Fray: Art and Textile Politics

Julia Bryan-Wilson will be talking about her new book

Fray: Art and Textile Politics

in the Townsend Center for the Humanities‘ monthly Berkeley Book Chat series

 

Wednesday, Oct 11, 2017 | noon to 1:00 

Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto T-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”— the politics and social practices associated with handmaking— UC Berkeley’s Julia Bryan-Wilson explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval.

After an introduction by Natalia Brizuela, Bryan-Wilson will speak briefly about her work and then open the floor for discussion.

Julia Bryan-Wilson, co-editor with Shannon Jackson of the recent Representations special issue Time Zones: Durational Art and Its Contexts, is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to Fray, she is also the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War EraArt in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing.