.com/discuss/ends/3215200/1–25 (accessed 1 November 2015).
35 pippinpuss, ‘Ah, So This Is How You End Up with a Stash’, 3 June 2015. Available at
http://www.ravelry.com/discuss/ends/3215200/76–100 (accessed 1 November 2015).
36 The textiles industry, including apparel and textiles (which in turn includes yarn and
wool) has undergone significant changes since 2004, largely due to the end of the
Multifiber Arrangement, which controlled global quotas for the export of textiles
and apparel. For further explanation see Kirsty Robertson, ‘Embroidery Pirates and
Fashion Victims: Textiles, Craft and Copyright’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and
Culture, vol. 8, no. 1 (2010): 86–111.
37 Marsha Mercer, ‘Textile Industry Comes Back to Life, Especially in South’,
USA Today, 5 February 2014. Available at http://www.usatoday.com/story/
news/nation/2014/02/05/stateline-textile-industry-south/5223287/ (accessed 1
December 2015).
38 Jaewoo Lee, Pau Rabanal and Damiano Sandri. ‘US Consumption after the 2008
Crisis’, IMF Staff Position Note, 15 January 2010. Available at https://www.imf.org/
external/pubs/ft/spn/2010/spn1001.pdf (accessed 1 November 2015).
39 Cvetkovich, Depression, 168.
40 Jaewoo Lee, Pau Rabanal and Damiano Sandri. ‘US Consumption after the 2008
Crisis’, IMF Staff Position Note, 15 January 2010. Available at https://www.imf.org/
external/pubs/ft/spn/2010/spn1001.pdf.
41 OECD, ‘Household Accounts’, OECD Data, 2012. Available at https://data.oecd.org/
hha/household-debt.htm (accessed 1 December 2015).
42 Ye Xie and Belinda Cao, ‘China’s Debt-to-GDP Ratio Just Climbed to a Record High’,
Bloomberg Business, 15 July 2015. Available at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/
articles/2015-07-15/china-s-debt-to-gdp-ratio-just-climbed-to-a-new-record-high
(accessed 1 December 2015).
43 Cvetkovich, Depression, 165. To be clear, crafting is practiced by many men as well,
and by women of all ethnic backgrounds. Cvetcovich’s observation here is used to
parallel with those using Ravelry, who tend to be middle-aged, white and wealthy.
44 For the former, see Sigmund Freud, ‘Femininity’, in Freud on Women: A Reader,
ed. E. Young-Bruehl (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 342–62. For the latter see
Lee Gant, Love in Every Stitch: Stories of Knitting and Healing (Jersey City: Viva
Editions, 2015).
45 Cvetkovich, Depression, 189.
46 Such discussions are typically not overtly xenophobic. However, a fear of racialized
outsiders present in the Collyer story is found in occasional posts that describe fears
of Chinese labour crushing US American industry.
47 Etsy garnered a great deal of controversy in 2013 through changing its seller policies
to allow for large(r) scale manufacturing, allowing that only the idea must originate
with the seller and that sellers must oversee production. See Liz Core, ‘Can Etsy
Blow Up and Keep Its Soul?’ Grist, 4 March 2015. Available at http://grist.org/living/
can-etsy-blow-up-and-keep-its-soul/ (accessed 14 May 2015); Grace Dobush, ‘How
Etsy Alienated Its Crafters and Lost Its Soul’, Wired, 19 February 2015. Available at
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/etsy-not-good-for-crafters/ (accessed 14 May 2015),

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Hiroko Tabuchi, ‘Etsy’s Success Gives Rise to Problems of Credibility and Scale’,
New York Times, 15 March 2015. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/
business/media/etsys-success-raises-problems-of-credibility-and-scale.html?_r=1
(accessed 14 May 2015).
48 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (reprint) (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 4.
49 Cvetkovich, Depression, 168–69. See also Maria Elena Buszek (ed.), Extra/
Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011);
Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl, Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft,
and Design (Princeton: Princeton Architecture Press, 2008); Betsy Greer (ed.),
Craftivism: The Art and Craft of Activism (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2014).
50 Alex Williams, ‘That Hobby Looks Like a Lot of Work’, New York Times, 16 December
2009. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/fashion/17etsy.html
(accessed 1 December 2015).
51 Sara Mosle, ‘Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy’, Double X, 10 June 2009.
Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20130329053942/www.doublex.com/
section/work/etsycom-peddles-false-feminist-fantasy (accessed 22 April 2019).
52 Williams, ‘That Hobby Looks Like a Lot of Work’.
53 Nicole Dawkins, ‘Do-It-Yourself: The Precarious Work and Postfeminist Politics of
Handmaking (in) Detroit’, Utopian Studies, vol. 22, no. 2 (2011): 274.
54 Before Etsy opened to manufactured goods, more that 96 per cent of people selling
there identified as female. Mosle, ‘Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy’.
55 Smull, ‘Allyson Mitchell’, 28.
56 Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting’,
Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited and with an introduction by Hannah
Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 60.

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13 SHINIQUE SMITH: LINES

THAT BIND
Julia Bryan-Wilson

The sculpture – a columnar solid that looms over the viewer some seven-and-a-half
feet high – is muscular and commanding, filling the gallery space with its emphatic
presence. Made out of hundreds of items of cast-off clothing and domestic linens
that have been massed together and visibly tied with twine, the piece, entitled
Bale Variant no. 0022 (2010), belongs to Shinique Smith’s masterful Bale Variant
series (Figure 13.1, Plate 17). Though its scale is far from modest, the work also
imparts an intimate, approachable quality, as the cloth appears to leak out from the
sculpture’s seams, with garments spilling onto the floor and shirtsleeves escaping
the confines of the work’s geometry. Smith has not compressed the fabric into this
form at random, but carefully selected the material and composed the towering
structure with an eye for colour and pattern, with darker textiles at the bottom
grounding the piece and lighter ones rising up to the top.
With textured layers resembling geological strata, Bale Variant no. 0022 looks
like a giant core sample from an archaeological excavation. And like a core sample,
the cloth contained in the sculpture holds traces of the past, carrying with it
residue of the lives it has surrounded. The piles of used clothing confront both the
overabundance of consumerist, capitalist excess and also reveal the tenderness of
textiles, that is, how they can become surrogates for the people who wear them,
how we attach affective meaning to garments and imbue them with character.
Originally gleaned from her own closet and those of her friends, Smith now also
uses cast-off clothing from strangers, and as they accumulate, they remind us how
items once worn and even cherished are eventually thrown out to make room for
new things.
Yet much disposed clothing never really disappears. Smith’s bale shape
consciously echoes the packing of clothing into cubes for ease of shipping, making
reference to what author Andrew Brooks, in his book Clothing Poverty, calls
‘the shadow world of used clothing’, in which donated, discarded and surplus
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FIGURE 13.1 Shinique Smith, Bale Variant No. 0022, 2012, vintage fabric, clothing,
blankets, ribbon, rope, and wood, 90 × 30 × 30 inches. Courtesy: Shinique Smith and
The Sandy and Jack Guthman Collection, Chicago. Photo: Eric Wolfe.

garments in countries such as the United States and the UK are sold at profit to
‘the poor in the global South’.1 Smith’s repurposing of used clothes is a persistent
reminder about the material residue of obsolescence. Brooks writes: ‘Consumers
have responded to clothing availability and an environment of competitive
consumption by purchasing increasing numbers of artificially cheap goods, and
getting rid of old garments, in rapid cycles of acquisition and discard.’2 Here the
melancholy of textiles with their lingering smells and memories intersects with the
melancholy, and inequity, of capitalist modes of production.
Bales are usually assembled mechanically by baling machines, but Smith’s
approach is distinctly corporeal and hands-on. As she notes in an interview
with Kymberly Pinder, she thinks of tying, binding and wrapping as procedures
that are connected to the manipulation of text, all of which she undertakes
in a kind of ‘frenetic meditation’.3 Pinder connects Smith’s textile work to her

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history with graffiti, since ‘graff is all about motion and so is your work’.4 At once
urgent and ritualistic, Smith’s tying and wrapping are also ways to make evident
and demystify her own efforts. Given that ‘the labour activities associated with
the collection, processing and export of second-hand clothes and the complex
interactions between waste-making, donations and environmental acts are hidden
in contemporary society’, this visible labour is crucial.5
Smith’s Bale Variant series take some cues from minimalist sculpture, with its
staging of phenomenological encounters with the spectator, and it can be situated
within other lineages, including Arman’s assemblages of found objects, Judith
Scott’s bound-textile work and Howardena Pindell’s Black feminist abstraction.
Smith’s work is often discussed within the realm of handicraft and fibre art, despite
the fact that she does not utilize sewing or knitting or weaving. The textiles she
uses are by and large resolutely industrially produced, though of course industrial
production – and destruction – maintains an important component of bodily
labour (even in their afterlives, when discarded textiles are shredded, there is still
an element of hand sorting). Smith counts among her wide-ranging influences
Japanese calligraphy, the writings of Italo Calvino, Tibetan meditation practices,
1980s punk and hip-hop and abstract expressionism. What these disparate sources
have in common with Smith’s sculpture is that they all negotiate an improvisational
energy within a rigorous system of constraints and limits. Her use of fabric as
both a formal and an emotional element has frequently positioned her work
in conversation with other contemporary artists dealing with the cultural and
economic meanings of cloth as it circulates between markets and bodies. South
Korean artist Kimsooja, for instance, with her lashed-together fabric bundles, or
bottari, invokes ties between women’s labour, migration and the weight of memory.
Many of these artists think critically about the gendered and raced dynamics of
the textile industry, including Pakistani artist Risham Syed, whose quilts map
colonial histories of, and resistance to, the British Empire cotton trade.
Smith recalls a childhood in Baltimore, Maryland, surrounded by fabric – her
mother was a fashion editor and her grandmother had a flair for mixing patterns
in her interior design, and she was often aggravated by the insistent presence of
textiles in her life.6 In graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art,
she began gravitating towards experiments with fabric as surfaces for her abstract
paintings, first utilizing vinyl as a canvas for its smoothness. Since then, Smith
has continued to pursue an expansive multidisciplinary practice that includes
paintings, collages, site-specific murals, sculptures, installations, printmaking,
performative events, videos and collaborations with dancers. She has worked with
acrylic, paper, ribbons, food wrappers, yarn and ink, as well as with second-hand
belongings such as furniture, toys, pillows and shoes. Her work has been shown
internationally in high-profile group shows that include Frequency (2005) at the
Studio Museum in Harlem (featuring emerging Black artists) and Revolution in
the Making (2016) at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel (highlighting women abstract

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sculptors), as well as solo shows at venues such as Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts
and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 7
The basic element that runs throughout much of Smith’s work is the line –
whether it be with a piece of rope, a song lyric, a mantra or a gestural mark on a
wall, she is always scribbling in space. Her hybrid methods blur the conventional
boundaries between media as she moves fluidly between making objects and
producing more relational pieces that directly engage audiences outside the space
of the museum, including elementary school students. Sometimes techniques
that began in the studio, such as the organic tying together of fabric, are given a
different valence when she takes them outdoors. For instance, during a residency
at the Headlands Center for the Arts in northern California, Smith wrapped her
own body in cloth and foam, photographing herself in the coastal landscape,
resulting in lush digital prints that suggest masses of detritus that have washed
up on the shore in untitled [Rodeo Beach Bundle] (2007). Already charged with
meaning when located in the white cube of the gallery, her beautifully lumpy
creations are newly animated on the beach by the palpable outline of a human
figure underneath.
As her work with floor-based sculpture demonstrates, Smith is interested in the
physical properties of gravity as well as in the spiritual qualities of weightlessness,
and she often suspends her fabric bundles from the gallery ceiling. Soul Elsewhere
(2013) is a bulbous denim sculpture that hangs in mid-air, its curves trussed with
white rope that strains against the fabric (Figure 13.2, Plate 16). Two pairs of jeans
have been sutured together at their waistbands and then stuffed, and the legs taper
at the top and bottom to create an evocative hourglass shape. In Smith’s work, denim
is a fabric that solicits a wide range of responses; it connects everything from cross-
cultural traditions of indigo dyeing to the corporate branding of jeans. Jeans can be
a symbol of independence and freedom (as when Levis were eagerly sought out by
those in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall), but also mass production
and crushing standardization (as in the 2005 documentary China Blue, directed by
Micha Peled, which follows the lives of female factory workers in Guangdong to
underscore the dismal, punishing conditions in which jeans are made).
A wardrobe staple that is prevalent across spectra of gender, race and class
and is often heavily personalized, denim can signify cowgirl, mechanic or rapper.
Its cultural malleability – denim can be used in everything from (literally) blue-
collar work-wear to high-dollar status symbols – means that jeans are often
treated as a blank canvas, open to resignification based on context and frequently
embellished by an individual’s own interventions. The jeans in Soul Elsewhere
were the artist’s own work pants, worn until they split, with evidence of both her
labour and moments of leisure – paint spatters, bleached out scrawls and hand-
drawn doodles – embedded in the fibres of the fabric. With its uncanny limbs
and creaturely protuberances, the resultant sculpture recalls both the poupée of
German surrealist Hans Bellmer and the clustered mattress works of US artist

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FIGURE 13.2 Shinique Smith, Soul Elsewhere, 2013, artist’s clothing, ballpoint ink, poly-
fil and rope, 38 1/2 × 18 × 14 inches. Courtesy: Shinique Smith and SAS Studio, Private
Collection. Photo: Eric Wolfe

Nancy Rubins. They also evoke the stuffed grids of Pindell, mentioned earlier,
whose work forms a crucial bridge between African American female traditions
of textile making and contemporary abstraction.
At the same time, Soul Elsewhere is very much its own suggestive form, a
present-day Venus of Willendorf-meets-butterfly cocoon made from a second
skin of clothing that has cycled out of pure usefulness into the realm of the
aesthetic. Though no longer worn by a moving body, the jeans of Soul Elsewhere
enliven the space in which they are hung and appear to have an inner vibrancy.
With both Soul Elsewhere and the Bale Variant series, Smith mobilizes figures-in-
absentia. Her approach to sculpture pivots on scale: while the manipulated jeans
trigger associations with the human body, the stacked monoliths overwhelm the
viewer with their imposing size and have an architectural feel. The sculptural heft
of her work is often balanced by the gestural delicacy of the strands that bind its

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constitutive parts together: for instance, her Bale Variant series relies on a logic of
accumulation and massing while she also plays with webbing, nets and knotting,
generating a conversation between geometry and line.
In works like Soul Elsewhere, Smith’s process of tying is also an act of
discovery; rather than work towards a predetermined shape, she is not certain
how the object will look when she’s finished, instead endeavouring to let the
materials move together. Her work, including Bale Variant no. 0011 (2005), was
featured in the New Museum’s seminal exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in
the 21st Century (2007–2008), a show which brought together artists who use
everyday found objects to comment on conditions of dissolution, trauma and
displacement with largely provisional and un-heroic art. According to co-curator
Massimiliano Gioni, the unmonumental is characterized as ‘a sculpture of

FIGURE 13.3 Shinique Smith, Granny Square, 2013, acrylic, spray paint, vintage crochet
baby blanket on wood panel, 48 × 48 × 2 1/4 inches. Courtesy: Shinique Smith and SAS
Studio. Photo: Jason Mandella.

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fragments, a debased, precarious, trembling form’.8 While her work made sense
in this context, Smith is also keen to emphasize metamorphosis and renewal; all
of the tangible stuff that she engages with – including actual trash like leftover
fast-food wrappers – undergoes a transformation as she recycles and remakes it
to give it a fresh narrative.
For instance, in Granny Square (2013), Smith repurposes a found crocheted
blanket and uses it as the diamond-shaped centrepiece of an abstract painting
(Figure 13.3). The blanket is both handmade and readymade, and Granny Square
deftly integrates a typical household textile and methods of appropriation within
the frame of painting, scrambling any sense of the inviolable distinction between
craft and conceptualism. Smith has painted an elaborate border around the edges
of the blanket, and the colours of the crochet and her energetic brushstrokes
vibrate against a vivid yellow background. This piece takes the form of a tightly
composed, symmetrical mandala; her use of this structure was influenced by
childhood experiences she had watching sand mandalas being made and then
destroyed. Smith’s work, too, is about constant regeneration, as it acknowledges
that all goods are part of an incessant and ever-changing flow: garbage can be
transmuted into prized purchases, just as precious artifacts can degrade into
neglected rubbish. Her bound bales and bundles of used fabric speak to personal
and social stories of fabrication and connection as she advocates for a politics of
abstraction, an abstraction that laces together the materiality of race, gender and
economics. In Smith’s hands, waste becomes sheer explosive potential, compacted
together and ready to unleash on impact.

Notes
1 Andrew Brooks, Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand
Clothes (London: Zed Books, 2015), 98.
2 Ibid., 82.
3 Smith quoted in Kymberly N. Pinder, ‘Unbaled: An Interview with Shinique Smith’, Art
Journal, vol. 67, no. 2 (2008): 6–17.
4 Ibid., 9.
5 Brooks, Clothing Poverty, 98.
6 Shinique Smith, phone interview with author, October 2015.
7 Thelma Golden, Christine Y. Kim and Michael Paul Britto, Frequency (New York:
Studio Museum in Harlem, 2005); Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by
Women, 1947–2016, ed. Jenni Sorkin and Paul Schimmel (Los Angeles: Hauser,
Wirth, 2016).
8 Massimiliano Gioni, ‘Ask the Dust’, in Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,
ed. Richard Flood, Massimiliano Gioni and Laura J. Hoptman (London: Phaidon, in
association with the New Museum, 2007), 65.

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14 MARGARITA CABRERA:
LANDSCAPES OF
NEPANTLA
Laura August

Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable,

precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es
tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant
state of displacement.
GLORIA ANZALDÚA AND ANALOUISE KEATING, EDS., THIS BRIDGE WE
CALL HOME: RADICAL VISIONS FOR TRANSFORMATION

We have known since Ruskin that the appreciation of landscape as an

aesthetic object cannot be an occasion for complacency or untroubled
contemplation; rather, it must be the focus of a historical, political, and (yes)
aesthetic alertness to the violence and evil written on the land.
W. J. T. MITCHELL, ‘IMPERIAL LANDSCAPE’, LANDSCAPE AND POWER

In Chicanx and Latinx writing, nepantla – the Nahuatl term connoting in

betweenness – has signified a series of resistance strategies for survival in inhospitable
places. ‘Sometimes, [nepantla] is a reference to living in the borderlands or
crossroads, and the process of creating alternative spaces in which to live, function
or create … resisting the mainstream, while, reinterpreting and redefining cultural
difference as a place of power,’ writes historian Miguel Leon-Portilla.1 Writer, poet
and queer feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa considers nepantla a space for healing
the wounds of forced acculturation, for mending the scars of the conquest. The
people who move inside the space of nepantla, Anzaldúa writes, are the nepantleras,
the threshold people who facilitate passages between worlds. They are, she writes,
‘boundary-crossers, thresholders who initiate others in rites of passage, activistas
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who, from a listening, receptive, spiritual stance, rise to their own visions and shift
into acting them out, haciendo mundo Nuevo (introducing change)’.2 El Paso-
based artist Margarita Cabrera uses craft to open a dialogue with communities that
exist in spaces between citizenship and deportation, between fear and politics. For
her multi-year project, Space in Between, she looks to nepantla as a framework for
participatory making. For her, collaboration is both a craft-based practice, and a
mode of convening fragmented immigrant communities.
Cabrera’s artistic practice has long looked to the labour conditions of the large
factories producing consumer goods for export, or maquiladoras, along the US–
Mexico border. Since the early 2000s, Cabrera has created a series of soft sculptures
of mass-produced objects, such as toaster ovens, waffle makers, sewing machines,
blenders and automobiles, critiquing the labour practices that have sprung up
along the frontera. Just outside the purview of the United States, Mexican factories
staffed mostly by women mass-produce these items for North American markets,
using toxic processes in an often-exploitative work environment that is illegal in
factories north of the border. The United States turns a blind eye to the working
conditions of these factories, benefiting from the resulting low prices of goods
produced there. Cabrera hybridizes the machine, using sewn vinyl to replace the
parts of each domestic appliance that were made in Mexican maquiladoras.
Cabrera’s 2008 exhibition, The Craft of Resistance at Artpace in San Antonio,
Texas, brought this labour critique into the museum, and incorporated it as part of
her working process. The project included a makeshift factory in the artist’s studio,
where she trained volunteers to do a type of traditional metalwork native to Santa
Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, Mexico. Together, she and the volunteers created an
assembly line that produced 2,500 copper butterflies over the course of the artist’s
residency. Volunteers were seated in narrow cubicles at long tables in the Artpace
gallery. The crude work stations, outfitted with basic tools, transformed the gallery
space from one of object-display, to one of object-production. Making production
visible is one of the central tenets of Cabrera’s career-long investigation of craft and
community. In many ways, when we make the production of an object invisible,
we detach ourselves from the radical proposition underpinning craft: that making
something together can challenge systems of oppression, of mass production, of
isolation and of exclusion. Making copper monarch butterflies was also loaded
with symbolic significance. With their annual migratory patterns, the butterflies
suggested the importance of free passage across American borders. They pointed
to the difficulties that Mexican citizens have in crossing the border into the United
States, in stark contrast to the comparative ease with which US college students
make annual spring-break migrations into Mexico, or the warm reception with
which American expatriates are greeted upon moving south of the US border.
The copper butterflies were stamped on one side with the wing pattern of the
monarch. On the other, they were stamped with an impression of the American
penny. At the end of her Artpace residency, Cabrera installed the copper butterflies

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FIGURE 14.1 Margarita Cabrera in collaboration with Candelaria Cabrera, Space in Between –
Nopal, 2010, border patrol uniform fabric, copper wire, thread and terracotta pot. © Margarita
Cabrera/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

in a private home in San Antonio. From the space of the workshop/taller, they
entered the exchange of the marketplace. Here, Cabrera recreates certain labour
economies that underpin much of the US consumption on a micro scale in the
gallery. Like many goods produced in maquiladoras south of the border, their
value was determined by the price the market was willing to pay, not by the
objects’ relationship to labour. That is, the participatory action of making the
monarch butterflies became invisible in the work’s final installation. This gesture
of erasure was an intentional one, underscoring the distance between the space
of production and the space of consumption and replicating the invisibility of the
maquiladoras who make many familiar domestic electronics. There is a dividing
line here, too, between what we buy and where it comes from.
For Space in Between, Cabrera invites members of communities in Texas, North
Carolina and Arizona to work with her in a process of recycling discarded Border
Patrol uniforms and transforming them into soft sculptures of Indigenous desert
plants, such as the nopal and yucca (Figures 14.1–14.4, Plates 18 and 19). The soft
plant sculptures are installed in terracotta pots, their zippers, buttons and labels
peering through the plant’s form. ‘We immediately find out what we know as a
group’, Cabrera says:

We establish a sense of trust through dialogue, then we share experiences and

stories that are embroidered on the surface of the fabric. During the embroidery

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FIGURE 14.2 Margarita Cabrera, Nopal detail, 2010, border patrol uniform fabric, copper
wire, thread and terracotta pot. © Margarita Cabrera/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

process, we find out what skills we bring and share them with the group …
There is this amazing hybridity of different styles and our new embroideries
just happen. We celebrate our heritage that way … craft, and art, and culture-
making are at the heart of a community. If that disappears, we have nothing.3

Although Cabrera’s works utilize several traditional techniques, their impli­

cations for craft are perhaps more firmly grounded in the appropriation of the
taller/workshop model than in discussions of sewing, embroidery and metalwork.
For Cabrera, the workshop model has the potential to restore context and history
for communities that are distanced from the craft traditions of their native regions.
Process remains central to the politics of Cabrera’s production. ‘The experience
of a community project has to be all-inclusive’, she observes, ‘everyone who comes

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FIGURE 14.3 Margarita Cabrera, Sabila, 2010, border patrol uniform fabric, copper wire,
thread and terracotta pot. © Margarita Cabrera/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

into contact with the work experiences some type of change. Not just at the
individual level, but also at the institutional level. There are people coming into
this project at different levels: organizations, funders, exhibitors, individuals.’4 This
combination of participants offers Cabrera a space for engaging with the economic,
social and political structures that underpin the art world. ‘The real value of craft
at this moment has nothing to do with a stable ideology or indeed any singular
quality inhering in the idea of “craft,” but rather with craft’s strange, pressured and
contested position within the schematic of contemporary consumption’, writes Julia
Bryan-Wilson.5 Indeed, to discuss Cabrera’s craft in relation to histories of sewing
and women’s work is to see only one fraction of the objects’ resonance. ‘To be truly
inclusive of our diverse communities all the way through the systems within which
we work as a cultural community’ is a way of fundamentally reshaping how those

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FIGURE 14.4 Margarita Cabrera, Sabila detail, 2010, border patrol uniform fabric, copper
wire, thread and terracotta pot. © Margarita Cabrera/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

systems work, allowing and reflecting new ideas and ways of making, Cabrera
says. Part of the work is

challenging our curators, directors, [and] collectors, inviting them to accept our
changing nation’s demographics with more inclusive programming, making
them aware of these changes, and opening them up to new communities … it
is so important for collectors to know their privilege, their responsibility … [as
participants in Space in Between] they start to live [in] that moment and think
about it. I welcome them all to enter that transformative space of nepantla.6

In every iteration, Space in Between includes a series of lectures and talks related
to craft and activism, botany, migration and immigration. It includes educational
programming and scholarships, and it invites often-excluded members of local
communities to participate alongside museum patrons, curators, institutional
and local leaders: in Arizona, among other constituents, Cabrera invited Latinx,
African American and Central American youth in area detention centres to join
the workshops. Cabrera’s invitations to often-overlooked communities are an effort
to change the demographics of participation in the conversation around cultural
objects. This kind of broad invitation places the participatory model of her workshops
in sharp relief, the question becomes: At which point does inviting a cross-section of

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the local community to make work with her critique the systems of production and
consumption; at which point does it offer a centre for community identity and cultural
pride, and how does it complicate the way we understand both of these processes?
Anzaldúa’s nepantla is radical because it suggests an alternative to oppositional
politics of us/them, positing the political potential for inclusivity and community-
building through intersectionality. ‘When you’re in the place between worldviews
(nepantla) you’re able to slip between realities’, she writes. ‘A decision made in the
in-between place becomes a turning point initiating psychological and spiritual
transformations, making other kinds of experiences possible.’7 In the American
landscape of immigration, the space between places has become a hotly contested
political territory. Cabrera’s Space in Between has a particular resonance in Arizona,
after the passage of State Bylaw 1070 in 2010, that required police to determine the
immigration status of subjects arrested or detained, whenever they had ‘reasonable
suspicion’ that these detainees were living in the United States without legal
permission.8 In Cabrera’s workshop model, she valorizes the work of makers, of
craftspeople. Whereas Arizona’s laws target migrant workers for deportation and
racial profiling, Cabrera invites members of the local community to labour with
her, and connects them to the craft traditions of Mexico. She reverses the stigma
of being a migrant worker, instead highlighting the importance of immigrant craft
traditions, narratives and personal experiences.
In its Arizona iteration, ongoing since 2015, Space in Between works in
collaboration with the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. Founded in the
late 1930s, the Desert Botanical Garden is a 140-acre garden and plant research
institute for the conservation and celebration of desert plant life. The garden boasts
more than 21,000 plants, including almost 140 rare, threatened or endangered
species. The collaboration between Cabrera and the garden is significant because
it makes this popular tourist destination a participant in the conversation about
immigration; that is, the desert plants are transformed into symbols of political
struggle and the experience of passage between countries. As a tourist destination,
the garden’s constituency is also significant. Tourists have access to travel and to
leisure time. The activity of being a tourist is a dramatic contrast to the experience
of being a migrant or an undocumented worker, for example. Whereas tourists can
view a desert landscape as an aesthetic experience, the people who attempt to cross
the border from Mexico into the United States have a much different – often violent,
and dangerous – experience of this same landscape. Rather than romanticizing the
desert landscape, Cabrera’s Space in Between takes this unique landscape and its
plant life as a site for understanding very specific human experiences. There is a
dark side to landscape, as W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us and there are many ‘ “hard
facts” embedded in idealized settings’.9 In his article ‘Imperial Landscape’, Mitchell
argues for the importance of changing landscape from a noun to a verb. Rather
than describing landscape as an object to be seen or read, Mitchell proposes that
landscape can be understood ‘as a process by which social and subjective identities

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are formed’.10 The strong contrast between the tourist landscape offered by the
botanical garden – what Mitchell calls ‘a marketable commodity to be presented
and re-presented … an object to be purchased, consumed, and even brought
home in the form of souvenirs such as postcards and photo albums’11 – and the
handmade landscape that Cabrera and her collaborators stitch together offers a
radical rethinking of how landscape is inscribed with affect, experience, history
and trauma. ‘As a fetishized commodity, landscape is … an emblem of the social
relations it conceals’, Mitchell writes.12 By making a handmade landscape of cacti
and desert plants, Cabrera slows down the way in which her collaborators and
audiences consume the landscape around them. In the altered Border Patrol
uniforms, she embeds the twenty-first-century American immigrant experience
of border-crossing with the labour of stitching, of embroidery, of the handmade.
And, in the process, she unveils the violence that is often concealed in the landscape
of the American Southwest.
Negotiating one’s path through nepantla requires a constant rethinking of the
boundaries of community and how it is made, of political subjectivities and their
place in a physical environment. It is, in the end, a gesture towards building a
new American landscape that includes the complex experiences embedded in
the borderlands. Immigration to the United States is a central foundation of the
nation’s history, even as the political climate becomes aggressively xenophobic and
as laws are passed (and detention centres are built) to complicate the lives of new
immigrants, or to force them out of the country. There are many lives lived in
the borderlands (both literally and metaphorically), ‘lives for which the central
interpretive devices of the culture don’t quite work’, as historian Carolyn Steedman
writes.13 By looking to craft traditions and by co-opting the politics of the
maquiladora workshop, Cabrera offers other interpretive devices, suggesting that
American political discourse could benefit from a broader view, a more inclusive
approach to the experiences of the many people who choose to make their lives in
the United States.

Notes
1 Miguel Leon-Portilla, Endangered Cultures (Dallas: Southwestern Methodist University
Press, 1990), 10 (original emphasis).
2 Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home: Radical
Visions for Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2002), 571.
3 Margarita Cabrera, interview with the author, 12 May 2016.
4 Ibid.
5 Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘Sewing Notions’, ArtForum, vol. 49, no. 6 (February 2011): 73–74.
6 Margarita Cabrera, interview with the author, 12 May 2016.
7 Anzaldúa and Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home, 567, 569.

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8 Although other provisions of the bill were subsequently blocked by the U.S. Supreme
Court, the so-called show me your papers provision remains official policy as of the
writing of this text.
9 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 5.
10 Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’, 1.
11 Ibid., 15.
12 Ibid.
13 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London: Virago, 1986), 5.

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15 THE SOVEREIGN STITCH:

REREADING EMBROIDERY
AS A CRITICAL FEMINIST
DECOLONIAL TEXT
Ellyn Walker

What does it mean to imagine the sewing needle as a dangerous tool and
to envision female collective textile making as a process that might upend
conventions, threaten state structure, or wreak political havoc?1
JULIA BRYAN-WILSON

Art and craft have always served as important vehicles for political protest and
cultural activism, particularly feminist activism(s), as their visual forms lend
creatively to public dissemination, tactile and social engagement. Embroidery
is no different, acting as a critical site of resistance and re-imagination for its
creators, users and viewers alike. As an active material process, embroidery
allows for a diversity of perspectives and histories to unfold, through a distinct
tactile and visual language that operates as a critical text. Embroidery conveys
the touch and negotiation of hands in motion, and allows space for individual
agency, processes of undoing, redoing and intimate imagining. Like embroidery,
‘the story of decolonization is one that has room for many voices, one where many
people can find ways to belong on the land without dominating, destroying and
displacing Indigenous societies,2 and that can be practiced and evidenced through
everyday acts of sovereignty such as stitching. Inuk art historian Heather Igloliorte
nuances the meaning of ‘sovereignty’ as something that is unique to Indigenous
societies and worldviews, explaining it is a ‘fundamentally different formation
than the idea of nationhood’,3 which has come to define historical and modern-
day colonial nation states. Using the example of her own Indigenous culture,
Igloliorte distinguishes Inuit people’s understanding of sovereignty from the state,
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emphasizing its dependence on the revitalization and preservation of culturally

specific ways of knowing and doing, such as through art-making. She notes
how this allows for the ‘strengthen[ing of] our communities and cultivat[ation
of] our cultural resilience’,4 which can enable long-term forms of sovereignty.
This essay builds on Igloliorte’s perspective, to offer a reorientation of dominant
readings of embroidery as a feminized, and often Indigenized or culturally distinct
material practice. I consider embroidery work from three distinct sites across the
Americas: Chile, Chiapas and Canada, to reimagine its possibilities as a creative
expression of critical feminist organizing, Indigenous self-determination, cultural
resistance, remembrance and resilience – all of which are vital processes within the
larger struggle for decolonization.5
Art historian Rozsika Parker’s foundational book, The Subversive Stitch:
Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, offers a particular reading of the role
of embroidery in women’s lives throughout European and Western nation-building
projects. In it, Parker critically asserts that, ‘to know the history of embroidery
is to know the history of women’.6 She illustrates this history through a specific
historiography of domestic and fine art examples spanning the past 500 years,
which mirrors the timeline of European contact and colonization7 on the lands now
known as North America. With case studies that break down distinctions between
notions of ‘art’ and ‘craft’, such as historical Victorian household embroidery, or the
example of feminist artist Judy Chicago’s well-known multimedia installation The
Dinner Party (1974), Parker highlights the use of embroidery by women to advance
discussions about women. In doing so, she offers an important, albeit incomplete,
genealogy of embroidery as a (white) feminist archive. While The Subversive
Stitch points to embroidery’s potential as a site that constructs the feminine, while
simultaneously offering a place to resist such constructions; Parker’s consideration
of women and the diversity of their subject positions is limited, as her text employs
a Eurocentric lens characteristic of the context of second-wave feminism in
which she was writing. Yet there remains enormous potential to build on Parker’s
perspective, to decolonize and expand its reading, in particular, through the
examination of embroidery outside of a settler-colonial8 feminist framework and
beyond Eurocentric notions of border or national (and economic) sovereignty.
Parker’s work, and others like it, is important to unsettle because it constructs
a record of embroidery that privileges white cultural production over all others.
In particular, elisions of Indigenous and culturally diverse examples render
their presence and artistry invisible, which is especially problematic in light
of the range of cultural identities and diverse practices possible within various
sites of embroidery production over time. Following on recent interdisciplinary
scholarship that explores the ‘classed, raced, gendered and sexualized formations’9
of textile production, a number of open-ended critiques emerge in response to
Parker’s markedly selective telling.10 My analysis responds to The Subversive Stitch’s
omissions through a focus on Indigenous, anti-colonial and other culturally

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specific forms of embroidery. I consider the production of arpilleras in Chile,

huipiles in Mexico and moccasins in Canada, as deeply land-based, matriarchal
and politicized practices. While decolonization is by no means something
complete(d) within the creation of a work of embroidery – as decolonization is
neither a metaphor nor an endpoint11 – Indigenous and diverse communities of
women have used embroidery to attain cultural and economic sovereignty for
centuries. Today, communities around the world continue to mobilize broader
projects of social justice, truth and reconciliation. It is from this critical decolonial
perspective that I approach textile works that speak from women’s embodied
experience(s), and that create renewed spaces for bodily and cultural sovereignty
through creative and collectivized forms of making.
Following Igloliorte’s assertion that ‘the arts can play a determining role in
[the] effort to reassert cultural sovereignty’,12 this essay explores examples of
embroidery that afford a unique understanding of critical feminist, decolonial
and emancipatory work. Specifically, I look at how Indigenous, activist and
culturally diverse communities of women across the Americas use embroidery to
expose histories of gendered, colonial and state-sanctioned violence, and create
models of feminist making, community-building and Indigenous resurgence.13
This research is framed within a hemispheric context and engages with writing
in critical art history, Indigenous and cultural studies to consider the local and
global implications of embroidery as a nuanced text representative of feminist
and Indigenous resistance and cultural creativity. I view embroidery as a text
because it operates as a site for close reading, which in turn, (and importantly),
promotes new ways to look, feel and listen more deeply to cultural objects and their
extended relations. This kind of intertextual reading also underscores the shared
etymological roots of the words textile and text, which originate from the Latin
word texere, which means to weave. As Janet Berlo writes, ‘textiles are eloquent
texts, encoding history, change, appropriation, oppression and endurance, as
well as personal and cultural creative visions’.14 The following examples evidence
embroidery as a complex and multivalent space of resistance, remembrance and
autonomy through its close making as well as its close reading.

Chilean arpilleras
Chile, a protracted strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean in what
is now modern-day South America, was inhabited and cared for by Inca, Mapuche
and other Indigenous groups for millennia before colonization by the Spanish
in the mid-sixteenth century. Though successfully establishing independence
again in 1818 as a sovereign republic, Chile’s most notable political history is,
perhaps, its most violent one: General Augusto Pinochet’s ruthless and violent
dictatorship from 1973 to 1989. Employing terror as a political strategy, Pinochet

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used ‘censorship, curfew, exile, prison, torture, and desparecidos (disappearance) –

people taken by the police and never seen again’ to frighten Chileans into silence
and civil obedience.15 Thousands of people, predominantly men, ‘disappeared at
the hands of Pinochet’s secret police [and still] have yet to be found’,16 while Chile’s
second national Truth Commission Report on Torture and Political Imprisonment
counts the total number of people officially registered as torture victims at 38,254.17
Thinking about Chile’s tragic reality is inseparable from the question of what role
‘gender, women’s experiences, and the struggle for human rights occup[ies] in this
history’.18 Chilean embroidered arpilleras, tiny patchworked images, exemplify
these multifaceted roles, as they are ‘made by hands of mothers, daughters, sisters,
and wives – the living relatives of loved ones who have disappeared’,19 and make
visible lives truncated by state and colonial violence.
Arpilleras are small, brightly coloured textiles that feature patchwork and
embroidery as narrative devices. They are made by affixing vibrant scraps of
fabrics onto a rectangular piece of burlap (arpillera in Spanish), which acts as the
base. An artistic form unique to Chile, each arpillera tells a story ‘where speech
has not [before] been possible’,20 in a way that is at once delicate and powerful.
More precisely, ‘the arpillera signals what it means to have a life interrupted or
suspended, a life that no longer exists’,21 where each stitch, in its repetitive circular
motion, can be seen as a poetic gesture towards a reparative relation or future.
In Marjorie Agosín’s Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Resistance, she explains that
‘each stitch mends the world and at the same time affirms a personal and universal
history … [as they] take on the role of uniting families and sewing broken lives’.22
The stitches insist on the women’s survival in spite of their incommensurate losses,
as well as the gruesome realities of how their loved ones were taken. With this
perspective, the act of making arpilleras enables tactile and textual experiences
of witnessing, storytelling and remembrance, which are essential parts of both
healing and decolonizing processes. Arpilleras also call for truth-telling and
national accountability despite ongoing denial by the state, what cultural studies
scholar Roger I. Simon described as a critical ‘remembrance practice’ – a type of
visual or material representation that ‘rearticulates memory over and against the
desire and necessity of forgetting’.23 The rich intersections that exist between the
culturally specific craft object, political gesture and alternative historical document
demonstrate the complexity inherent in arpilleras and their making.
Arpilleras originated within the tradition of narrative textiles and began as ‘a
clandestine art made in the basements of churches or in the houses of marginalized
women’ during the first few years of Pinochet’s regime.24 The women used clothing
from disappeared loved ones to imbue the arpilleras with the scents of the bodies
that once wore them. Representative of illegal speech acts, arpilleras uniquely
communicate in a dual language established by their makers, as their aesthetic
qualities – such as the use of miniature dolls, bright colours or perfectly sunny
landscapes – depict seemingly cheerful and childlike pictures that are, in actuality,

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deeply subversive, dark and political. Arpilleras were initially made in secret
‘under the auspices of the Comité Pro-Paz (Pro-Peace Committee) and then the
Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicarate of Solidarity), a human rights agency affiliated
with the Catholic Archdiocese of Santiago’,25 whose official status and religious
affiliation granted the women relative protection from state surveillance and the
ongoing threat of disturbance. Despite their classified production, women joined
the workshops ‘out of a sense of solidarity and wanted to offer their assistance
by participating in a common humanitarian project’.26 In this regard, arpillera
workshops became informal centres of feminist and anti-colonial solidarity and
community-building, where the act of gathering turned women’s individual grief
into collective outrage and creative resistance towards the state, and offered a place
to remember and mobilize alternative tellings of Chilean history. Likewise, the
embroidering process brought women together in spite of the state’s terrorizing
acts of familial rupture, isolation and gendered violence, creating spaces for
women’s collective healing and exchange.
Violeta Morales, a prolific arpillerista working during (and after) Pinochet’s
regime, made countless arpilleras in response to the disappearance of her brother
Newton Morales in 1974. In her graphic arpillera work, Sala de Torturas (Chamber
of Torture) from 1996 (Figure 15.1), Morales depicts a chilling scene of hidden

FIGURE 15.1 Violeta Morales, Sala de Torturas (Chamber of Torture), 1996. Photo: John
Wiggins. From the private collection of Marjorie Agosín.

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and tortured bodies through their abstract representation as captives. This is

made explicit through the depiction of bodies squeezed inside familiar shapes of
furniture, and tied to chairs and bedposts; each figure is embroidered as a simple
silhouette against an ominous background of dark fabric. Here, the strategic use
of contrasting colours and figurative abstraction draw attention to the very real
human lives involved and eventually extinguished in these harrowing yet colourful
scenes of internment that reflect much larger experiences of state violence.
While not as ‘cheerful’ as many popular arpillera scenes, this work nevertheless
relies on similar conventions: using unusual colour combinations, bold graphic
shapes and human abstraction. Though the illustration of torture is undeniably
difficult, Morales’s arpillera – no matter how disturbing it is to look at – insists on
a truth that has for so long been denied and made invisible on both national and
international levels. Sala de Torturas tells an important counter-story to Chile’s
‘official’ history, making visible the lives of the disappeared, and insisting that they
will not be forgotten.
The arpilleras’ small size made them easy to roll, pack and conceal as ‘illegal’
objects to travel across borders, in the context of the reigning political regime
that censored and murdered dissidents. However, it was not until later that
arpilleras began to circulate more globally, as the international movement for
human rights brought increased attention to a country in crisis. Their strategic
portability allowed for extra-national movement through networks of ‘Chilean
exiles, feminists, humanitarian aid organizations, progressive church groups,
NGOs, global trade gift stores’,27 among other Indigenous and anti-colonial
organizations. It is important to note that arpilleras were not made exclusively by
Indigenous women – as Indigenous identities in the context of Chile (and other
Latinx communities) relate to complex histories of colonization, enslavement,
diaspora and migration28 that involve Indigenous, African, European, Spanish
and other populations. However, arpilleras play an important role in the
movement for decolonization, as their embroidered narratives refuse the
injustice(s) of Pinochet’s regime, which is just one piece of a much longer history
of colonial occupation, dislocation and oppression in the Americas. Arpilleras
also demonstrate how decolonization work, like commitments to social and
environmental justice, is not only the purview of Indigenous makers and
communities. Rather, the ongoing work of dismantling colonial structures and
systemic forces that inequitably affect Indigenous people is relevant to all people
and must involve everyone’s efforts.
Arpilleras make visible the effects of violence that are specific to the Chilean
context – representing familial and maternal loss and sometimes, torture and
amputation. Notably, loss is often depicted as an absence within arpilleras, as in
Sala de Torturas – outlined shapes of bodies that are clearly missing. Other scenes
of ‘absence’ found in arpilleras depict families gathered around the dinner table
with seats that remain empty. In conversation with these examples, decolonization

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can be thought of as ‘an [equally difficult to represent] elsewhere’,29 a future

free of gendered violence, colonial oppression, disappearance and state denial,
that inherently requires a different way of seeing, relating to and valuing life.
Indigenous and cultural studies scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe
this different future as requiring ‘a change in the order of the world’,30 perhaps
one that cannot yet be made fully visible, amid society’s current configuration(s).
Yet the personal and forthright representation of human lives in arpillera imagery
calls for a decolonizing gaze, one that sees outside of the purview of colonial
state logics, and instead, insists on the recognition of human rights in the face of
physical disappearance and denial.
While arpilleras are certainly not the only form of Chilean resistance practiced
during Pinochet’s terrifying rule, they were used to create a visual language
for human rights at a time when human lives were seen as disposable. Agosín
questions where ‘the role of the arpilleristas fit in th[e]‌space of debate to rethink
Chile in relation to the more visible civil participation that occurs in a country’.31
Arpilleras call for and promote justice in multiple ways: through community-
building, forming cooperative and collaborative relationships, and with feminist,
anti-colonial and human rights activism. Indeed, through their collective making,
individual or institutional collection, intra and extra-national dissemination, and
public or private display, arpilleras represent sovereign cultural objects. They
embody national truths and counter-narratives in spite of state suppression. Just as
Parker articulates the reciprocal relationship between embroidery and women, the
work of arpilleras ‘utilizes the feminine by articulating the most intimate gestures,
such as the long hours of dedication to manual work in order to create textiles that,
from the universal and feminine perspectives, tell a story of the war, horror, and
violence created by men’.32 Their visual narratives insist on the lived experiences of
their makers to mark the losses of their sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles,
cousins and friends. Even in the process of making, ‘tying [the] ends, deciding
on the colors that can speak of the detainment of a loved one or the torture
endured’, they tell a unique story and allow others to participate in a process of
remembering.33 For this reason, arpilleras are most often unsigned, remaining
‘anonymous in order to ensure that [they] remain a collective expression of a
historical period’,34 one that, indeed, must collectively never be forgotten. In this
way, arpilleras reflect Simon’s notion of a ‘remembrance practice’, rearticulating
memory in the face of its denial and erasure. While the front of the arpilleras
functions as an explicit public text, it is on the back that a small space for personal,
more private communication is reserved: some arpilleras feature a tiny pocket on
their reverse, a place where their makers can leave a personal message of love,
mourning or hope that has ‘the ability to mend, repair, and recover’ underground
histories.35 Agosín elaborates on this significance, explaining that ‘to find a message
in a pocket is an act of communion and solidarity with the woman who made the
arpillera’.36

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As art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson puts it, ‘once made by a threatened

underground network of women’, arpilleras ‘have been incorporated into official
spaces of memory and commerce as a source of national pride’.37 Museum
collections have focused on historical arpilleras made between 1974 to 1989,
though small numbers of contemporary arpilleras are still being produced.
Arpilleras embody personal histories of loss, but at the same time, of survival. As
such, they represent a vital act of memory work, allowing others to bear witness
to state and gendered violence and to remember the many human lives affected
by it. In doing so, arpilleras demonstrate the creative resilience of women during
a national terror campaign that desecrated their families, and rearticulate their
bodily sovereignty and agency through embroidered testimony and truth-telling.

Chiapan huipiles
Chiapas, a free and sovereign state within Mexico bordered by parts of Guatemala
and the Pacific Ocean, is home to one of the largest Indigenous populations in
the country. Its most well-known municipality, San Cristóbal de las Casas, is
located in the central highlands of Mexico and aptly translates to ‘place in the
clouds’ in local Tzotzil and Tzeltal languages, as its elevation exceeds more than
7,000 feet. While much of San Cristóbal’s history is representative of colonial
expansion and contemporary Latin American tourism, its reputation has come
to symbolize social and Indigenous justice on a global scale, when the world
watched the masked Zapatista Army of National Liberation or Ejército Zapatista
de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) storm San Cristóbal on 1 January 1994. This was
the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was
signed by Canada, the United States and Mexico, where in Article 27, Indigenous
land rights were neither recognized nor protected. Primarily made up of rural
Indigenous people, this revolutionary and militant leftist group (also known as the
Zapatistas or EZLN) declared war on the Mexican state in defence of their lands
and resources, and they continue to live in sovereign communities or ‘caracoles’
across Chiapas. The movement’s primary goals include addressing ‘the basic needs
of social development for farms and communities, education, healthcare, family-
planning and women’s empowerment, in a uniquely Indigenous way’.38 Chiapan
embroidery has played a significant role in Indigenous resistance movements such
as for the Zapatistas, where the use of renewable land-based materials, ancestral
imagery, feminist intergenerational production and autonomous economic
models represent important practices of Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.
Uniquely, Indigenous peoples’ ‘relationships to land comprise their epistemologies,
ontologies, and cosmologies’, and as such, reflect ‘creation stories, not colonization
stories, about how they came to be in a particular place’.39 One such epistemology
is the Maize Creation story told by traditional Maya peoples, that describes maize

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(corn) as having given birth to their original ancestors. In what is now present-day
Chiapas, the cereal grain known as corn is said to have been first invented, where
in the same regions of central and southern Mexico, Maya peoples cultivated this
renewable crop that would become a staple of diet and culture for Indigenous
peoples, and later, for people all over the world.
In the previous example of Chilean arpilleras, Marjorie Agosín described fabric
as an intimate site of creation, as ‘the experience of working with [textile] evokes
the personal function of memory’ and ‘implies a close relationship between a
person’s hands and the history of the fabric itself ’.40 The same can be said of Chiapan
embroidered huipiles, which reveal culturally specific images, creative practices,
gendered customs of dress and natural resources grown from autonomous
Indigenous communities located across the mountainous highlands of the Mexican
state. Although huipiles are a popular Mayan dress in past and present-day central
Mexico, they can also be found throughout parts of Guatemala and other regions
of Central America, with slightly varied narrative symbols and aesthetic designs.
This geographic expansion originally reflected the mobility of Indigenous peoples,
and their resultant exchange; however, it has also come to represent the dislocation
of many contemporary Indigenous communities due to increasing cartel violence
enacted across the country, causing many ‘rural populations to flee their land and
homes’.41 These traditional untailored women’s garments tell stories reflective of
the people who create them, and embody sovereign Indigenous knowledges. Their
unique boxy shape (Figure 15.2, Plate 20) originates from early Mesoamerican times
and continues to be the standard style – appearing like an oversized tunic ‘constructed
of one, two, or three rectangular webs of cloth sewn together lengthwise’.42 Within
the Chiapan example, huipiles are produced on a handmade back-strap loom that is
shared among women, set up in modest one-room structures found within various
caracoles – where girls have the opportunity to grow up around their mothers,
grandmothers and great-grandmothers who all work on the same loom. By engaging
inter- and multigenerationally in such long-standing traditions, the women who
make huipiles ‘highlight [the] cultural continuities’ that Igloliorte emphasizes are an
essential process in achieving cultural sovereignty.43
In historian Irmgard Weitlaner Johnson’s study of Chiapan huipiles, he describes
their construction as ‘a variation of plain weave [and] paired warp interlace in an
over-and-under fashion, with weft units composed of four singles’.44 This is also
known as a ‘basket weave’, which produces both a vertical and horizontal pattern
of interlocking threads which hold together. He explains that the huipil’s ‘sewing
is done on the reverse side by means of tightly worked whipping stitches’ where
‘the raw edges [are] reinforced with closely made blanket stitches’ on the back.45
Vertical slots are left unsewn on each side for narrow arm openings and again at the
top for the small neck aperture – modest slits that lend themselves to the rest of the
blouse’s voluminous shape. This ‘boxy’ effect is not banal – as many believe it serves
a ritualistic function that represents the woman as the centre of the symbolic world,

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FIGURE 15.2 Blouse, Huipil, San Andreas Larainzar or Magdalenas, Chiapas, Mexico,
Tzotzil Maya, cotton, wool, mid-twentieth century. Opekar/Webster Collection, T94.0982.
Courtesy: Textile Museum of Canada.

as her head passes through the huipil’s neck opening, representative of a mountain
range or horizon line, seemingly into the sky. This poetic image brings to mind
other considerations, like how the autonomy of resource and clothing production
shares many connections with Indigenous epistemologies and ways of life, such
as living off and with the land, and women-led communities. This is especially
apt for Zapatista women, who were equal participants in the 1994 uprising, and
continue to arm themselves and actively defend their communities, alongside
men. Sadly, the realities of ongoing militancy have become increasingly needed in
many Zapatista, Indigenous and rural communities, as cartel presence and power
has come to affect the contemporary takeover of land, disenfranchisement and
murder of Mexican people. Embroidered depictions of weapons, masks and EZLN
insignias can now be found as common symbols on Zapatista-made huipiles.
In Magdalena Aldama, a Chiapan Tzotzil village near San Cristóbal famous for
its weaving, local Indigenous storytelling is prominently featured on its huipiles.
For instance, popular decorated huipiles typically feature vibrant geometric
basket-weave patterns that incorporate Mayan iconography as trim at the bottom
and along the edges of the neckline and sleeves. Such iconography might include

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FIGURE 15.3 Woman weaving huipil, Mural, Oventic caracole, 1999, Chiapas, Mexico.
Photo: Ellyn Walker, 2015.

thunderbirds, cacti flowers, burdock or ramshorn snails; or the previously

mentioned examples specific to the EZLN. Embroidered on white cotton that has
been cultivated, hand spun, dyed and pressed on a back-strap loom (Figure 15.3),
the multicoloured threads sewn into the huipil tell a cultural and place-based story
through their purposeful combination, such as the animals and plants that thrive
on the same land shared with the Tzotzil and Zapatista people. Harvested from
the insects that live on cacti found throughout Mexico, huipil fibres are dyed with
cochineal – a natural dye that has been produced and used by Maya peoples for
thousands of years. The importance of land-based perspectives is also evidenced
by the survival and sustained use of early natural materials like yarn, cotton, yucca
and sometimes feathers, which can be seen in formal huipiles worn on special
occasions. While these pre-Hispanic natural fibres continue to be harvested and
used within many Indigenous communities today; others have also been adopted,
such as wool and silk introduced by the Spanish during colonization.
In addition to wearing these traditional items themselves, many Tzotzil women
and girls who live in municipal areas and sovereign Indigenous caracoles weave

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and embroider textiles to sell both inside and outside of their communities. These
include huipiles that are decorated with plain-weave embroidery and abstract
outlines of EZLN figures (easily indicated by their masked faces), or the iconic
imagery of corn crops. They are sold directly to tourists, where the one-room huts
popular among caracoles are carefully arranged in such a way that the huipiles for
sale are located right at the entrance, with a larger area reserved for working in the
back. Huipiles are also sold along the highways leading up to caracoles; or taken
and sold in nearby towns, urban textile and tourist centres and worldwide Zapatista
cooperatives. Thus, huipiles contribute to the empowerment of Indigenous
women, their communities and their economic autonomy through their function
as sovereign objects, like with arpilleras, made by ‘sovereign subjects, as things,
formed by power relations, materials, pressure and gravity’.46
Furthering this embodied sovereignty is the fact that the knowledge of their
making is shared and repeated across generations, whereby huipiles take shape
through the land-based, material and aesthetic teachings of Mayan women across
time. In unifying the space between harvest-to-(re)production, the huipil’s very
material being connotes more than just physical survival; rather, it refers to the
resilience of Indigenous peoples to survive and thrive in spite of settler-colonialism
and its continued forms, which are particularly complex in the context of Mexico.
Anishnaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s notion of ‘survivance’ as ‘an active sense of
[Indigenous] presence’ is relevant here, similar to Igloliorte’s notion of cultural
sovereignty, as it reflects the ways in which culturally specific Indigenous practices
embody ‘the continuance of native stories’,47 intimate modes of doing and knowing,
and ongoing ancestral relations in a place. Huipiles embody this vital connection
that Indigenous people have to land, place and being, and signify important sites
of creative resistance to colonial, state and other emergent practices of domination
and displacement.
It is important to recognize that the production of these kinds of textiles under
the NAFTA is a significant and complex counteraction to global capitalist systems.
The grassroots and land-based processes of huipil production also challenge the
ongoing corruption within Mexico’s national economy, where local and powerful
criminally organized drug trafficking cartels48 continue to take over land, control
bodies and desecrate communities – a contemporary form of genocidal capitalism
and alternative imagining of what can be considered colonization. Alongside the
growing international drug economy, cartels continue to expand, spurring increase
in their range of geographic control, measures of population displacement, and
tactics of mass violence, including murder. Here we see both the specific and
broad impacts of ‘the drug trade and cartel activity on land use in diverse regions’,49
including its social, cultural, familial and environmentally destructive effects.
These are some of the economic and political circumstances that influenced the
original Zapatista uprising in 1994, as well as the continued calls for Indigenous
and basic human rights that have resounded since the Mexican Revolution,

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which took place less than a century before. Today, increasing cartel growth and
power, alongside events of government collusion, continue to mar and terrorize
Indigenous and broader communities across Mexico, reflective of the urgent
conditions many migrants today face. Because the making of huipiles focuses on
Indigenous ways of being such as local harvest, production and sustainability, it
remains important for their makers to be territorially and community-situated, to
work close to the land from which the fibres, like their ancestors, originate – rather
than in urban environs or cartel zones. Thus, the production of huipiles uniquely
ties people to their land, and in doing so, also mobilizes Indigenous communities
and knowledges through the sharing of women’s intergenerational teachings
and continuance of material practices, even amid shifting conditions, forms and
realities of capitalism and coloniality. Huipiles also represent Indigenous resistance
to Mexico’s increasingly expanded cartel-dominated economy and related land-
grabbing tactics, where the sale of huipiles both within and outside of Zapatista
caracoles materially supports Indigenous cultural production and economic
sovereignty in the face of a new colonial threat.

Aboriginal moccasin vamps

Bordered by three oceans, Canada is the world’s second largest country in terms
of total area mass and, like the above-mentioned locations, has been inhabited by
Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Similar to Chile and Chiapas, Canada
has its own history of settler-colonialism, despite former prime minister Stephen
Harper’s vivid denial, when he infamously stated during the 2010 Toronto G20
Summit that ‘Canada has no history of colonialism’.50 Today, Canada is a land
inhabited by Indigenous peoples, settlers, immigrants and refugees from all over
the world. Yet despite its seeming ‘diversity’ and ‘progress’, it also has an epidemic
of colonial violence, today acknowledged as a ‘Canadian genocide’, against its
Aboriginal women. I use the word ‘Aboriginal’ here to invoke Indigeneity in the
Canadian context, which includes people of First Nations, Métis and Inuit ancestry.
While violence against Aboriginal women and girls in Canada sadly takes a variety
of forms, I am focusing on works and practices that address their disappearance
and murders; numbered at 1,200 women in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s
2014 national report, and more recently at 4,232 by the Native Women’s
Association of Canada.51 In response to this ostensibly increasing epidemic, Métis
artist Christi Belcourt initiated the commemorative art project Walking with
Our Sisters (WWOS) (2012–2020) to ‘honour the lives of missing and murdered
Indigenous Women of Canada and the United States; to acknowledge the grief and
torment families of these women continue to suffer; and to raise awareness of this
issue and create opportunity for broad community-based dialogue’.52 Importantly,
WWOS launched as a community-led action in spite of repeated (and, at that

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time, unanswered) calls from Indigenous leaders and international human rights
organizations for a national inquiry, which wouldn’t begin until 2015 under Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. Through the project’s assemblage of
hand-beaded and embroidered moccasins vamps (tops), each pair memorializes a
missing or murdered woman and the family, friends and citizens who have been
affected and still think of her.
The loss of Indigenous women is a complex phenomenon, and, accordingly,
WWOS is a multifaceted project. Described by Belcourt as a ‘contemporary art
installation’, WWOS uniquely straddles the realms of art, community practice
and Indigenous traditionalism (which refers to both sacred and nostalgic
understandings of Indigenous identity). The installation consists of 1,700 pairs
of handmade moccasin vamps donated by amateur and experienced makers alike
who responded to Belcourt’s public call for vamps to commemorate each missing
and murdered Indigenous woman. Reflective of the fact that gendered and colonial
violence in Canada is a social epidemic that implicates Indigenous and non-
Indigenous people, the project was open to anyone who wanted to contribute, and
‘the vamps were gathered without a curatorial filter [and] range from beautifully
crafted fine art objects to aesthetically weak but affective expressions of sadness,
rage, and solidarity’.53 Since its beginnings, WWOS has been shown in art galleries,
museums and community spaces – each context with its own set of specified
conventions.
In the art institution, ‘the exhibition is curator-free and abides by [distinct]
protocols’ such as location-based community advisory committees who set the
rules of entry, and that, in turn, work to Indigenize the space.54 Métis artist-curator
David Garneau unpacks this process further, explaining that ‘because the show is
novel’ in its multidisciplinary form ‘and the sites are usually non-Indigenous, there
are no specific protocols that cover it. Gatherings occur long in advance of the
installation to discuss the right way to do things’.55 This reflects a culturally specific,
sovereign curatorial process that intervenes into dominant modes of institutional
governance, curating and exhibition-making, as an exhibition’s conditions for
entry and presentation are normally set by its hosting institution, not its ‘guests’.
This reversal of the host/guest metaphor within WWOS’s institutional enactment
offers particular relevance for conversations around decolonization, as it works
to highlight the ways in which settlers are always guests on Indigenous lands in
Canada (and many other places). The WWOS project dislocates contemporary
art spaces from their traditional authoritative role, and re-centres them around
Indigenous models of gathering, self-expression and sovereignty. While the
project continues to be overseen by Belcourt, ‘each venue is managed by a team
of local women who adapt protocols and arrange the vamps according to their
local meanings and needs’, using the presentation of moccasins as substitutes
for missing women within a site-specific framework.56 Here, it is both their
presentation and making that are of importance, where the different ways of

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FIGURE 15.4 Christi Belcourt, Walking with Our Sisters, installation at Carleton University
Art Gallery, 2015. Photo: Leah Snyder.

arranging the moccasins reflect Indigenous-only conversations and women’s site-

specific negotiations (Figure 15.4).
Belcourt’s involvement of community-based committees also gives voice and
agency to Indigenous women who have, in light of Canadian art and national
histories, largely been silenced, misappropriated or ignored. The handmade vamps
included in WWOS evidence a ‘creative response that builds on and adapts tradition
to express and critique a real issue faced by living Indigenous people’ within a local
context.57 Alas, the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women
and girls should be viewed as an urgent issue for all Canadians or people who now
find themselves on these lands, as the open-ended participatory nature of WWOS
reflects. This gives further relevance to the more than 230 recommendations
to the federal government, police and larger Canadian public, to address this
‘Canadian genocide’, as outlined in the final report from the Inquiry for Missing
and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.58 Opportunities exist for people of
diverse geographies and backgrounds to engage with the project’s politics in a
variety of ways: through individual moccasin creation, public exhibition viewing,
attendance at the project’s many parallel programs, or simply through learning
more about the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women in Canada, and
beyond.
Like the insight gained from studying the natural materials of Chiapan
huipiles, there is also much to learn from looking at the materials that comprise
Aboriginal moccasins. WWOS project contributor Sandra Benoit’s moccasins,

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for example, feature raw deer hide vamps with large peonies beaded at the top
of each foot. The animal hide – that references its hunt, dissection, skinning,
tanning and other preparatory acts practiced by many land-based Aboriginal
communities – evidences the health of the maker’s community or family with
regards to their animal population, as well as knowledge of traditional methods
of survival and crafts. Similarly, the practice of beading demonstrates the
continuity of Indigenous cultural production, as beading has been an important
artistic form for many Indigenous communities across North America,
originally employing local natural materials like porcupine quills and Atlantic
quahog and whelk shells, among others. Glass beads were later incorporated
into both bead- and quillwork, once introduced via European contact, trade
and increasing settlement across the continent (see Nicole Burisch, Chapter 3).
Historically, beads were also used to record treaties, important events and oral
traditions within Indigenous societies, as well as in exchange, or later as a form
of currency with European settlers. The process of physically sewing beads
into natural fibre or animal hide has been passed down through generations of
grandmothers, where, as is the case in Chile and Chiapas, embroidery remains
a largely women-centred practice within Aboriginal communities.
More specifically, beading plays a historical and pedagogical role in the
practice of individual and cultural sovereignty, as its endurance across different
generations of women most often went hand in hand with conversations about
their community and its histories.59 In such a setting, beaded creations embody
critical cultural histories, feminist and intergenerational practices, as well as
deeply personal meanings. With this perspective, the various makers of WWOS
moccasins demonstrate their solidarity with the struggle for Indigenous
and women’s rights through their volunteer participation in the project, and
continuance of culturally-specific practices. Each stitch that pierces the animal
skin – akin to the individual and collective violence inflicted on Indigenous
women’s bodies – symbolizes a kind of ‘repair’, wherein the attentive connection
of each bead stitched to the expanded object is a tactile example of a relationship
of holding, as well as care.
In addition to their gathering and presentation, the act of making and
contributing moccasin vamps is akin to materializing and holding space for
human presence: for the women who have been lost or ‘disappeared’. This reflects
a simultaneous gesture of individual and collective ‘remembrance’, to invoke the
words of Simon again, where the project’s multifaceted processes of creation,
collecting, organizing and visualizing allow for intimate moments of recollection.
Moccasin beading, particularly within the WWOS project, also represents
important evidence of cultural continuity and Indigenous survival in spite of
ongoing realities of colonial oppression and gendered, genocidal violence, as
the project’s contributors are participating in an Indigenous-centred framework.
Igloliorte describes the deeply politicized context in which many contemporary

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Indigenous artists work. She outlines how their participation in ‘the creation and
appreciation of artwork that resists and subverts the legacies of colonization’,60
works to directly support the larger struggle for Indigenous cultural sovereignty.
Despite the alarming rate at which Aboriginal women and girls disappear or are
subject to violence – twelve times more likely to be murdered than any other
demographic in Canada61 – women continue to thrive on this land and refuse to
accept the realities of colonial injustice, as evidenced in their artistic work and
collaborative imagining. The beaded and embroidered vamps embody hopefulness
and resistance to domination using creativity as a vehicle to make visible the ways
in which missing and murdered Aboriginal women are by no means forgotten, but
rather, continuously remembered.

