Quilting

Jacqueline Bishop's celebrated piece Tristes Tropique I (2013), exhibited in the 2014 Jamaican Biennale, is part of the artist's larger engagement with the utopic and the dsytopic, the local and the global, the image and the gaze, in representations of the island of Jamaica. In this piece, Bishop restructures and recasts portraiture as a means to engage with nature and the naturalistic in order to dialogue concerning the authorship of Caribbean subjectivity. This work is an interposition between the two parts of Bishop's A View from Afar series that I call Landscapes: Jamaica (2010-ongoing) and the Dudus Chronicles (2011), which together represent a juxtapo-sition of the different Jamaicas she depicts in her work. Bishop's artscapes sit in the midst of dialogic engagement between the rural and urban contexts in Jamaican society; between the gaze up close and the romantic gaze from afar; between a sense of outsiderness and insiderness, but always in a space of belonging to an island that is rimmed and defined by racialized capitalism, a legacy of colonial disequity, touristic dreams and delusions, and violent social relations that spring from its inability to reconfigure its broken economical terrain. In effect, these artscapes allow for art and politics , the abstract and the material, the analytical and the activist, to commingle and resonate through processes of unsettling accepted suppositions, conceptualizations, narratives, and edicts. Tristes Tropique is an obvious invocation of Claude Levi-Strauss's (1955/1961) famous text, and Bishop uses the title as an evocative reminder of the melancholy and distress that undergirds Caribbean life. Levi-Strauss's work is a memoir that also becomes an ironic critique of the impact of human exegesis in forms of domination and exoticism under the prism of tourism, travel, and study. With this particular image, Bishop, like Levi-Strauss, creates a self-reflexive work that imbricates the fragility of the ecology and the place of Jamaicans within the narratology of Island life. This work, measuring 50.8 cm x 25.4 cm, is part of a new, ongoing photographic series by Bishop. The work is formed out of ripped, jagged photographs, pieced back together in odd, asymmetrical patterns, and in the midst stands a black-and-white image of a child surrounded by a mix-match of tropicality, a testament to people who are often unseen and a place that is so paradoxical. However, it is very much representative of how Bishop generates her own aesthetic form in her use of the techniques of intermedia, bricolage, and collaging, which I call "patchwork aesthetics, " a form which Bishop says derives from her foremothers who were visual artists. In Tristes Tropique I, Bishop builds on Levi-Strauss's critique of how the indigenous are misinterpreted and elided from Western narratives by simultaneously interpolating her ancestral connect-edness in the mixed media she employs and by creating a different subject view that emanates from within the photograph, welling from an iris that gently overlays, but does not obscure, the black-and-white image of the child. The outer portions of the photograph are scenes of nature, the lushness of the bush, with a ring of bright pink bougainvillea across the top; the child-a studio portrait of Jacqueline Bishop herself-sits in its midst outlined by the shape of an eye, with its looming iris (Fig. 1). Only the lower half of the child's face is seen, along with her upper torso; her eyes are obscured by the bougainvillea that blocks her view, but since she is placed in the middle of the iris, she implicates the gaze facing her. This would normally control her representation. Here, it does not. In effect, Bishop creates a visual doubling of the gaze from inside the photograph and the perception from the viewer outside that allows for a reinscription of Jamaican subjectivity. The external perspective, in looking at the photograph, may have dismissed

The paper presents a new method that automates the process of extracting graphic information from reference images and integrating the data into patchwork garments design. The main stages of the transition from a 2D reference image to the 3D virtual and actual garment are proposed. The method was applied to model a women's coat based on a painting titled “Improvisation 4” by W.W. Kandinsky (1909). The possibilities of using computer graphic packages and computer-aided design (CAD) systems in patchwork garments design in relation to contemporary trends in apparel industry were shown.