Conclusion
In the resistance to the violence of gender-based oppression, vibrant worlds
have emerged.62
– Heather Davis

The continued use of piercing and knotting techniques in fabric – known also as
embroidery – has enduring potential as a creative and tensive mode of feminist
expression and resistance. Its use in diverse forms of artistic production over time
demonstrates this relevance across varied practices, cultures and geographies.
The significance of embroidery to Indigenous, activist and other cultural-specific
groups of women runs throughout this text – as it reflects the ways in which
oppressed communities mobilize unique and imaginative responses to colonial
injustices through creative practices of resistance, sovereignty and remembering.
For instance, the Chilean arpilleras underscore feminist and anti-colonial modes
of counter-storytelling. The Chiapan and Canadian Aboriginal examples offer
evidence of material ways in which ‘decolonization offers different pathways
for reconnecting Indigenous nations with their traditional land-based cultural
practices [and how] the decolonization process operates at multiple levels’,
connecting personal and bodily agency and tradition with notions of broader
cultural sovereignty. Thus, embroidery is an essential contribution to decolonial
work that ‘necessitates moving from an awareness of being in struggle, to actively
engaging in everyday practices of resurgence’.63 The arpilleristas, Zapatistas and
rural Tzotzil women, and WWOS participants all demonstrate this shift from
mourning and disempowerment to critical action through their creation of
embroidered artworks. The varied case studies also remind us of the fact that
decolonization is not only the project of Indigenous makers and communities, but
rather, a different way of living and relating to the world that must involve all of us
in both its undoing and remaking.

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Several common elements exist across cultures that use textiles as a means
of protest.64 Rozsika Parker provides a partial account of the ways in which
embroidery has coincided with social change and, alongside this, white women’s
empowerment. By looking at culturally specific examples of embroidery across
three distinct geographies in the Americas, I am participating in an expanded
analysis of feminist visual and material culture, and contemporary craft theory,
informed by intersectional and decolonial approaches. Taking a cue from
contemporary art curator cheyanne turions’ notion that negotiation is an intimate
form of sovereignty,65 I hope this text honours the artistry and culturally-specific
relationships that the arpilleras, huipiles, moccasins and their makers embody,
and how they evidence unique practices of cultural imagining, continuance
and sovereignty. I have attempted to demonstrate the usefulness of thinking
about embroidery akin to decolonization, as both are processes – ones that
involve multiple ways of doing and knowledge-creation, rather than singular or
homogenous approaches. Embroidery also represents an important site of feminist
agency, mobilizing women and their communities through processes of both
learning and practice. While Parker’s pivotal text on embroidery uses feminist
art history to support nationalist narratives, this essay instead looks at particular
examples within the frameworks of anti-colonial and Indigenous feminisms that
contrast, complicate and unhinge such attempts. The pursuit of decolonization in
the Chilean, Mexican and Canadian contexts requires rejecting dominant stories
of feminism, nationalism and sovereignty, and demands ‘figuring out what kind of
story we intend to live in its place’.66 Embroidery is an incredibly storied site, and,
as such, has much to tell – when we choose to listen.

Notes
1 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017), 1.
2 Emma Battell Lowman and Adam J. Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st
(Winnipeg, Canada: Fernwood Books, 2015), 121.
3 Heather Igloliorte, ‘Arctic Culture, Global Indigeneity’, in Negotiations in a
Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada, ed. Kirsty Robertson and Erin Morton
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 151.
4 Ibid., 153.
5 ‘Decolonization’ refers to both short- and long-term acts that counter the ways in
which colonization constructs contemporary individual and social life. Cherokee
scholar Jeff Corntassel describes decolonization as ongoing and ‘everyday acts
of resurgence’ that regenerate Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, and ways
of being that can ‘embrace a daily existence conditioned by place-based cultural
practices’ that centre on Indigenous land, sovereignty and ways of thinking. See Jeff
Corntassel, ‘Re-envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to Decolonization and

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Sustainable Self-determination’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol.

1, no. 1. (2012): 89.
6 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, 1st
ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 1984), ix.
7 ‘Colonization’ refers to the act of establishing control over another sovereign area.
Colonization uses the concept of ‘terra nullius’, or the belief that ‘the land belongs to
no one’, to legitimize expansion into other territory as a ‘civilizing’ project.
8 ‘Settler-colonialism’ is an ongoing form of colonization that is specific to the
acquisition, claiming and theft of territory. It focuses on land as a resource and uses
occupation as a way to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their original territories.
9 Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, 5.
10 See also Janet Catherine Berlo (ed.), The Early Years of Native American Art History
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992); Sophie Woodward, ‘Object
Interviews, Material Imaginings and “Unsettling” Methods: Interdisciplinary
Approaches to Understanding Materials and Material Culture’, Qualitative Research,
vol. 16, no. 4 (July 2015): 359–74; and Allyson Mitchell, ‘Sedentary Lifestyle: Fat
Queer Craft’, Fat Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 147–58.
11 See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’,
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40; and David
Garneau, ‘Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation and
Healing’, West Coast Line, no. 28 (Summer 2012): 28–38.
12 Igloliorte, ‘Arctic Culture, Global Indigeneity’, 153.
13 ‘Resurgence’ refers to the regeneration of Indigenous ways of being and thinking,
and to culturally specific practices, knowledges and epistemologies of Indigenous
peoples.
14 Janet Catherine Berlo, ‘Beyond Bricolage: Women and Aesthetic Strategies in Latin
American Textiles’, in Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes, ed. Margot
Blum Schevill, Janet Catherine Berlo and Edward B. Dwyer (New York: Garland,
1991), 439.
15 Marjorie Agosín, Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Love: The Arpillera Movement in
Chile, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 2.
16 Ibid.
17 Chile’s second national Truth Commission Report on Torture and Political
Imprisonment, 2011.
18 Agosín, Tapestries of Hope, 21.
19 Ibid., 15.
20 Ibid., 24.
21 Ibid., 18.
22 Ibid., 27.
23 Roger I. Simon, A Pedagogy of Witnessing: Curatorial Practice and the Pursuit of
Social Justice (New York: Suny Press, 2014), 4.
24 Agosín, 18.
25 Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, 149.

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26 Ibid., 150.
27 Ibid.
28 Indigenous peoples comprise approximately 9 per cent of Chile’s population, wherein
the Mapuche are the largest of the eight Indigenous groups that are currently
state-recognized.
29 Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonization’, 36.
30 Ibid., 35.
31 Agosín, Tapestries of Hope, 22.
32 Ibid., 19.
33 Ibid., 172.
34 Ibid., 73.
35 Ibid., 18.
36 Ibid., 73.
37 Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, 159.
38 Duncan Earle and Jeanne Simonelli, ‘Zapatista Autonomy in Cartel Mexico:
Preserving Smallholder Viability’, Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment, vol.
33, no. 2 (December 2011): 135.
39 Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonization’, 6.
40 Agosín, Tapestries of Hope, 16–17.
41 Earle and Simonelli, ‘Zapatista Autonomy in Cartel Mexico’, 133.
42 Irmgard Weitlaner-Johnson, ‘Survival of Feather Ornamented Huipiles in Chiapas,
Mexico’, Journal de la Société des Américanistes, vol. 46, no. 1 (1954): 189.
43 Igloliorte, ‘Arctic Culture, Global Indigeneity’, 153.
44 Ibid., 192.
45 Ibid., 190.
46 cheyanne turions, ‘Subjects as Things’, blog post, 2 June 2014, https://
cheyanneturions.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/subjects-as-things/ (accessed 15
November 2017).
47 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), vii.
48 I would like to complicate popular notions of the ‘cartel’, particularly in the context
of Western notions of criminality, where cartels are solely understood as drug
trafficking enterprises akin to a ‘gang.’ In Canada’s colonial context, corruption and
racism within the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as well as local and provincial
police forces throughout the country are well noted, as known perpetrators of
violence against Indigenous peoples. The RCMP and local police organizations can
also be thought of as collective governing bodies of specific jurisdictions that operate
as a kind of ‘cartel’.
49 Earle and Simonelli, ‘Zapatista Autonomy in Cartel Mexico’, 134.
50 Derrick O’Keefe, ‘Harper in Denial at G20: Canada Has “No History of
Colonialism” ’, Rabble, 28 September 2009, rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/derrick/2009/09/
harper-denial-g20-canada-has-no-history-colonialism (accessed 2 June 2016).

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51 John Paul Tasker, ‘Confusion Reigns Over Number of Missing, Murdered Indigenous
Women’, CBC News, 16 February 2016, http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mmiw-4000-
hajdu-1.3450237 (accessed 1 July 2016).
52 Christi Belcourt, ‘Walking with Our Sisters’, 21 June 2015, christibelcourt.com/
walking-with-our-sisters/ (accessed 1 June 2016).
53 David Garneau, ‘Indigenous Criticism: On Not Walking with Our Sisters’, Border
Crossings, vol. 34, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 5.
54 Ibid., 4–5.
55 Ibid., 5.
56 Ibid., 4–5.
57 Garneau, ‘Indigenous Criticism’, 5.
58 The final report, culminating with the Inquiry for Missing and Murdered Indigenous
Women and Girls, was released on 3 June 2019.
59 See Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, Native North American Art
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
60 Igloliorte, ‘Arctic Culture, Global Indigeneity’, 165.
61 John Paul Tasker, ‘Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Issues
Final Report with Sweeping Calls for Change’, CBC News, 3 June 2019.
62 Heather Davis, ‘Introduction’, Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press and Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art,
2017), 4.
63 Corntassel, ‘Re-envisioning Resurgence’, 89.
64 Agosín, Tapestries of Hope, 19.
65 turions, ‘Subjects as Things’.
66 Lowman and Barker, Settler, 120.

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238
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16 URSULA JOHNSON:
WEAVING HISTORIES
AND NETUKULIMK
IN L’NUWELTI’K (WE
ARE INDIAN) AND
OTHER WORKS
Heather Anderson

Like their maker, Ursula Johnson’s baskets are compelling storytellers. In Johnson’s
art practice, weaving gives form to memory and experience, narrating how
colonialism and legislation mark Indigenous peoples’ lives, while her critique of
the museological treatment of Indigenous art forms and objects, and personal
practice of Netukulimk (which can be expressed as ‘self-sustainability’ in Mi’kmaw),
engage in processes of decolonization. Drawing on Mi’kmaq1 cultural traditions
from her upbringing on Waycobah and Eskasoni First Nations in Cape Breton,
Johnson has developed the ash-splint basket weaving techniques she learned from
her great-grandmother, Caroline Gould, into a performative and sculptural art
practice. Woven from supple, blonde strips of black ash, Johnson’s basket forms
hold the shapes of individuals and their identities in her series L’nuwelti’k (We Are
Indian) (Figure 16.1, Plate 22), enact a symbolic scalping in Elmiet and infiltrate
the museum in O’pltek (It Is Not Right) and The Archive Room, while appearing as
ghostly images in The Museological Grand Hall. Johnson’s adaption of Mi’kmaw
basketry transgresses and expands its conventions. She draws us into the story of
its shifting status within museums, archives and contemporary art, and rekindles
traditional knowledge and connections to the land through Netukulimk.
Storytelling is an essential part of craft, and as Walter Benjamin noted, ‘the Latin
word for “text,” textum, means something woven’.2 Among the stories Johnson shares
in artist talks is how she first integrated Mi’kmaw basketry and contemporary art
240

FIGURE 16.1 Ursula Johnson, Male Dis-enfranchised, L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian), 2014,
performance organized by Carleton University Art Gallery as part of Making Otherwise: Craft
and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art. Photo: Justin Wonnacott.

for Nations in a Circle, an Indigenous art showcase at Dalhousie University’s Arts

Centre in 2003. Feeling alienated as one of the few Indigenous students at the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design where the curriculum didn’t reflect her culture,
Johnson undertook to weave a basket around herself. She recalls entering into this
early performance with a naïve, art school bravado. Not having woven a basket
since she was nine, she soon found herself humbly asking the elder Mi’kmaq basket
makers present for help.3 Once she had succeeded in enclosing herself in the woven
structure, she desired to remain inside, protected by the basket and her culture.4
Johnson restaged this endurance performance as Basket Weaving (Cultural Cocoon)
in 2011 for Debajehmujig Six Foot Festival on Manitoulin Island, and for Planet
Indigenous at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre in 2012.
In reaching out to members of her community, Johnson recognized that she
needed her elders in order to understand her identity and art practice. In 2008, she

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began studying Indigenous art forms in relation to Netukulimk, which she describes
as the Mi’kmaw world-view encompassing one’s relationship to the land and
surrounding elements. While interviewing elders, Johnson was struck by her great-
grandmother’s concern that basketry would die out because the younger generation
couldn’t identify the trees from which baskets were made, let alone weave them.
This inspired Johnson to investigate how Mi’kmaw basketry reflects Netukulimk.
In 2009 Johnson began to learn how to identify, harvest and prepare trees
required to weave baskets. Squaring an ash tree, splitting it into splints and
peeling it into strips for weaving is labour intensive, and, as she learned from
her grandfather, requires deep knowledge and mastery. In her durational
performance Processing (2014–ongoing), realized over several days at each venue
of the exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember),5 Johnson used family tools
to process a white ash tree she had harvested. However, instead of creating strips
used in basket weaving, she obliterated the tree into shavings that were left strewn
on the floor to convey her generation’s poor understanding of Netukulimk.
As black ash trees in Nova Scotia are scarce due to colonial overharvesting
and susceptibility to disease, Johnson sources ash strips from Quebec from
the same person her great-grandmother did. Her great-grandmother has been
foundational to Johnson’s development as an artist. Johnson honoured her by
curating Kloqowej (star): A 30-year retrospective of Caroline Gould for the Mary
E. Black Gallery in Halifax.6 Gould inspired Johnson’s own basket making and
inquiry into how baskets are commodified and enter into private collections,
or public museums as ‘artefacts’. Johnson first made traditional forms like
those of her great-grandmother, who taught her that a basket’s foundation or
base is the most important element. She also learned various techniques such
as the star weave, and how to create curls, twists, bends and shapes that one
could not imagine coming from a solid tree. Gould’s teachings that the maker
does not manipulate the wood, but rather the wood manipulates the maker
into understanding what it can do,7 is echoed in anthropologist Tim Ingold’s
assertion that the basket weaver must ‘join with and follow the forces and
flows of material that bring the form of the work into being’.8 Gould’s counsel
underscores Indigenous recognition of materials participating with the basket
weaver, akin to what Karen Barad describes as an ‘intra-active relationship’,
whereby ‘subject and object emerge’ through intra-action and causality.9 As
feminist anthropologist Zoe Todd asserts, such Indigenous worldviews of the
non-human as sentient and agential have been overwhelmingly overlooked
in recent discourse of the ‘ontological turn’ with its ‘breathless “realisations”
that animals, the climate, water, “atmospheres” and non-human presences like
ancestors and spirits are sentient and possess agency’.10
In Johnson’s hands, the wood materializes stories of colonization’s ongoing
effects and processes, while also enacting steps towards decolonization. Her
performance Elmiet (2010) arose from a ‘conversation’ she had with a statue of

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Halifax’s founder, Governor Edward Cornwallis, in an eponymous downtown

park. Created for the city’s Nocturne and Prismatic festivals, Elmiet, which means
‘he/she is going home’, commenced with Johnson, wearing a dramatic headpiece
woven from ash, maple, cane reeds and sweet grass, being led through Halifax
streets by parkourists.11 Accompanied by musicians, they arrived after dark at
the Grand Parade opposite City Hall. Johnson addressed the crowd, calling for
a volunteer to participate in a ‘scalping ceremony’. A man who came forward
followed Johnson’s instructions, placing his hands on either side of her head while
she pretended to struggle, and violently removed her headpiece when a traditional
song sung by Nathan Sack ended.12 Johnson proclaimed this the last scalping in
Nova Scotia. Throughout the performance, her entourage distributed postcards
stating the wording of the British Scalp Proclamation, reissued by Governor
Charles Lawrence in 1756, for which a bounty was paid for captured Indigenous
persons or their scalps.13 Johnson invited people to use the postcards to write to
the government of Canada to demand the proclamation’s removal, which has
never been repealed despite requests by Mi’kmaq leaders and a public apology by
Nova Scotia’s government in 2000.14
Johnson’s series of portrait busts, L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian) (2012–ongoing),
engages another piece of legislation with a long and problematic history: Canada’s
Indian Act and its definition of who is entitled to Indian status according to Indian
Registration and Membership Codes.15 To create each portrait, Johnson issued a
call for volunteers who self-identified with a particular code, such as ‘Male 6.1,
Off-Reserve’, ‘Male 6.2 Disenfranchised’ or ‘Female, Métis, Nomadic’, to participate
in a performance. Each performance comprises Johnson weaving an inverted
basket form that extends from the top of the participant’s head to their shoulders,
a process lasting about an hour (Figure 16.2).16
Woven from pale yellow strips of black ash, the minimal, undulating forms
powerfully evoke a sense of their sitter’s presence and individuality. The portraits
are presented separately on plinths in the gallery, referencing the Western tradition
of busts that commemorate important individuals. Yet Johnson’s portraits remain
anonymous, identified only by the Indian Registration and Membership Codes
included in the titles on wall labels. In this way, L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian) foregrounds
the categories and criteria by which Indian status is conferred in Canada, parallel to
the categorization of Indigenous objects in museums. Johnson eschews the museum
practice of presenting ethnographic objects under Plexiglas, instead enabling viewers
to experience these portraits more directly. Inside each woven form, she has tucked
an artefact tag with the name of the individual and their status code as a private record
of the portrait’s making and interaction between artist and sitter.
Johnson’s great-grandmother also taught her the vocabulary of basket making,
underscoring that if younger generations didn’t learn basket weaving, these
Mi’kmaq words would be lost along with the art. This potential loss struck a chord
with Johnson, who fluently speaks Mi’kmaw, her first language. The Museological

242 the NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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FIGURE 16.2 Ursula Johnson, Male Dis-enfranchised, L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian), 2014,
performance organized by Carleton University Art Gallery as part of Making Otherwise: Craft
and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art. Photo: Justin Wonnacott.

Grand Hall, created for Mi’kwite’tmn, features diagrams of various Mi’kmaq

baskets and terminology as ghostly white drawings on the sides of the Plexi display
cases (Figure 16.3, Plate 21, detail).17
Applying Gould’s teaching that a good foundation is the basis for innovation,
Johnson translates her sense of the world as an urban Indigenous person practicing
Netukulimk into new basket prototypes. For instance, as part of the O’pltek (It is
Not Right) series (2010–ongoing), Johnson wove the shape of a traditional fishing
creel from black and white ash, maple, sweet grass and twine,18 embellishing it to
make it ‘more like a purse’ better suited to bringing farmed fish home from a store,
rather than wild fish from a lake.19 While these baskets initially read as traditional,
one notices some are unusually small while others are unconventional, even
anthropomorphic in shape. During a residency at Mount Saint Vincent University
Art Gallery in 2012, Johnson played upon the authorship and authenticity
expected of Indigenous objects by soliciting people to draw in her sketchbook
‘what you think a basket should be’. Highlighting how discourses of anthropology,
archaeology and museology frame understanding of Indigenous objects and
their categorization in museum collections, Johnson hosted a ‘cataloguing party’,
inviting the public to play the role of an ‘ologist’ and propose names for new basket
forms using a ‘Mi’kmaw Nomenclature Reference Guide’ she created.20
Furthering this critique of how Indigenous objects are subjected to Western
taxonomies, Johnson made a humorous catalogue database as part of her ongoing

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FIGURE 16.3 Ursula Johnson, Museological Grand Hall, 2014, 12 etched Plexiglas
vitrines of varying dimensions, installation detail from Mi’kwite’tmn (Do you remember) at
Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, 2014. Photo: Steve Farmer.

project The Archive Room for Mi’kwite’tmn. Participants don white gloves to select
O’pltek baskets from shelving units to read, with the aid of a barcode scanner,
Johnson’s witty database entries that call museum collecting practices and
presumed authoritative knowledge into question: a basket for holding a cell phone,
a basket for house spiders, and a basket for a village clothing maker’s buttons,
among other more or less plausible forms.21 By inviting gallery visitors to handle
her works, Johnson counters the museum embargo on touch, enriching visual
engagement with haptic experience. As artist/curator David Garneau advocates,
it is through handling and using Indigenous objects that meaning and value are

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conveyed.22 The Archive Room expanded as more baskets were created during
residencies and as Mi’kwite’tmn travelled.
With works such as L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian), The Museological Grand Hall
and The Archive Room Johnson intervenes into museological practices whereby
Indigenous objects are presented in ways so divorced from cultural context and
contemporary Indigenous people and their experiences, that settler-audiences
often assume the culture on display belongs to people of the distant past. Through
interweaving craft, Netukulimk and contemporary art forms, Johnson tells a
different story. Her works insert experiences of Indigenous individuals as part
of contemporary, changing cultures into galleries and museums, confronting the
role these and other institutions play in ongoing processes of colonization. As
historian Amy Lonetree outlines, such critical engagements and collaborations
with museums and galleries have the potential to begin decolonizing these spaces,
which, given their histories and treatment of Indigenous peoples and their culture,
‘can be very painful sites for Native peoples’.23 Johnson’s projects such as Elmiet
and L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian) speak ‘hard truths of colonialism’ through the
poetics of material and performance ‘thereby creating spaces for healing and
understanding’.24
Although Johnson feels she has much to learn before becoming a basket
maker of her great-grandmother’s stature, she skilfully and beautifully weaves
Netukulimk together with history, memory and narratives of power and identity.
She uniquely integrates basket weaving with performance and installation, entering
into conversation with contemporary Indigenous artists making baskets including
British Columbia-based Meghann O’Brien (Haida-Kwakwaka’wakw) who weaves
traditional cedar baskets, and Olympia, Washington-based Gail Tremblay
(Onondaga and Mi’kmaw) who creates traditional Mi’kmaq basket forms using
16 mm film and other materials. These artists are among a growing wave seeking out
and incorporating traditional Indigenous skills and knowledge into the production
of contemporary art in ways that foster sustainability akin to Netukulimk.25
For Johnson, integrating basket making into contemporary art practice has
become her way of practicing Netukulimk. In so doing, Johnson is reshaping
Mi’kmaw basketry while weaving new strands into discourses and practices
of decolonization. Her basket weaving, like storytelling, ‘mirrors a mode of
processing and reconstituting experience’.26 The stories Johnson weaves articulate
and speak back to the continued impact of colonialism, bringing new objects and
experiences into being.

Notes
1 The Mi’kmaw language uses the singular Mi’kmaw with singular nouns and the plural
Mi’kmaq with plural nouns.

URSULA JOHNSON 245

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2 Esther Leslie, ‘Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft’, in The Craft Reader, ed. Glenn
Adamson (London: Berg, 2010), 388.
3 Mary Elizabeth Luka, ‘Nuji’tlateket (One Who Does It): An Interview with Ursula
Johnson’, NOMOREPOTLUCKS 32:perform, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/
nujitlateket-one-who-does-it-an-interview-with-ursula-johnson-m-e-luka/ (accessed
27 September 2015). Johnson also related this experience in conversation with Cara
Tierney at Carleton University Art Gallery, 20 June 2014.
4 Ibid.
5 Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) was presented at Saint Mary’s University Art
Gallery (7 June–3 August 2014), and toured to Kenderdine Art Gallery (26
September–12 December 2014); Confederation Art Centre (17 January–3 May 2015);
Grenfell Campus Art Gallery (24 September–12 December 2015); University of
Lethbridge Art Gallery (19 January–9 March 2017); The Reach, Abbotsford, British
Columbia (21 September–31 December 2017); McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton,
Ontario (1 September–8 December 2018); https://www.mikwitetmn.ca/#exhibition.
6 The exhibition was held from 13 January to 27 February 2011 at the Mary E. Black
Gallery.
7 Ursula Johnson, ‘First Nations Cultural Preservation Through Art: Ursula Johnson’,
TEDx Halifax, 2012, https://ursulajohnson.wordpress.com/videos/ (accessed 27
September 2015).
8 Tim Ingold, ‘The Textility of Making’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 34, no 1
(2010): 97.
9 Karen Barad describes ‘intra-action’ as ‘a new way of thinking causality. It is
not just a kind of neologism, which gets us to shift from interaction, where we
start with separate entities and they interact, to intra-action, where there are
interactions through which subject and object emerge, but actually as a new
understanding of causality itself.’ See Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, ‘Matter
Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers. An Interview with Karen
Barad’, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/
ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/--new-materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2
;view=fulltext (accessed 18 July 2016).
10 As Todd makes clear, it is imperative to acknowledge Indigenous epistemologies and
the scholars writing on these topics, as to do otherwise perpetuates colonization,
the exploitation of Indigenous peoples and white Western supremacy within
the academy. Zoe Todd, ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological
Turn: Ontology Is Just Another Word for Colonialism’, Journal of Historical Society,
vol. 29, no. 1 (March 2016), 4–22 (original emphasis) or Todd’s 24 October 2014
blog post of the same title, https://zoeandthecity.wordpress.com/2014/10/24/
an-indigenous-feminists-take-on-the-ontological-turn-ontology-is-just-another-
word-for-colonialism/ (accessed 8 February 2016). See also Jessica L. Horton
and Janet Catherine Berlo, ‘Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and “New
Materialisms” in Contemporary Art’, Third Text, vol. 27, no. 1 (January 2013): 17–28.
11 Parkour is a practice of moving through an environment by running, climbing,
vaulting, jumping, and so on. It evolved from military obstacle course training.
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour (accessed 11 April 2016).

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12 David Murray, Ea-pea Dave’s Terra Nova, blog entry of 18 October 2010, http://
epterranova.blogspot.ca/2010/10/elmiet-october-16–2010.html (accessed 31
October 2014).
13 The British Scalp Proclamation was first issued by Governor Cornwallis in 1749 in
response to ongoing clashes between the British and Mi’kmaq, which included taking
scalps by both sides. Prior to returning to England in 1752, Cornwallis rescinded
the bounty proclamation in an effort to make peace with the Mi’kmaq. Governor
Lawrence reinstated the bounty in 1756. See www.governorconrwallis.com and
http://www.ictinc.ca/aboriginal-peoples-the-mi’kmaq-people-of-nova-scotia (both
accessed 22 October 2015).
14 See ‘Two Hundred Year-old Scalp Law Still on Books in Nova Scotia’, CBC News
posted 4 January 2000, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/two-hundred-year-old-
scalp-law-still-on-books-in-nova-scotia-1.230906; and ‘British Scalp Proclamation
1756’, http://www.danielnpaul.com/BritishScalpProclamation-1756.html, and ‘All
Doubletalk, Not Action on Repealing Scalp Proclamation’, Daniel N. Paul web site
http://www.danielnpaul.com/Col/2000/BritishScalpBountyStillOnBooks.html.
See also ‘Elmiet’, https://ursulajohnson.wordpress.com/videos/ (all accessed 31
October 2014).
15 The Indian Act was developed through separate pieces of colonial legislation
regarding Indigenous peoples across Canada, beginning with the Gradual Civilization
Act of 1857 and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869. In 1876, these were
consolidated as the Indian Act. The Indian Act has been amended several times, most
recently in 1985 in response to a United Nations Human Rights Committee and the
Canadian Human Rights Commission identification of Section 12 of the Indian Act
as a human rights abuse and discriminatory along gender lines because it removed
a woman’s Indian status if she married a non-Indian man. Bill C-31 was passed in
1985 to ensure that those who had lost Indian status through marrying out and other
forms of Enfranchisement could apply to regain status. Sharon McIvor successfully
challenged Bill C-31 in the Supreme Court of British Columbia for only allowing
those whose status has been reinstated to pass it on to the succeeding generation.
In June 2009, the court ruled this limitation as unconstitutional and in violation of
Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The government is currently in the
process of amending the Indian Act. See http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/
home/government-policy/the-indian-act.html and https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/
DAM/DAM-INTER-HQ/STAGING/texte-text/1876c18_1100100010253_eng.pdf,
(accessed 20 March 2016).
16 L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian) comprises twenty-two portraits to date, created in public
and private sittings. Johnson follows each performance with a private debriefing with
the sitter to discuss what emotions and reflections may have arisen for them, while
they were at the centre of this public performance, about their Indian status. The first
L’nuwelti’k performances were site-specific: four portraits were created in 2012 in the
atrium of Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law, where Johnson engaged
future lawyers in conversation about the project; the next four were created in 2013
at the Galerie d’art de Louise et Reuben Cohen and Law Library at the Université
de Moncton; and two more were created in Carleton University’s quad opposite
Ojigkwanong, the Indigenous students’ centre. One portrait was created at Mount
Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in Halifax in a public performance as part of
Carleton University Art Gallery’s touring exhibition Making Otherwise: Craft and

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Material Fluency in Contemporary Art (2014). Johnson created two public portraits
in Toronto, and two privately (2014); one additional private portrait in Saskatoon;
two public portraits in Listuguj, Quebec as part of Vaste et Vague’s programming
(2014); three private portraits in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia; and one in a public
performance as a part of Memory Keepers (2014) at Urban Shaman in Winnipeg.
17 The images of the baskets and terminology are etched onto the surface of the four
Plexiglas sides of each display case through a multistep laborious process. Johnson
translates photographs of baskets into drawings on acetate that are then scored
onto masking film to create silkscreen images, which are then ‘stamped’ onto the
protective film covering the Plexiglas, and then sandblasted into the Plexiglas surface.
Ursula Johnson, email correspondence with the author, 3 November 2015.
18 The O’pltek series was first exhibited at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in the exhibition
O’pltek (It Is Not Right) (2010), curated by Nadia Kurd. It is now part of The Archive
Room installation.
19 TEDx Halifax, ‘First Nations Cultural Preservation Through Art: Ursula Johnson’.
20 Ursula Johnson, email correspondence with the author, 3 November 2015.
21 Johnson created this database with the aid of a photographer and designer to parallel
the kind of database that one might find in a major museum. Ursula Johnson, email
correspondence with the author, 3 November 2015.
22 David Garneau, public presentation as part of Accessing the Museum, Ottawa Art
Gallery, 3 May 2016. See also ‘Marginalized by Design’, Bordercrossings, no. 137
(March 2016), 62–65: http://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/marginalized-by-design
(accessed 26 April 2016).
23 Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and
Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 1.
24 Ibid., 5.
25 I am thinking of artists such as Olivia Whetung (Anishinaabe) whose works translate
spectrograph recordings of herself learning to speak Anishinaabe into beaded
sculptural installations, and Nadia Myre (Anishinaabe) and Ruth Cuthand (Plains
Cree) who create large-scale, conceptual beadworks that tackle political issues such
as the Indian Act and diseases that have ravaged Indigenous populations respectively.
Alexandra Nahwegahbow curated Always Vessels for Carleton University Art Gallery
(11 September–12 November 2017), an exhibition that explored contexts and
processes of learning, and the transfer and continuity of customary practices within
contemporary Indigenous art.
26 Leslie, ‘Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft’. 387.

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17 ‘THE BLACK CRAFTSMAN

SITUATION’: A CRITICAL
CONVERSATION ABOUT
RACE AND CRAFT
Sonya Clark, Wesley Clark, Bibiana Obler,
Mary Savig, Joyce J. Scott and Namita
Gupta Wiggers

Introduction
In 1972, Francis Sumner Merritt, director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts
in Deer Isle, Maine, was struggling to recruit African American instructors and
students to a 1974 international summer session featuring instructors from
African countries.1 Merritt asked Brooklyn-based weaver Allen Fannin for help,
acknowledging the dearth of diversity at Haystack: ‘I realize that we just haven’t
taken enough initiative in developing the relationship … I hope you could help
us make some contacts for enrollment.’2 In response, Fannin described the ‘black
craftsman situation’ to Merritt (Figures 17.1–17.3). He suggested that while the
political goals of the craft revival were devised with good intentions, they did little
to address the everyday needs of non-white artists.
Merritt and Fannin went on to organize the 1974 summer session ‘American
Black Crafts’ to coincide with the session led by African artists. The joint summer
session was attended by established and emerging artists in the field, including
Arthur Green and Joyce J. Scott. A few months later, one of the attendants, poet
potter M. C. Richards, reflected:

The one moment that still hangs in my memory like a question is the departure
of the Africans, with much ado, swooped off by the 2 young guides + guardians
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FIGURE 17.1 Allen Fannin to Francis Merritt, 19 January 1972. Francis Sumner Merritt
papers, 1903–1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Page 1.

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FIGURE 17.2 Allen Fannin to Francis Merritt, 19 January 1972. Francis Sumner Merritt
papers, 1903–1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Page 2.

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FIGURE 17.3 Allen Fannin to Francis Merritt, 19 January 1972. Francis Sumner Merritt
papers, 1903–1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Page 3.

252 the NEW POLITICS OF THE HANDMADE

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from the state department, as if it were an honor to be black in America! I’m

still wondering how that scene struck our black American friends, who are
more likely to be arrested than feted for their appearance and ancestry, right?
Ah me, the paradoxes.3

The observations outlined in these letters prompt comparison to the rising

prominence of craft in art and culture. Although artists, writers and curators in the
field of craft have engaged in multivocal discussions of gender, class and sexuality,
generative considerations of race and ethnicity remain less prominent. In 2016, the
Critical Craft Forum hosted a panel, chaired by Bibiana Obler and Mary Savig, at
the College Art Association’s annual conference to assess the state of the field some
forty years later.4 What assumptions are being made about race in the craft world
today? What are the systemic realities in the field faced by artists of colour? How
do history and legacy inform the current situation? Given the complexity of these
questions, the panel – which took place in Washington, DC, and gathered artists
based in Virginia and Maryland – focused on race-based issues concerning this
region, where #BlackLivesMatter banners and Confederate flags dot the landscape
from Baltimore to Richmond.5
The following transcription, collaboratively edited and abbreviated for
publication by Bibiana Obler, Mary Savig and Namita Gupta Wiggers with
final approval from all participating panellists, is a contribution to shifting our
course. The speakers, moderated by Wiggers, Critical Craft Forum Director and
co-founder, represent three generations of artists invested in craft: Sonya Clark,
Wesley Clark and Joyce J. Scott.6 The panellists began with brief statements in
response to Fannin’s letter and the questions just mentioned.

***
Sonya Clark (reading an excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man [1952]):

I am an Invisible Man. No, I’m not a spook like those who haunted Edgar
Allan Poe. Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man
of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids, and I might even be said to
possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the
bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have
been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me
they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination,
indeed, everything and anything except me.

I’ve been thinking about invisibility and about how to make the invisible
visible. And I’ve been thinking about defining terms and about mentors. I’ve been
thinking about these three things in the context of being a Black craftswoman.

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Let’s begin with the idea of invisibility. We (the panelists) were talking this
morning about how comprehensive museums might not have many people
who are of African descent represented in their craft collections. My immediate
reaction is: it depends on how you define what craft is and where you’re looking.
Because comprehensive museums are actually filled with craft, and they’re filled
with craft created by people of colour. But that’s not where we tend to define where
craft is and where it is located within those museums. Making the invisible visible.
Also, invisible technological skills are often overlooked. Africans who were
brought to other parts of the world through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Route
were not valued as human beings. We were valued for our skills and our strength.
Our skills were often technologies like weaving, basket making and blacksmithing.
All of these things. Making the invisible visible.
I think about mentors, because I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for a grandmother
who taught me how to sew. I honour her legacy every day as a fibre artist and as a
woman. Because of her genetic pool and the genetic pool of those grandmothers
and grandfathers that I did not know, all the unknown ancestors, I have the strength,
fortitude and legacy to be with you today. I have mentors and friends like this lady sitting
right here (Joyce J. Scott), and two of my mentors in the audience: Joan Livingstone
and Anne Wilson, who were my teachers at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
I think about my peers who make the invisible visible. Artists like Simone Leigh
who are craftspeople, and of her project which brought attention to caregivers in
her Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014). Caregivers as craft. I think about Theaster
Gates’s project Shine at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2014), where
he framed the idea of who is an artist by focusing the audience’s attention to see the
people who shine shoes in a new light. That’s craft. In my own Hair Craft Project
(Figure 17.4, Plate 23), where I think about hairdressing as a craft. I collaborated
with twelve Richmond hairdressers to bring African and African American
hairdressing into focus as a type of textile mastery. Making the invisible visible.
Joyce J. Scott: Sonya, I’m going to ask you to read with me what you read on
Ellison. I don’t have my glasses. Plus this is more theatrical. So would you start
reading again?
Sonya: ‘I am an invisible man.’
Joyce: I’m a woman and you see me all the time.
Sonya: ‘No I’m not a spook like …’
Joyce: I am a spook.
Sonya: ‘Edgar Allan Poe. Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms …’
Joyce: You know that’s wrong, because I’m totally Hollywood.
Sonya: ‘I am a man of substance.’
Joyce: I am a woman. I created substance.
Sonya: ‘Of flesh and bone.’
Joyce: Flesh, bone, and fat.

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FIGURE 17.4 Sonya Clark, The Hair Craft Project, 2013, featuring hairstylists Kamala
Bhagat, Dionne James Eggleston, Marsha Johnson, Chaunda King, Anita Hill Moses, Nasirah
Muhammad, Jameika and Jasmine Pollard, Ingrid Riley, Ife Robinson, Natasha Superville and
Jamilah Williams. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Photo: Naoko Wowsugi

Sonya: ‘Fibre and liquid.’

Joyce: I use them all the time.
Sonya: ‘And I might even be said to possess a mind.’
Joyce: It’s been said.
Sonya: ‘I am invisible.’
Joyce: No.
Sonya: ‘Understand simply because people refuse to see me … Like the bodiless
heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded
by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.’

Joyce: Thank you. My job, the one that I’ve chosen, is to break that glass. It’s maybe
why I use glass in my work (Figure 17.6, Plate 25). I believe that I’m always seen,
but you refuse to see my quality. I believe that my work is art. I believe that my
work is craft. I deserve to be with anyone, any artist, and I deserve to make as much
money as any artist. But to defy or to say that I’m not a craftsperson as well as a fine
artist, means that I diminish, spit [on], forget my mother, my grandparents, my
great-grandparents who were potters, and weavers, and all the things that they did.

‘THE BLACK CRAFTSMAN SITUATION’ 255

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So my job as an artist – and I don’t believe it’s every artist’s job – is to shine, and to
use all of the facilities that were given to me. It is to break that glass, take a shard,
and cut through the next veil. Because that’s what someone did for me.

Wesley Clark: My work is aesthetically based in the antique; the warmth of the
colour of the wood, the texture just makes you think ‘old’. It’s meant to question why
is it being salvaged and put in this gallery space My Target series, for example, deals
with the idea of black people being targeted and the psychological effects that go
along with that. The aesthetic is meant to draw you in with this beautiful warmth,
and then to address the underlying issues. I’d not really considered how craft comes
in for me, to be honest, until being asked to be on the panel. But it’s in my process.
Historically, I come from a family of craftmakers. My grandfather was a craftsman.
He built half the homes in Freetown and Glen Burnie (Baltimore, Maryland). When
he passed, he made sure his tool set came to me because by that time I was working
in wood. My aunt called me ‘Little Gertrude’ for a period, because I came home
from college crocheting hats and making things of that nature. But I never really
considered that to be anything. Now all these things are becoming part of my work,
yet I’ve never considered it a craft. It’s just the materials I used.
In the process of being in the studio, I am creating this narrative for myself,
asking questions: What would a real craftsman do when he’s finished his work?
I’m playing a role as a craftsperson, so I consider myself to be a faux or fraudulent
craftsman.

Namita Gupta Wiggers: Let’s go back to terms. What kind of craft are we talking
about when we’re talking about craft? Fannin alludes (in his letter) to the ‘53rd
Street mentality’, which refers to what was then the Museum of Contemporary
Crafts, and later the American Craft Museum and now the Museum of Arts and
Design. He is speaking to that particular institution and location, but also about a
group of supporters who separate out one kind of craft from other kinds of craft
and art, as in the Studio Craft Movement.
For example, Wes brought up that he doesn’t think of himself as a craftsperson
… and in terms of the artwork that has been presented today, it’s not so different
than artwork I’ve seen in a number of contemporary art institutions. When Mike
Kelley uses thrifted quilts, it’s considered art. Yet there’s a particular aesthetic
perceived in connection to craft, an attention to materials that you cannot find in
other parts of the art world. The question is, in being a ‘Black Craftsman’, is it more
challenging because you’re trying to operate within that Studio Craft Movement?
Or is it that the Black artist – as opposed to the Black craftsman – has more
opportunity because of the kinds of things that can be done in the art world?

Wes: I think, to a degree, it is about defining terms. What I knew to be craft, or

what I consider to be craft, was my grandmother who made the quilts, or my

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FIGURE 17.5 Wesley Clark, Black Don’t Crack but it Sho’ Catch Hell, 2014, spray paint,
acrylic, wood, 24 x 32 inches. Courtesy: Wesley Clark.

grandfather who built functional items. I never considered the use of wood
in my art or my crocheting with yarn. For me, it was just a simple matter of
materials that I chose to express whatever it was that I was dealing with (Figure
17.5, Plate 24). To some degree, it was always a separate line for me. There was
artmaking, and then there was craft, and there’s craft in art and art in craft, but
somehow, I simply never knew the difference consciously. I never drew that line
in the sand, so to speak.
My grandmother wasn’t trying to be in an art gallery, but that’s what I was
aiming for. For my grandparents, it was all functional and skill-based. The quilt was
used because they were farmers and self-sufficient. That’s actually what drew me to
wanting to know how to make a hat, and some of the other skills I’ve learned that
were craft-based was out of this idea of self-sufficiency. I’ve never really thought of
them as the means for aesthetics.
Sonya: Your grandmother’s quilts – were they beautiful?

Wes: It was beautiful because of its history, to my mind. It’s not really beautiful
when you look at it, no. But it was beautiful to me.

Sonya: So I don’t think art should be judged just on beauty, but I was doing that
to reframe the way you might look at a quilt. If it’s functional, then it does what
it needs to do. If it has a story, if it belongs to your family, then it has a story,

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and imbued in that story is its power, right? You know why Wes is here, right?
Because we invited him. He was waiting for an invitation. We defined him as being
a craftsperson and here he is.

Wes: Yeah, pretty much. Thank you.

Joyce: Some of this has to do with the belief that [craft is] a bunch of nannies and
squaws, and people who have no true intellect, who can cook really well, but never
went to school who make crafts. There’s this whole feeling that something is ‘not equal
to’ when one makes a cup. Some people don’t make cups because they know that a cup
is going to make them very little money in contrast to painting a picture of that cup.
Many times schools, and galleries, and museums, and people who have the money and
the power to direct people, say: No, that’s fine art. You just used wood and you made a
chair. Now he just made a deconstructed chair, but that’s sculpture. You made a chair,
and that’s craft work. And they can’t have the same value. There are some people who
believe that [craft is] the stepchild or bastard kid in the art world who really won’t get
that great exhibition in a museum. I don’t think that is true anymore; there are a lot
of people on this stage and in this audience who worked very hard to get people to
understand the brilliance and to give respect to crafts as in and of itself a fine art.
Sonya said it. We’re throughout museums, but we’re placed in other departments. If
Jeff Koons wants to do a blow-up balloon dog, that’s called fine art, but someone else
does something similar out of crochet and it sells for $1,000. That’s not talking about
whether people are great critics. That’s talking about something else deeply rooted,
I believe, in the arts. And if someone who considers herself to be both … I hear things.
I’ve been told: Stop calling yourself a craftsperson; if you keep being rooted in the
crafts, then you’re not going to get the respect and the money that you deserve.
And then I say, ‘How can I tell those Black people who raised me and made the
things that I use as my touchstone, that I can’t say [I am a craftsperson]?’ That’s
like saying, ‘Joyce, don’t respect yourself. Go and put on another mask and go on
out, or the face you have, just cover up that part because that cheek is not worthy
of the rest of your face.’
A painter told me that when he saw the Gee’s Bend denim quilts, you know the
ones made out of overalls? He said, ‘I’ve been trying to get the way that blue blends
my whole life.’ And they did it. And they’re still blue jean quilts. It’s bullshit. It’s
what humans do to each other.
Sonya: It’s hegemony and it’s racism and it’s all sorts of things. Sexism, too. There’s
something even more deeply rooted than that, which is the Western notion of the
mind/body split. We’re still suffering from the Western construct of intellect and
intelligence that resides in what we call painting and sculpture, versus things that are
clearly made from the intelligence of our bodies, through kinaesthetic intelligence.
It’s as if paintings weren’t made from the body and weavings weren’t made from the
mind. The strategy is so binary and antiquated but it still has resonance.

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Namita: An image circulated recently on the internet: ‘White privilege is your

history being part of the core curriculum, and mine being taught as an elective.’7
I think each of our panellists addresses this issue in a number of different ways. It
is evident in Fannin’s letter, in which he states ‘that offering scholarships, believe it
or not, is still not the approach’ to take.8
We need systemic change. This isn’t just about adding numbers, diversity, and/
or meeting quotas. It’s about sitting down and reworking the system that is not
recognizing the breadth of work that has been made and what is being made now.
That involves changes to museums and academia. It involves thinking every day
about how we live.
Let’s continue by thinking about some of those systems and to move this
discussion towards what you think can be done: where is the problem and what
needs to happen to fix the problem?

Sonya: It’s deeply rooted in our culture (the separation between), tech schools
versus liberal arts schools is part of the problem. Now fast-forward to what happens
with where students end up going to school, and what they end up studying. I got
800, a perfect score on my math SAT. And I was a Black girl, I was supposed to
be an engineer. But in everyone’s story you can find a serendipitous connection of
dots. That happened between my grandmother and meeting lots of other people
in whom I found a like-mindedness. I came to believe that my mind and body
work together, and craft could be a repository for ideas, thoughts, queries. It seems
laughable when I say this out loud. Of course, the mind and body work together.
One of the things that happens is that Black students, if they’re first generation
college-bound, or even if they’re not, their parents say, ‘You’re going to go to art
school. Okay. Well, maybe you should become a designer because there might be
money in that, in the design field.’
Here’s the thing. Craft is all about design and about function. So we should be
getting those students; making smart utilitarian objects is exactly when a design
works, right?
Namita: So why aren’t Black students showing up in the materially based programs?

Sonya: Some of them are because of serendipity, but it is about defining the
terms. If we define craft by its utility and its connection to design, that’s a way of
connecting to those students whose parents say interior design, graphic design,
fashion design, all good. Craft should be on that list.
If you are interested in art because you’re interested in connecting to your
culture, you just heard the three Black people on the panel say we do craft because
of our legacy. So that becomes another way. It’s more how we are telling the story,
who is telling the story of craft, and who has the biggest megaphone.

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Joyce: If you look at what’s happening in the United States with Flint, Michigan
and Black Lives Matter, I think some kids are scared to go to schools where they
will be marginalized, and will be seen as very, very different.9 I think it’s wonderful
that art schools exist where folks can just come and be real, be artistic. But in
talking to kids, they think ‘I’m not going to do well.’ I always say: there is not
a critical mass of Negritude. So you’re the only one, you’re one of three, you go
through your entire undergraduate life where you are the Other.
Some people rally to you for all reasons. One is because you are the Other, and
they see that light from you and they want to get it. Because some students wander
around in some of these schools and they do cleave to their mentors, to their
teachers, because they can in some senses, be lost. And I know that the Maryland
Institute College of Art has suffered because of the uprising that happened last
year because parents were scared to send their kids there.10 Well that’s all parents,
not just white parents.
Sonya: Should be Black parents …

Joyce: And the other thing that you [Wesley] said that is so incredible to me –
because my parents were sharecroppers – is the difference between the head and
the heart. I don’t think there’s much difference, but it’s the application, how we
think about it.
I was at Haystack (Mountain School of Crafts) in 1974 (for the international
summer sessions organized by Merritt), and I went back to be an instructor
in 1976, which was the bicentennial year. That was the year that there were
Indigenous professors; all of the Native American instructors were there, just like
Black History Month where every Black person is working as a Black person.
When you were with Africans and when you were with Native teachers, they
really didn’t separate the two (head and heart). It’s really helped me to be a better
teacher when I’m teaching. You might be singing while you’re weaving. You might
be imbuing that thread with a different kind of spirit. You might talk about the
use of the garment, or use of whatever you’re making, the taste that you get from
holding this cup and the cup being a certain colour, or the cup having a certain
shape. And whether it won’t ever get hot, but you can feel the warmth, that kind of
thing. And that’s the combination of the two. I’ve been in classes where it is so skill
driven that it never comes up. This is a big loss.

Namita: Let’s open this up to the audience.

Fo Wilson [speaking from the audience]: I want to pick up on something that

both Sonya and Joyce said about the African identity. What gets confusing for
the African-American experience is that we live in a society that privileges the
Western way of thinking, of philosophical thinking about art and life. In many

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cultures, not just African cultures, the idea of beauty is not separate from utility.
It wouldn’t occur to us as part of our genetic heritage to think about those things
differently. But when you come to a university to be academically enforced, that’s
how it is. That’s the way the power structure is. Your work [the artists’] to me is a
form of resistance to that power structure because you’re working against it. I want
more scholars in craft that write from different points of view, from outside of that
Western paradigm and French philosophy.
I also have a graduate student who happens to be African American. He is very
rooted in African American tradition. He says he has to spend 30 minutes teaching
the faculty and students about his culture before he can talk about his work. I said,
‘You can tell them to do that work before they come to your crit. It’s your right to
do that and say, “Look, I’m going to be talking about this. You’re going to get a lot
more out of it and you’re going to be able to give me better feedback if you read
this article.” ’

Namita: You’ve hit on a couple of places where there are things that can be done.
Look for people who are writing and thinking outside of that Western philosophical
construct. Go find them, they may not be in academia. Find somebody who is
going to break down those boundaries and encourage them to write about your
work. Bring them into the conversation.
Second, figure out how you’re going to accept that teaching comes from many
places, and help the system value your grandmother and the lady down the street
who taught you to embroider as teachers. Figure out how to bring them into the
academic environment in other ways.

Sonya: How can we together cultivate intellectual humility? We don’t know

everything, but if we’re curious, we can learn together, right? If you do that
in the classroom, then what your student was doing would just be natural. It
would just be a natural thing, if that’s at the heart of what we’re doing together
as educators.
I’ve been in academia now for twenty-two years. I stick with academia because
I know that I can change something within the system. But I also happen to be a
chair of the department, which means that I can hold people accountable for what
they’re doing in the classroom, too.
So for all the African American students and students of African descent, or
students of colour, or whoever feels like they’re Other in that situation, I’m not only
looking to you and me, but they’re looking to everyone in this room who might not
look like them. And knowing that there’s some level or cultural competency there.
Cultural competency is something that I actually hold my faculty accountable for,
because you can’t teach craft without teaching about the world. It is impossible.
So if you’re managing to do that, stop. Revisit how blinding your privilege has
been, and then let’s figure out how to get these notions of other cultures and other

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ways of thinking and being, and making, and evaluating, and critiquing into the
classroom.
The second thing is to cultivate intellectual humility. Because I don’t know
everything. I don’t know everything about Africa. I don’t know everything about
the Caribbean, Jamaica, Trinidad. I don’t even know everything about myself.
I really don’t. Cultivating intellectual humility allows the space for us to say we
don’t know; how can we learn it together? And it is such a great antidote to privilege
that blinds us. I say this as someone who is privileged. I’m aware of the privileges
that I had. I grew up middle class, I went to prep schools, and I’m always trying to
say, okay, is that my privilege blinding me, because I’m also a Black woman who
got followed around in stores as a kid because store owners thought I might steal
something.
***
Wes: I was thinking about Fannin’s point that we have other issues as Blacks: we
have to eat, we have to put food on the table, and the idea of value formed in my
mind. It’s the same thing, for instance, when I came home and was amazed that my
family crocheted. I don’t remember it growing up. It was a skill that was around me
because I was on this blanket every day, but no one ever told me my grandmother
made it. So there are these skills that aren’t being passed on, or the idea of working
with your hands. There’s a certain level of value I felt that is missing early on. You
can make a hat instead of buying that $50 J. Crew hat that is crocheted. I can make
that hat; I can then make anything. Once you have the skills, you can take that
in other realms, but if you weren’t introduced to the idea of crocheting in your
sculpture class, even made to do it as part of the actual assignment, then it’s going
to get lost.

Sonya: Do men in your family crochet?

Wes: No, men do not. But when I was teaching in elementary school I taught the
boys to do it and they loved it. I don’t really know what to say as far as gender,
simply that if you’re taught it then you can do it. When boys aren’t being taught
it unless they actively seek it, and I guess no one ever thought to teach me.

Sonya: Sometimes as children, we don’t know what’s possible if we don’t have role
models or mentors. So if you crochet, then it becomes possible for a young man
who looks like you, or looks up to you to say, oh, that’s possible. That’s not just
something women do. That’s one of the things that is also really important: to not
only know our histories, but that fibre arts and textiles are not gendered across
the globe, in fact. But also to be the role model in this place and when we teach, to
make sure that we’re sharing those models. And making sure we’re not engendering
more of them either.

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Joyce: I was thinking earlier that if I were the audience, and I were white – I’m
saying this because we talked about the cleave sometimes between ethnicity and
class in the classroom – and I was doing everything that the panellists have so
sweetly described to you, I might feel a little bit like, ‘wait a second. I’m already …
what can I do?’ For me, it’s about getting close to a person that’s not doing it. When
I say get close, I don’t mean have sex with them, or go out and have drinks, that’s
not what I mean. But sometimes you know that someone has great ability and it’s
manifest in what they do in class or what they do with their students. Sometimes
you have the real ability to just be human with another human. Help people with
what could be perceived as an academic shortcoming. It really is all of us working
with each other. I think that’s how change happens.

***
Joan Livingstone [speaking from the audience]: I was intrigued by the title of
the topic, ‘The Black Craftsman Situation,’ and I know we referred back to this
incident in Haystack as a kind of historical precedent for asking the question. But
I’m curious if you could talk about what is the Black craftsman situation that we’re
referring to? I think there’s meat there to talk about.

Joyce: A thing that spoke to me about change was just seeing a feature on Art
Smith in Essence magazine. A lot of people are like, who? Art Smith was one
of the leading art jewellers starting in the 1950s. But the article now is in pop
culture. They had one of his necklaces, and on the next page featured a young
contemporary Black jeweller.
I looked at the jewellery in the article. They were jewellers who were really
pushing to have a really wide audience. So it wasn’t just about Black Art Smith
who did one of a kind work. It was, to me, much more about designers in a broader
group. Anyway, my point was when that guy (Art Smith) can be in an everyday
lexicon and some commercial thing, that says to me there’s a very slow creeping
difference. Because he’s this mentor, but he’s also in a magazine that talks about
who your boyfriend is and something else. Well, that means he’s in everyday
conversation. Wow, that’s a difference.
And the other difference is that because of what we do, we are by proxy instigating
crafted everyday stuff. I’ve been making jewellery for a long time, but I’ve been
selling since I was 16. Every year, we artists get together and have a Christmas
show. I have people who have developed a real knowledge about jewellery, and
they come wearing that necklace I made at the age of 16. They don’t have a lot
of money so we try to cap it at maybe $600. And they come back to our show
every year and they’ll say, ‘I went to the museum. Your work’s in the museum, and
I understand why this looks like this.’ Wow. I like that it’s an everyday conversation
being worn by everyday folks. So that to me is a real change. And it’s a change
because they’re more and more, I think, ‘Black people are doing that.’

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FIGURE 17.6 Joyce J. Scott, Buddha (Fire & Water), 2013, hand-blown Murano glass
processes with beads, wire and thread. Photo: Mike Koryta. Courtesy: Goya Contemporary,
collection of NMAAHC Smithsonian Institution.

Sonya: Joan, when I was bringing up the idea of defining the terms, I actually had
written down to define the terms of crafts, to define the terms of Blackness, to
really dig in at what you were saying. In this panel we’ve talked about a lot of
things, a lot of definitions that we could use for what craft is. We haven’t really
dug into the constructs around race. Maybe a couple of us said what that is, talked
about African Americans as people of African descent, people from Africa. But
I think the situation is that there are not enough people who are recognizing craft
by people who are Black. And there are not enough Black students who are here,
who are making work. There are not enough craftspeople in the power structures.
There’s not enough in the classrooms, there are not enough teachers. We have
been talking around it, so I really appreciate defining the terms. For me, that’s
the situation: there are not enough of us. There’s not enough light being shed on
the work that’s already been done, the work that has to be done, and work that

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is currently being done. To your point: What are we writing about? How are we
writing about what we’re writing about?
And that is not (a question) that is for Black people only. That is for every
people. And it’s necessary by design in this nation. In this nation in particular, it’s
necessary.

Joyce: That’s what it is. You just said something that rings true to me. It’s not just
for Black people, it’s for every people. We still have the [issue that] people don’t
see that we’re Americans, and that what we do belongs to you as well, and it’s
all that stuff that you want to know, too. Sometimes we’re not even in decision-
making positions that would encourage the administration or even the student
body to see us as a power force.
I can tell you one way that has changed. We’re here talking to you. Not so very
long ago, we might have been in the audience, but never chosen to be able to talk
to you about Blackness.

Notes
1 Founded in 1950, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is an international, non-profit,
studio program in the arts, offering a residency program and workshop sessions to
craftmakers and visual artists, led by prominent faculty artists. ‘Mission & History’.
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 2014. http://www.haystack-mtn.org/about-
haystack/mission-history/ (accessed 23 May 2016).
2 Francis Sumner Merritt to Allen Fannin, 29 December 1971. Francis Sumner Merritt
papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
3 M. C. Richards to Francis Sumner Merritt, 22 August 1974. Francis Sumner Merritt
papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
4 Critical Craft Forum offers on-line and on-site platforms for dialogue and exchange
on critical questions in the craft field. Founded in 2008 by Namita Gupta Wiggers
and Elisabeth Agro, and led by Wiggers since 2012, CCF has offered an annual
session at College Art Association since 2010, a daily-moderated discussion
via a Facebook group, and a podcast. ‘Home’. Critical Craft Forum. http://www.
criticalcraftforum.com/ (accessed 1 May 2016).
5 #BlackLivesMatter was created by Black organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and
Opal Tometi in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and as
a call to action against anti-Black racism in US society. The chapter-based organization
works to broaden conversations around state violence against Black people in the
United States and globally. ‘Black Lives Matter Freedom & Justice for All Black Lives’,
Black Lives Matter RSS2. http://blacklivesmatter.com/ (accessed 19 July 2016).
6 The Critical Craft Forum Session from which this interview is taken took place on
6 February 2016 at College Art Association, Washington, DC, and is available as a
downloadable podcast at www.criticalcraftforum.com. Absent due to unforeseen
circumstances were quilt-maker and scholar Joan M. E. Gaither and artist and
curator Diana N’Diaye.

‘THE BLACK CRAFTSMAN SITUATION’ 265

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7 Thesociologicalcinema. ‘Thesociologicalcinema’, The Sociological Cinema, http://

thesociologicalcinema.tumblr.com/post/132334458625/white-privilege-is-your-
history-being-part-of-the (accessed 1 May 2016). Photo credit: Perry Threlfall.
8 Allen Fannin to Francis Merritt, 19 January 1972. Francis Sumner Merritt papers,
1903-1979. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Page 2.
9 For information on the lead pollution in the city of Flint, Michigan’s water system,
see Abby Goodnough, Monica Davey and Mitch Smith. ‘When the Water Turned
Brown’, New York Times, 23 January 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/us/
when-the-water-turned-brown.html (accessed 24 July 2016).
10 See ‘Timeline: Freddie Gray’s Arrest, Death and the Aftermath--Baltimore Sun’,
Baltimore Sun, http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/freddie-gray/ (accessed 23
May 2016).

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INDEX

#BlackLivesMatter 253, 265 n.5 of politicized craft 18

3D risk 120, 122
modelling 148–9 theory 80
printing 5, 125, 135, 152–3 affect(ive) 2, 6, 15, 18–19, 27, 45, 70, 120, 123
3D Additivist Manifesto (Allahyari and n.4, 171, 178, 190, 192–3, 214
Rourke) 151–2, 152 good 2, 82, 91, 192
360 Degrees Vanishing (Jarmon) 51–7, labour 80
52, 54–5 meaning 199
power 18
Aboriginal. see also Indigenous qualities of textiles 15
communities 7–8, 225, 227, 229, 232 sadness 230
moccasin vamps 229–33 African American 6, 62–3, 66–9, 75 n.1, 185,
abstract(ion) 6, 83, 89, 101, 203, 228 203, 211–12, 249, 261, 264
Black feminist 201 hairdressing 254
expressionism 201 students 261
painting 205 textile making 6, 203
politics of 205 agency 1, 16, 19, 27, 88, 90, 136, 231, 241
academia 8, 14, 17, 259, 261 Agosín, Marjorie 220, 221, 223, 225
Accumulated Affects of Migration (Gates) 65 Agro, Elizabeth 265 n.4
activism(st) 3, 15–16, 26, 68, 72, 77 n.26, 99, Agua con Azúcar (Gabinete Ordo
103–4, 113 Amoris) 162–3
antiglobalization 35 alienation 62, 75, 103–4, 114 n.11
anti-war 14 Allahyari, Morehshin 4–5, 147–53,
climate 33 148–50, 152
craft 1, 13, 17, 26–7, 212 alternative
craft communities 18 economy 24
cultural 227 to mass-produced goods 16, 23–4, 190, 193
feminist 20, 103, 113, 217, 223 to modernity 83
human rights 223 to oppositional politics 213
lifestyle-based 16 pedagogical models 126
Adamson, Glenn 10 n.18, 17, 109 Amazon 140
aesthetics 1, 22–3, 48 n.47, 164, 176, 179, 257 ancestral imagery 7, 224
autonomy 72–3 Anderson, Chris 128, 139, 141, 143 n.5
DIY 16 Anderson, Heather 7–8, 239
of handcraft 3, 14, 79–93 Annan, Kofi 35
metapolitics 37 Anthropocene 5
268

anti/alter-globalization 1, 14, 18, 34–5, 44–6 banner 15–16, 33, 34, 106, 163, 253
anti-capitalism 99, 106, 190 Barad, Karen 241, 246 n.9
anti-colonial organizations 222 baskets 239–45
anti-globalization 1, 14, 33, 35, 44–6 Basket weaving (Cultural Cocoon) (Johnson)
anti-war activism 14 225–6, 239–42, 253
Anzaldúa, Gloria 207, 213 beading 3, 22, 40, 51–4, 232
appropriation 6, 102, 108, 205 community-based beading circles 57
cultural 14, 23 materials 57
of Indigenous cultural work 6, 22–3, 26 Moccasin beading 232
ARCHEloft 133–5 beads
architectural fabrication 117–22 in 360 Degrees Vanishing project (Jarmon)
architecture 2, 4–5, 117–22 51–7, 52, 54–5
Architecture Lobby, The 4, 10 n.11, 124 n.10 glass 51–3, 232, 264
archive 56, 151, 153, 171, 183–4, 218 paper 39
Archive Room, The (Johnson) 239, 244–5 seed 51, 53
Arrechea, Alexandre 157–61, 168 n.14 thread and 175–6
art. see also galleries; museums; specific working 51, 54–5, 57
movement Bedford, Emma 58 n.11, 59 n.13, 59 n.15
community 18, 188, 230 Belcourt, Christi 7, 229–31, 231, 237 n.52
criticism 1, 26, 72 Bell, Nicholas R. 32 n.53
education 127, 140 Benjamin, Walter 193, 197 n.56, 239, 246 n.2,
Euro-Western canon in 7 248 n.26
exclusions of craft 8 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 89, 93
high-art 7 Berlo, Janet Catherine 219
artefact 5, 8, 157, 159, 241–2 Beuys, Joseph 61
Artisan Welfare Programme 37, 37 ‘Big Knit’ campaign 30 n.37
Art League of Houston (ALH) 51, 52, 52, Black, Anthea 1, 9 n.7, 13, 33, 144 n.30
56, 58 n.2 Black craftsman 249–65
Arts and Crafts movement 18, 75 Black feminist abstraction 201
artwashing 28 n.3 Black jeweller 263
ash (black) 239, 241–2 Blackness 263, 265
Aspers, Patrik 43 Black Panther Party 68
aspirational 86, 102, 113 Black Power (movement) 25
August, Laura 7, 207 blacksmithing 253
austerity measures 2, 5, 140, 156, 167 n.4, blanket 176, 181–4, 187, 225
188, 193 crocheted 205
authenticity 4, 6, 10 n.18, 19–20, 23–7, 40, 44, homemade 193
81–3, 88, 112, 243 blue-collar workers 117, 119, 121
Auther, Elissa 2 bluewashing 34–5, 45. see also greenwashing
authorship 103, 108–9, 166, 243 Boltanski, Luc 2, 34, 44–5
autonomy 27, 56, 72–3, 75, 108, 120, 164, 219, bookbinding 24
226, 228, 278 Border Patrol uniforms 209, 209–10, 212–14
Avedisian, Alexis Anais 4–5, 147 borders
American 208
Bale Variant series (Smith) 6, 199, 200, colonial 7
201, 204 commercial border crossing 133
Bale Variant No. 0011 (2005) 204 communities 7
Bale Variant No. 0022 200 US–Mexico border 208, 224
Bam, Bulelwa 53, 59 n.18, 59 n.21 branding

268  Index
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corporate 18, 202 carpentry 158, 161

entrepreneurship and 74 Castillo, Marco 158–9, 161, 168 n.14
lifestyle-based marketing and 27 Cast Off Knitters 15
of products 69 ceramics 63, 106
strategies 19, 144 n.30 charity 14, 18–19, 23, 37, 39, 43, 184
bricolage 5, 166, 167 n.8 Chiapan huipiles/huipil(s) 224–9, 226–7, 231,
conceptualization 157 234–7, 236 n.42
Cuban culture of 161, 163–4 Chiapello, Eve 2, 34, 44–5
phenomenon 155–6 Chilean arpilleras 219–24
British Scalp Proclamation 242, 247 n.13–14 choice 89, 119, 184, 189
Brooks, Andrew 199–200 and charity 14
Bryan-Wilson, Julia 2, 6, 9 n.3, 17, 28 n.8, 29 consumer 16, 18, 82–3, 86
n.26, 199, 211, 214 n.5, 217, 224 economic freedom of 17
Brynjolson, Noni 3, 7, 56, 61, 67 individual 19, 23, 162
Buddha (Fire & Water) (Scott) 264 philosophical 132
Burch, Tory 19, 22, 30 n.39 Cipriani, Simone 39, 41, 43
Burisch, Nicole 1, 3, 13, 33, 51, 144 n.30, 232 citizenship 14, 19, 26–7, 208
burlap fabric 21–2, 230 Citizens of Craft campaign 19, 24, 25
Burne-Jones, Edward 112 Clark, Sonya 8, 249, 253, 255
Bush Lauren, Lauren 19, 22, 30 n.39 Clark, Wesley 8, 249, 253, 256, 257
Buszek, Maria Elena 2 class 14, 39, 42, 57
clay. see ceramics
Cabrera, Margarita 7, 207–14, 209–12, Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) 34, 45
214 n.3 climate
CAD-CAM (computer aided design-to- activists 33
computer aided manufacturing) 118–19 political 214
Calgary Makerspace 135–6 climate change 5, 33
Calgary Protospace Ltd. 133 ‘Climate Revolution’ banner 33, 34
Calvo, Andrew 130, 132, 140, 144 n.33 Clinton, Hillary 151
Canada 218, 229 cloth 6, 20, 81, 156, 177, 199, 202, 225
Canada’s Indian Act 242, 247 n.15, 248 n.25 donation 36
North American Free Trade Agreement economic meaning 6, 201
(NAFTA) 224 politics of 33
violence against Aboriginal women 229–31 Clothing Poverty (Brooks) 199
Canadian artist. see specific artists CNC (computer numerical control) 117
Canadian Craft Federation 19, 23–4 collaboration 4, 15, 22, 56–7, 120, 130, 134,
capitalism 4, 6, 13, 17, 33–46, 72, 87, 100, 213, 245
125–7, 140, 142, 153, 162, 165, 183, 191, collectives 5, 61, 108, 125, 223, 232
193, 228–9 authorship 166
anti-capitalism 99, 190 labour 65, 74–5
corporate 83 micro-economies 127
late 1–2, 6, 80–1, 99, 142, 183, 191 urban 133
neoliberal 1, 4, 98–9, 101–3, 106, 108 College Art Association 253
neoliberalism 99–100, 107, 111 Collyer Brothers 6, 185–6, 190, 193
overconsumption 2, 6, 33, 183, 185–90, 192 colonialism 6, 26, 235 n.7, 239, 245
spirit of 2, 44–5 cultural 3, 38, 229
Western liberalist 43 and Indigenous peoples 239
carbon footprints 4, 126 settler 6–7, 218, 228–9, 235 n.8
Carlton, Amy 29 n.13 and violence 172, 219–20

Index 269
270

conceptual art 110 Industrial Revolution 128

Constellation Africa Show 39 labour 4, 117–22
consumerism 16–17, 22–3, 83, 86, 88, 192 as lifestyle 3, 17, 27, 79
cultures 14 on margins/marginality 7, 14, 17
goods 7 methodologies 2, 5, 103
consumption of craft 2, 19, 126 and moral value 18
contemporary art 2, 4–6, 15, 18, 56–7, 72–3, movement 13, 16, 18, 28 n.11
230, 245 national identity 18–19, 26
contemporary craft theory 5, 8, 224 politics 2, 5, 7, 9, 13
Cooper, Cinnamon 29 n.13 as property 97–113
copper 4 public space 14, 17, 103, 165
bracelets 148 simplicity 18, 92–3
butterflies 208–9 slowness 3–4, 80, 82–3, 93 n.5
facade installation 118–19 social practice 3, 7, 71
panels 117–18, 121 socioeconomic status 99
Corbett, Sarah 15, 28 n.6, 29 n.17 subversive nature 153
Corntassel, Jeff 234 n.5, 237 n.63 sustainability 18, 27, 34, 44
Cornwallis, Edward 242, 247 n.13 theory 1–2, 8, 98–9
counterculture 86, 97, 133 traditional practices 3, 210, 212
craft value 3, 23, 211
activism 1, 13, 17, 26–7 craft and socially engaged art 71–5
amateur 2, 230 Craft Guerilla Army 29 n.12
in American education 8, 69–70, 126–32, Craftifesto (Carlton and Cooper) 16, 24
136, 139 craftivism 2, 14–18
anticapitalism 99, 190 Craftivism: The Art and Craft of Activism
artisanal 3, 5, 22, 24, 40, 61–75 (Greer) 15, 25
aspirational 86, 102, 113 Craftivist Collective, London 16
authenticity 3–4, 6, 23, 25, 40 Craft Ontario 32 n.53
charity, charitable 14, 18–19, 37, 39, 184 craftsmanship 83, 123
Citizens of 19, 24, 25, 32 n.53 craftspeople 17–18, 24, 33, 97, 102, 108–9,
and collaboration 4, 15, 22, 120, 208 119–20, 254
collecting 6, 181–7 craftwashing 2, 14, 19–23, 28 n.3, 35–8,
consumer-driven charity projects 19 44–6
consumption 2, 19, 126 creativity 4, 15–16, 97, 106, 109, 118, 121,
criticism 1–2, 72 139, 189, 219
curating 79, 193, 230 Critical Craft Forum 8, 253, 265 n.4, 265 n.6
and decolonization 217–19, 233 crochet 20, 40, 182, 184, 205, 257
definitions of 1 Cuban art 5, 157
digital 5, 120, 126 Cuban Liberty and Democracy Solidarity Act
fair 2, 9, 61, 74 166 n.3
feminized associations of 17 cultural capital 26, 73, 88
function 2, 13, 19 cultural imperialism 6
in global context 1 curating 79, 193, 230, 241
handcraft 22, 79–93 Cvetkovich, Ann 184, 190, 196 n.43
and high art 7
hoarding 6, 181–93 Davis, Ben 72–3, 75 n.26, 77 n.26, 77 n.35
indie craft 2, 14–16, 18, 22 Davis, Heather 7, 10 n.14, 11 n.23, 233
Indigenous practices 228 Dawkins, Nicole 18, 22, 26, 30 n.35
individuality 17, 22, 25, 110 Deamer, Peggy 4–5, 10 n.11, 117, 123 n.4

270  Index
271

de Certeau, Michel 158, 167 n.13 embroidery 6–8, 15–16, 209–10, 214, 217–20,
Declaration on Fundamental Principles and 223–4, 233–4
Rights at Work 35 Aboriginal moccasin vamps 229–33
decolonization 8, 217–19, 222–3, 230, 233, Chiapan huipiles/huipil(s) 224–9
234 n.5, 239 Chilean arpilleras 219–24
text 2, 7, 217 re-reading embroidery 7
theory 2 enlightenment 99, 109–10
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency La Época (The Epoch) (Desde Una
(DARPA) 144 n.25 Pragmática Pedagógica (DUPP)) 164–5
dematerialization 151 ethical fashion 2, 15, 33–5, 38
de Meuron, Pierre 4, 117–18, 120–2, 122 n.1, Ethical Fashion Africa Collection, Kenya 41
123 n.3 Ethical Fashion Initiative 38–44
democracy 15, 100, 159 Ethical Trading Initiative 36
denim 22, 202, 258 ethnicity 14, 253, 263
Dennis, Ryan 68–9, 77 n.27 Etsy 16, 19, 23–4, 32 n.52, 110, 112, 188,
Dercole, Matthew 64–5 190–2, 196 n.47
Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica (DUPP) Evangelou, Evie 39
157–8, 164–5 excess 5–6
Design & Crime (Foster) 93 Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art
deskilling 121–2 (Buszek) 9 n.7, 28 n.4–5, 30 n.26
Desna, Czech Republic 51, 53, 57
desparecidos (disappearance) 220 FabFoundation 143 n.11
de Young Museum 4, 117, 118–19 Fab Lab Berlin 126–8, 137–9, 138, 139, 141
digital production 5, 118, 120 fabric
Dinner Party, The (Chicago) 218 burlap 21
Dion, Mark 90 cotton 39
Dior Group 45 cultural 42–3
DIY (Do-it-yourself) 5, 16, 20, 22, 24, fabrication 4, 20
79, 82, 87 architectural 117–22
DIY Movement 126 digital 117–20, 128
Doc Martens 87 experimental 128
Doctorow, Cory 126, 142, 143 n.1–3, networked digital 128
145 n.56–7 stone 149
Doctorow, E.L. 185, 193, 194 n.12 studio 129
domestic space 16, 157, 166, 186 factories 9
Dorchester Projects (Gates) 62 Bangladeshi 36
Dorsey, Jack 131 cigar factory workers 160
Dublin, Lois Sherr 58 n.5, 58 n.12, 58 n.14 female workers 202
Duchampian ready-made 65 Mexican maquiladoras 208
dyeing 35, 39–40, 202, 227 Preciosa Ornela factory 51, 53, 57
workers 121
Eastern Cape Provincial Arts and Culture Zahner’s factory 122
Council (ECPACC) 51, 55 Fannin, Allen 8, 249, 251–2, 256
eco-capitalism 23 fashion 2–3
ecological crisis 19, 33, 128, 142, 152 brands 18–19, 40
ecology 43–4 ethical 2, 15, 33–5, 38, 42–5
economics 1, 45, 138 fair 39
Keynesian economics 100 fast 3, 33, 36, 190
education 8, 69, 127, 139–40, 162 industry 3, 22, 33–6, 39–40, 42, 135

Index 271
272

luxury 3, 34, 38, 45 handmade objects in 62

Fashion4Development (F4D) 39 public 137
fashion designers space 62–4, 165, 199
African 39 ‘white cube’ 164
luxury 34 garden 61, 68, 71, 79, 137, 213
UN Ethical Fashion Initiative 40 garment
Fashion Transparency Index 37 Cambodian garment industry 45
FEED Foundation 19 making 190, 199
bags 21–2, 30 n.39 wearable tech 135
feminism 17, 25, 113, 207, 218, 227, 234 Garneau, David 230, 235 n.11, 244, 248 n.22
activism 20, 217 Gates, Theaster 3, 62–6, 63, 74, 76 n.6, 254
art practices 7 Gaugele, Elke 2–3, 22, 33, 47 n.30
Black feminist abstraction 201 gender 14, 16, 43, 201
decolonial text 217–34 crafting 20
movements 113 domesticity 20
Riot Grrl scene 16 gender-based oppression 233
scholarship 17 gender-based violence 220–4, 229–32
second-wave feminism 218 structural inequities 140
third wave 113 gentrification 3–4, 62, 67–9, 73, 125–6, 129
Ferreira da Silva, Denise 172, 179 n.3–4 Gerdes, Benj 83
Florida, Richard 14, 127, 140 Gershenfeld, Neil 128, 143 n.10
folk 56, 79 Gestures of Resistance (exhibition) (Stratton
music 85 and Leemann) 17
skill 157 Gibbons, Perry 142
food Gioni, Massimiliano 204
aid to fashion 38, 42 Glass, Matt 84, 85, 94 n.10
chain 80–1 glass beads 52–3, 58 n.1, 232
donation 68 Preciosa Ornela factory 51, 57
fast-food 83 glassmaking 51, 57, 255
production 15 global capitalism 2, 43
staples 155 Global Compact 33, 35–8, 44
wrappers 205 globalization 18, 22, 33, 35, 44–5. see also
Foster, Hal 93, 95 n.35 antiglobalization
Francis Sumner Merritt papers 250–2 Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689 114 n.1
Fraser, Nancy 30 n.27 goods
Freedom and Democracy (McNicoll) 98 consumer 7
Free People’s Medical Clinic (Leigh) 254 handmade 18, 24
Friedan, Betty 191, 197 n.48 luxury 22, 27, 42
Frost, Randy 184–5 mass-production 16, 24
furniture 106–11 textile 45
colonial 157 Gorbachev, Mikhail 155
non-functional furniture replicas 165 Gould, Caroline 239, 241, 243
FUSE33 Makerspace 133–6 Granny Square (Smith) 20, 204–5, 205
Green, Arthur 249
Gabinete Ordo Amoris 5, 161, 163, 163 greenwashing 19, 23, 35–8, 46 n.7. see also
galleries 7–8, 14 bluewashing
accessibility of social crafting 7–8, 14 Greer, Betsy 15, 25, 28 n.4
Artpace 208 Greif, Mark 86
community 66 Groys, Boris 87–9, 91

272  Index
273

Gschwandtner, Sabrina 15, 28 n.8 activism 223

Gulf Labor Artist Coalition 4, 10 n.12 activity 43, 45
agency 221
hacker 126, 133, 139 postcolonial feminist perspective 34–6
Hadjithomas, Joana 171, 175–6 queer-feminist perspectives 46
Hair Craft Project (Clark) 254, 255 Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late
Half Cut Tea 3, 84, 84, 85, 88–90, 94 n.11 Capitalism (Mitchell) 181–4, 182, 187,
handmade (handcraft) 3–4, 14–15, 22–4, 74, 192–3, 194 n.6, 8, 16
86, 89, 93 hyper-individualism 2
aesthetics 14
goods 18, 24, 36 idealism 17
moral value 18 identity 9, 18–19, 23
role of 1 corporate 37
Handmade Nation (film) 16 national 19
Handmade Revolution (TV show) 17 self-styling 16
‘Handmade with love’ collection Igloliorte, Heather 217–19, 225, 228, 232
(Westwood) 33 immigrants 3, 7, 69, 214
Haraway, Donna 154 n.8 communities 208
Hatch, Mark 10 n.13, 128–30, 139, 142, 143 n.9 incarceration 7
Hayashida, Jennifer 83 immigration 212–14
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts 8, 26, independent crafts people 18, 23–6, 85, 131–2
249, 263, 265 n.1 Indian Act 242, 247 n.15, 248 n.25
Heath, Joseph 86, 111 indie craft 2, 14, 22
Hebdige, Dick 68, 87, 94 n.15, 94 n.19 movement 16
Heimerl, Cortney 16, 28 n.10 sales 15
Helms–Burton Act 166 n.3 Indigenous
Hernández, Diango 161 art and craft 7–8, 22, 26, 52–3, 217–33,
Herring, Scott 187–8, 190 239, 242–5
Herzog, Jacques 4, 117, 120–2, 122 n.1, communities 7–8, 22, 38, 52, 217–33
123 n.3 culture 10 n.18, 22, 54
Hill, Kashmir 150 indigenization 52
Himada, Nasrin 5–6, 171, 179 n.3 peoples 236 n.28
hipster 86–7 professors 260
Hirsch, Fred 99, 111 individualism 18, 27, 87, 99, 109–10
H&M 3, 19 creativity 4
Conscious Collection 36 Locke’s individualism 106–10
Hoarders (TV show) 6, 185–6 possessive 101
hoarding 6, 184 industrialization 13, 43, 62, 98, 189
fabric 188–9 Industrial Revolution 128
psychopathology of 183–5, 187, 190, 193 Ingold, Tim 241
hobby-craft 79, 131, 134, 188, 191–2 Inquiry for Missing and Murdered
Holt Renfrew 22 Indigenous Women and Girls 231,
Homer & Langley (Doctorow) 185 237 n.58
homogenization 98 intellectual property 5, 125, 130
honesty 18, 20, 44–5, 97, 107 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Houston 3, 54–7, 62, 66, 68 10 n.22, 31 n.48
Houston Arts Alliance 56, 67 Interior Habanero (Los Carpinteros) 5,
humanitarian 35–8, 221–2 157–60, 160, 161, 165–6, 168 n.14–15,
human rights 2–3, 25, 42, 45 169 n.34

Index 273
274

International Labour Organization (ILO) 35 Le-Clochard duvet cover 20–2, 21

internet 127, 147, 150–1, 259 Lee, Joe Han 25, 25
Invention of Craft, The (Adamson) 10 n.18, Leemann, Judith 2, 9 n.5, 29 n.23
32 n.55 Leigh, Simone 254
ISIS 147–53, 152 n.1 leisure 131, 156, 188–9, 191–2, 202, 213
Leonard, Annie 187
Jackson, Shannon 73 Leon-Portilla, Miguel 207
Jarmon, Selven O’Keef 3, 51–7, 52, 54–5 Lepore, Jill 153
Jefferies, Janis 195 n.30 Levine, Faythe 16, 28 n.10, 29 n.12
Jenkins, Jeffrey 91 Levi’s 19
jewelry 24, 45, 61, 68, 70, 263 waterless jeans 36
Johnson, Ursula 8, 239–45, 240, 243–4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 157, 167 n.8
Joreige, Khalil 171, 175–6 liberalism 4, 87–113
Jørgensen, Marianne 15 lifestyle 3–4, 16–18, 23, 27, 79, 90
Little Book of Craftivism, A (Corbett) 15
Kapcia, Antoni 166 n.7 Livingstone, Joan 254
Khachiyan, Anna 4–5, 147 L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian) (Johnson) 239,
Khiam (2000–2007) (Hadjithomas and 240, 242, 243, 245, 247 n.16
Joreige) 171–4. see also Objects of Khiam Lobel, Michael 194 n.16
(Hadjithomas and Joreige) Locke, John 4, 100–3, 106–8, 111, 114 n.1,
needle 174–5 114 n.3, 114 n.11
pencil 176 Locke’s philosophy 100–3
thread and beads 175–6 London Fashion Week 33
knitting 15, 17, 20, 184, 188–9 Lonetree, Amy 145
Kowolik, Leopold 4, 97 Long, Jordan Wayne 84, 85
Loos, Adolf 93, 120
Labelle, Marie-Louise 53, 59 n.17 Los Carpinteros 5, 157–60, 160, 161, 165–6,
labour 1, 4, 24, 56, 74–5, 89, 93 168 n.14–15, 169 n.34
contemporary craft 4, 55–7, 62–5, 73, 82, love 33, 44–6, 162
92, 191, 201, 241 Lowe, Rick 3, 61–2, 66
exploitation of 33 luxury 42
feminized 8 fashion 3, 22, 27, 34, 38
practices 23
precarious 2, 17, 27 Macpherson, Crawford Brough 101, 110
rights 34–5, 38 Macpherson, Janet 25
skilled 84, 101, 117–22 mahogany 5, 159
textiles 43, 45 MakeFashion 133–5
La Casa Nacional (DUPP) 157 Maker Movement 4, 128
La Muestra Provisional (Gabinete Ordo makerspaces 4–5, 126–42
Amoris) 163 Makers:The New Industrial Revolution
land 6–8, 22, 217–19, 224–9, 233, 234 n.5, 235 (Anderson) 126, 128, 143 n.5, 145 n.46
n.7, 239 marginal, marginalization 7, 14, 17, 26, 41
landscape marketing 3, 14
coastal 202 campaign 23–8
desert 213 products 18, 20
of immigration 213 markets 2, 13–14, 22
Lanier, Jaron 153 capitalism 17
Latinx 3, 69, 207, 212, 222 global 40
Lax, Thomas J. 56, 59 n.26 leaderships 46

274  Index
275

niche 39 The Museological Grand Hall (Johnson)

Marquilla cigarrera cubana (Los 243, 245
Carpinteros) 159 Museum of Contemporary Craft 256
Marx, Karl 101, 121 museums 2–4, 8, 14, 17. see also specific
Marxism 75, 101, 109, 121, 139 galleries and museums
Mary Bamber (Reichardt and Reynolds) My Big Black America (Wesley Clark) 257
105
Maryland Institute College of Art 201 Nasher Sculpture Center 62
mass-produced/mass-production 16, 24–5, nationalism 234
65, 73, 108, 190, 208 and borders 154 n.1
material culture 5, 92, 99, 155–6, 162, 166, nation-building 26, 218
187, 234 Nation-Building: Craft and Contemporary
materiality 1, 5, 63, 153, 155, 171 American Culture (Bell) 32 n.53
Material Speculation (Allahyari) 4–5, 148–9, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became
148–50, 153 Consumer Culture (Potter and Heath)
Mazza, Cat 15, 28 n.8 86
McCartney, Stella 43 Native. see Indigenous
McCullough, Malcolm 120, 123 n.7 Native Women’s Association of Canada 229
McFadden, David Revere 29 n.22 neoliberal capitalism 1, 17, 19, 25, 38, 40, 106
McKelvey, James 131 neoliberalism 71, 100, 102
McNicoll, Carol 97–9, 98 expansion of 33
Menkes, Suzy 42 nepantla 212
Merritt, Francis Sumner 249, 250–2 Netukulimik 8, 239
metal 5, 106, 117, 208 New Industrial Revolution 128
metalwork 68, 208, 210 New Spirit of Capitalism, The (Boltanski and
Mexican maquiladoras 208 Chiapello) 34, 44
Mexican Revolution 228 New York Times 86, 92, 191
micro-economies 4 Ngai, Sianne 80–2
middle class 74, 95, 190–1, 262 Nick Olson & Lilah Horwitz: Makers (Glass
migrant 4, 213–14 and Long) 84
migration 39, 62, 65, 201–2, 212–14 Nike Blanket Petition (Mazza) 15
Mi’kmaq basketry 7 non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
Mi’kmaq cultural traditions 239 34–6, 38, 45, 222
Mi’kmaw language 245 n.1 North American Free Trade Agreement
Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember) (Johnson) (NAFTA) 224
241, 244, 245, 246 n.5 nostalgia 16, 18, 20, 85, 87, 111, 120, 230
Mildred’s Lane 3, 90–1, 93, 95 n.33
minimalism 201, 242 Obama, Barack 127, 150
Mitchell, Allyson 6, 181, 182, 187, 192–3, 194 Objects of Khiam (Hadjithomas and
n.1, 194 n.6, 194 n.8 Joreige) 175–6
Mitchell, W. J. T. 213–14 Obler, Bibiana 8, 249, 253
Monsoon/Accessorize 36–7 O’Brien, Meghann 245
Artisan Welfare Programme 37, 37 Okeke-Agulu, Chika 59 n.27
craftwashing strategies 37 Okereke, Chukwumerjie 37, 40, 44
Morales, Violeta 220, 221 open source 5, 125, 141
Morris, Kathleen 25–6 O’pltek (It Is Not Right) (Johnson) 239
Morris, William 112, 120 O’pltek series 248 n.18
Moten, Fred 171–2 O’Reilly, Tim 139, 143 n.13
organic fashion 45, 151, 202

Index 275
276

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and programming 3, 15, 62, 67, 130, 231
Development 189 sector 132–3
Organization of African First Ladies against Puett, J. Morgan 3, 90–2, 91
HIV/AIDS (OAFLA) 39 punk movement 22, 23, 87
Oroza, Ernesto 161–2, 169 n.28–31 Purcell, Rebecca 91
Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, pussy hats 15
Interesting (Ngai) 80–1 Pye, David 123 n.7
overconsumption 2, 6, 33, 183, 185,
189–90, 192 queer-feminist artist 6, 46, 207
quillwork 232
painting 35, 41, 66, 159, 201, 205, 258–359 quilt 20, 39, 188, 201, 256–8
Parker, Rozsika 7, 16, 29 n.14, 218, 223, 234,
235 n.6 race 2, 8, 14, 16, 18–19, 22, 42–3, 63, 69, 75,
Parkour 246 n.11 77 n.26, 86, 125, 140, 159, 168 n.18, 202,
Partnership for Cleaner Textile 36 205, 253, 264
Patel, Mikhail 83 textile workers 36
pattern 20, 44, 201, 225–6 Racette, Sherry Farrell 52–3
Peace Knits banner (Revolutionary Knitting racism 160, 185, 236 n.48, 258, 265 n.5
Circle) 15 Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting
Peled, Micha 202 (exhibition) 17
Peteran, Gord 109, 110 radical politics 27
Pham, Cecilia 69, 77 n.27 Rana Plaza factory building, collapse 36
philanthropy 22 Rancière, Jacques 37, 82, 88
Pindell, Howardena 201 Rebuild Foundation 62
Pinder, Kymberly 200 recycled
Pink M.24 Chaffee Tank (Jørgensen) 15 nylon 164
Pinochet, Augusto 7–8, 219–23 textile work 6, 20, 33, 82, 84, 156, 162
plastic 5, 55 n.1, 104, 152–3, 162, 167 n.5, 174 Reichardt, Carrie 103, 104–5, 109, 113
pleasure 7, 22, 89, 93, 106–7, 117, 183, 188, Renegade Craft Fair 16, 18
190, 192 revolution 2, 5, 13, 18, 23–4, 114 n.1, 128,
porcelain 25 155, 228
postcolonial feminist 34 Revolutionary Knitting Circle 15
Potter, Andrew 86, 111 Revolution in the Making (exhibition) 201
poverty 10, 20, 22, 39, 41–4, 128, 162, 199 Reynolds, Nick 105
precarious labour 2, 17, 27, 128 Richards, M.C. 249
Primark (Associated British Foods [ABF]) 36 Rio Declaration on Environment and
prison(er) 6, 8, 171–3, 176–9, 179 n.2, 220 Development 35
progressive 26 Riot grrl movement 16
movement 13–18, 22 Risatti, Howard 73
politics 2, 18 Roberts, John 72–4, 121
Project Row Houses 3, 66–9 Robertson, Kirsty 2, 6, 17–18, 20, 181,
property and individualism 98–100 196 n.36
Locke’s philosophy 100–3 Rodríguez, Dagoberto 157–60, 168 n.14
property in craft 103–6 Rodríguez, René Francisco 157
Protospace 134 Rogers, Heather 19
public 15, 17, 161, 179 n.2 Rosetti, Dante Gabriel 112
art/craft 61–2, 103, 247–8 n.16 Roy, Arundhati 13, 27
domain 150 Ruskin, John 120, 207
funding 4, 56, 66, 127, 129–30, 140 Russell, Bibi 39

276  Index
277

Sabila (Cabrera) 211–12 spirit of capitalism 2, 44

Saitowitz, Sharma 58 n.4 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 2, 34, 37,
Sala de Torturas (Chamber of Torture) 41–3, 45
(Morales) 221, 222 Stalp, Marybeth C. 188, 192, 195 n.30
Savig, Mary 8, 249, 253 Steedman, Carolyn 214
scarcity 5, 25, 155–6, 158, 164, 178 Steketee, Gail 184–5
Schwartz, Judith S. 29 n.21 Stratton, Shannon R. 2–4, 29 n.23, 79
Scott, Joyce J. 8, 187, 249, 253, 264 Studio Craft Movement 32 n.53, 256
sculpture 7, 149, 152, 161–2, 199–203, stuff 5, 23, 27, 100–2, 106, 183, 185, 187, 189,
208–9, 262 191, 205
Second World War 68 subaltern 42–3
self-sufficiency 18–20, 74, 257 Subversive Stitch, The (Parker) 7, 16, 218
Sennett, Richard 120 sustainability 18, 23, 27, 33–5, 40, 44–6, 133,
Serrano Ortiz De Solórzano, Blanca 5, 155 229, 245
settler-colonialism 6–7, 218, 228–9, 235 n.8
sewing 6, 40, 193, 201, 208, 210–11, 220, Tapestries of Hope, Threads of Resistance
225, 232 (Agosín) 220
Sherlock, Diana 4–5, 125 TechShop Inc. 126–42, 131, 143 n.9, 144 n.33
Shine (Gates) 254 Teller, Juergen 41, 41
Sholette, Gregory 66 textiles 6, 13, 15, 20, 34–5, 112–13, 135,
shopping 27, 79, 91, 112, 164, 186, 192 199–205, 219, 228, 262
Silicon Valley 151, 153 hoarding 6
silk 227 labour 43, 45
silver 106, 148 workers 40, 42
Simmel, Georg 43 texture 20, 74, 107, 256
Simon, Roger I. 220 Thinking Through Craft (Adamson) 109
skilled makers 62–6, 74, 76 n.6 Third Ward 66–9, 72
Sklodowska, Elzbieta 166 n.1, 169 n.34 thrift 6, 18, 84, 184, 188, 190, 193
Smith, Shinique 6, 199–205, 200, 203–4 Thrift, Nigel 90, 93
Smull, Mary 181 Todd, Zoe 241, 246 n.10
Snurk 19 Toffler, Alvin 126, 143 n.5
bedding 22 Tory Burch 22, 30 n.39
products 20 tourism 3, 73–4, 156, 162, 165, 224
socialism 103, 112, 155, 161, 165 Trans.lation 3, 61–2, 69–71
socially engaged art 3, 61–2, 66, 71–5 Tregurtha, Kyle 42
social media 3, 84, 122, 125, 147, 153 Tremblay, Gail 245
social practice 3, 7, 31, 73 Trilling, Lionel 82
Sofá provisional (Gabinete Ordo Amoris) Truth Commission Report on Torture and
163, 163 Political Imprisonment 220, 235 n.17
solidarity 35, 172–3, 178–9 Tseëlon, Efrat 45
Soon-Taek, Ban 39 Tuck, Eve 223
Soul Elsewhere (Smith) 6, 203 turions, cheyanne 234
Soul Manufacturing Corporation (Gates) 3,
62–6, 63, 74–5 Understanding the Material Practices of
souvenir 57, 103, 149, 214 Glamour (Thrift) 90
sovereignty 7, 101–3, 107, 217–19, 224–5, United Nations (UN)
228, 232–4 Convention Against Corruption 35
Space in Between (Cabrera) 213 Environment Program 23
Special Period 5, 155–61, 164–6, 167 n.4 Ethical Fashion Initiative 38–44

Index 277
278

Global Compact 33, 35–8, 44 Wartime Knitting Circle (Gschwandtner) 15

Human Rights Committee 247 n.15 weaving 39–40, 226–7, 239–45, 254
International Trade Centre 43 Weber, Max 44
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 35 Weiss, Rachel 5, 161
Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Weitlaner-Johnson, Irmgard 225
Century (exhibition) 204 Westwood, Vivienne 3, 33–4, 34, 40–2, 41
Wiggers, Namita Gupta 2, 8, 249, 253, 256,
Vanite (Los Carpinteros) 159, 160 265 n.4
Victoria & Albert Museum 104, 104, 115 n.15 Williams, Austin 45
vintage fabric 91, 200, 204 Williams, Kristen A. 18, 30 n.31
violence 8, 22, 63, 75, 150, 153, 172, 178, 207, world-making 7, 90, 92
219–25, 228–33
Vivienne (Teller) 41 Yang, K. Wayne 223
Vizenor, Gerald 228 yarn 39–40, 183, 188–91, 257
yarnbombing 15
Wacquant, Loïc 75
Walker, Ellyn 7–8, 217, 227 Zahner Metals 4, 117–22
Walking with Our Sisters (WWOS) (Belcourt) Zapatistas 224–9, 233
229–33, 231 Zou, Carol 69–70
Wang, Pei-Hsuan 64

278  Index
i

PLATE 1 Snurk,
Le-Clochard, 2008,
cotton. Photo: Ram
Van Meel. Copyright:
Snurk (Chapter 1:
From Craftivism to
Craftwashing).

PLATE 2 Juergen Teller, Vivienne, Vivienne Westwood campaign, Autumn Winter

2011, Nairobi, 2011. Courtesy: Juergen Teller (Chapter 2: Ethical Fashion, Craft and
Global Capitalism).
ii

PLATE 3 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, 360 Degrees Vanishing, 2019. Photo: Alex Barber.
Courtesy: Art League Houston (Chapter 3: Selven O’Keef Jarmon).
iii

PLATE 4 Selven O’Keef Jarmon, 360 Degrees Vanishing, beaders working at Art
League Houston, Houston, Texas, 2015. Photo: Peter Gershon (Chapter 3: Selven
O’Keef Jarmon).

PLATE 5 Theaster Gates, Soul Manufacturing Corporation, The Spirit of Utopia, 2013,
installation view. Photo: Timothy Soar (Chapter 4: The Making of Many Hands).
iv

PLATE 6 Rebecca Purcell, J. Morgan Puett, and Jeffrey Jenkins in collaboration,

HumanUfactorY(ng) Workstyles: The Labor Portraits of Mildred’s Lane, 2014.
Photo: Jeffrey Jenkins (Chapter 5: That Looks Like Work).
v

PLATE 7 Gord Peteran, Secret Weapon, 2011, violin cases, hand planes, velvet, 24”
w x 8” d x 5” h. Courtesy: Gord Peteran (Chapter 6: Craft as Property as Liberalism as
Problem).

PLATE 8 Carrie Reichardt and The Treatment Rooms Collective, History is a Weapon,
2014, ceramic intervention, Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo: Peter Riches
(Chapter 6: Craft as Property as Liberalism as Problem).
vi

PLATE 9 Copper facade installation at De Young Museum, San Francisco, 2004.

Courtesy: A. Zahner Company (Chapter 7: Zahner Metals).

PLATE 10 Fab Lab Berlin, Samples, 2016. Courtesy: Fab Lab Berlin (Chapter 8:
Capitalizing on Community).
vii

PLATE 11 Morehshin Allahyari, Material Speculation: ISIS, Nergal, 2016, clear resin,
flash drives and memory cards. Courtesy: Morehshin Allahyari (Chapter 9: Morehshin
Allahyari).
viii

PLATE 12 Los Carpinteros, Vanite, 1994, wood, marble, oil painting. Courtesy: The
Farber Collection (Chapter 10: From Molten Plastic to Polished Mahogany).
ix

PLATE 13 Gabinete Ordo Amoris, Sofá provisional, 1995. Courtesy: Ernesto Oroza
(Chapter 10: From Molten Plastic to Polished Mahogany).

PLATE 14 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Objects of Khiam, 2000. Courtesy:
The artists. Photo: Alfredo Rubio, Two Suns in a Sunset at the Sharjah Art Foundation,
2016 (Chapter 11: Things Needed Made).
x

PLATE 15 Allyson Mitchell, Hungry Purse: The Vagina Dentata in Late Capitalism, detail,
installation, Toronto Alternative Art Fair International, Gladstone Hotel, Toronto, Ontario,
April 2006. Photo: Cat O’Neil (Chapter 12: Secret Stash).

PLATE 16 Shinique Smith, Soul Elsewhere, 2013,

artist’s clothing, ballpoint ink, poly-fil and rope, 38
1/2 x 18 x 14 inches. Courtesy: Shinique Smith
and SAS Studio, Private Collection. Photo: Eric
Wolfe (Chapter 13: Shinique Smith).
xi

PLATE 17 Shinique Smith, Bale Variant No. 0022, 2012, vintage fabric, clothing,
blankets, ribbon, rope, and wood, 90 x 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy: Shinique Smith and
The Sandy and Jack Guthman Collection, Chicago. Photo: Eric Wolfe (Chapter 13:
Shinique Smith).
xii

PLATES 18 AND 19 Margarita Cabrera in collaboration with Candelaria Cabrera, Space

in Between – Nopal detail and Nopal, 2010, border patrol uniform fabric, copper wire,
thread and terracotta pot. © Margarita Cabrera/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York, NY. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen (Chapter 14: Margarita Cabrera).
xiii

PLATE 20 Blouse, Huipil, San Andreas Larainzar or Magdalenas, Chiapas, Mexico,

Tzotzil Maya, cotton, wool, mid-twentieth century. Opekar/Webster Collection,
T94.0982. Courtesy: Textile Museum of Canada (Chapter 15: The Sovereign Stitch).

PLATE 21 Ursula Johnson, Museological Grand Hall, 2014, 12 etched Plexiglas vitrines
of varying dimensions, installation detail from Mi’kwite’tmn (Do you remember) at Saint
Mary’s University Art Gallery, 2014. Photo: Steve Farmer (Chapter 16: Ursula Johnson).
xiv

PLATE 22 Ursula Johnson, Male Dis-enfranchised, L’nuwelti’k (We Are Indian), 2014,
performance organized by Carleton University Art Gallery as part of Making Otherwise:
Craft and Material Fluency in Contemporary Art. Photo: Justin Wonnacott
(Chapter 16: Ursula Johnson).
xv

PLATE 23 Sonya Clark, The Hair Craft Project, 2013, featuring hairstylists Kamala
Bhagat, Dionne James Eggleston, Marsha Johnson, Chaunda King, Anita Hill Moses,
Nasirah Muhammad, Jameika and Jasmine Pollard, Ingrid Riley, Ife Robinson, Natasha
Superville and Jamilah Williams. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Photo: Naoko Wowsugi (Chapter 17: ‘The Black Craftsman Situation’).

PLATE 24 Wesley Clark, Black

Don’t Crack but it Sho’ Catch Hell,
2014, spray paint, acrylic, wood,
24 x 32 inches. Courtesy: Wesley
Clark. (Chapter 17: ‘The Black
Craftsman Situation’).
xvi

PLATE 25 Joyce J. Scott, Buddha (Fire & Water), 2013, hand-blown Murano
glass processes with beads, wire and thread. Photo: Mike Koryta. Courtesy: Goya
Contemporary, collection of NMAAHC Smithsonian Institution (Chapter 17: ‘The Black
Craftsman Situation’).