Seymen, N., & Aydın Türk, Y. (2018). City and Craft: Trabzon. In H. Arapgirlioğlu, A. Atik, S. Hızıroğlu, R. L.Elliot, & D. Atik (Eds.), The Most Recent Studies in Science and Art (Vol. 2, pp. 1994-2008). Ankara: Gece Kitaplığı. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS: Parallel to the globalizing world, due to the acceleration of capital, commerce, population, consumption and increasing product diversity, identity changes and cultural losses are taking place in the cities. Such changes in the texture of the cities are mostly seen in the old city centers where craft spaces are concentrated. Therefore, the crafts and craft spaces, which have an important place in the identity and culture of the city, are gradually decreasing and disappearing. This is an important problem for sustainability of crafts in the future. For this reason, planning approaches should be adopted in order to protect and maintain the craft spaces, which are distinguishable identities and cultural elements of the city. The historical city center of Trabzon, which was selected as the study area, has important traces in the identity and culture of the city. The historical city center and its surrounding urban areas are known for their craft types. For example, Pazarkapı for carpentry, chest-making, ironworking; Kemeraltı for jewellery, copperworking, silversmithing, broommaking; Tabakhane for shoemaking and leatherworking. Today, these craft spaces have either changed places or have gone to a change of function or are completely lost. It is important to be able to maintain these characteristics of the historical city center of Trabzon and traces it has today. Therefore, it is necessary to protect the craft spaces and bring them back to the city. In the planning and conservation works in the city, crafts and craft spaces should be supported by special projects. Cultural spaces where research projects, exhibitions and activities for the crafts can be made should be created and they must be brought together with the city and urbanites. With public, private and NGO cooperation craft-oriented urban policies should be developed. Sectoral models for different craft types in the city should be produced and cooperation should be provided.

This chapter explores some tensions in both textile theories and practices informed by the feminist 1970s. While tracing the lines between radical and reformist approaches to women's textiles, it pinpoints moments of intersection and permeability. Oscillating between a play for canonization and a debunking of the art world's selection criteria, feminist textiles both prefigure and feed into the diversity of craft's deployments in contemporary art practice. Omnipresent, pervasive, and resistant to coherent classification, textiles are interwoven into the private and public practices of every culture, both formal and informal, quotidian and ceremonial. The chapter discusses the difficulty of containing feminism and textiles by considering some of their tensions and contradictions in foundational feminist art historical and practice‐led thought. Considering the centrality of the art/craft/anti‐art debates in feminist cultural politics, it is unsurprising that a critical attention to textiles features prominently in foundational moments of feminist art history.

The needle arts are traditionally associated with the decorative, domestic, and feminine. Stitching the Self sets out to expand this narrow view, demonstrating how needlework has emerged as an art form through which both objects and identities – social, political, and often non-conformist – are crafted.

Bringing together the work of ten art and craft historians, this illustrated collection focuses on the interplay between craft and artistry, amateurism and professionalism, and re-evaluates ideas of gendered production between 1850 and the present. From quilting in settler Canada to the embroidery of suffragist banners and the needlework of the Bloomsbury Group, it reveals how needlework is a transformative process – one which is used to express political ideas, forge professional relationships, and document shifting identities.

With a range of methodological approaches, including object-based, feminist, and historical analyses, Stitching the Self examines individual and communal involvement in a range of textile practices. Exploring how stitching shapes both self and world, the book recognizes the needle as a powerful tool in the fight for self-expression.

In order to depart from an arguably hegemonic and colonial cultural perspective in the field of Composition and Rhetoric (Comp/Rhet), we claim that scholars in Comp/Rhet disproportionately continue to value quantitative and qualitative research methods based upon colonial--read Eurocentric--forms of knowledge-making such as positivism and empiricism, which value factual science over personal experience and intuitive knowledge. We claim that such colonial research methods overlook the researcher’s positionality and privilege, which denies the colonized, with their ties to a pre-Columbian past, their ability to challenge the objectivity of such methods.

One Hundred Good Wishes Quilts (OHGWQ) are a contemporary form of material culture that commemorates an American family’s adoption of a Chinese child. Made and/or coordinated by parents in the midst of adopting, OHGWQ are community-based objects constructed from fabrics donated by a large number of family, friends, and acquaintances. A practice that spread largely via the internet starting around 2000, the OHGWQ tradition is based upon a host of phenomena and contexts: the sudden growth of China adoption in the late 1990s and 2000s; indigenous patchwork and quilting practices in China and the U.S.; the Western history of cultural appropriation; and present-day forms of web-based communication.
Drawing on interviews with nearly two dozen adoptive parents, this research utilised a phenomenological approach to explore the experience of making a OHGWQ, a form of material culture never previously studied. The work explores how OHGWQ function on the individual or personal level, in such ways as celebrating a significant moment in a family’s history, making the adoption process seem less onerous and interminable, building support for a non-traditional method of family-building, and giving makers the opportunity to participate in a form of “everyday creativity” (Gauntlett 2011). The thesis also examines the OHGWQ’s place and meaning in the lives of those who organise and/or make the projects and within American society and culture at large.
In particular, the thesis demonstrates that the OHGWQ project plays several “in-between” roles, functioning as a link or transitional device in each case: between being a non-maker and a maker, between disparate Eastern/Western cultural practices, between various groups of people, and between pre- and post-adoption senses of identity for the family as a whole and potentially for the adoptee. In essence, it is argued that OHGWQ connect people, cultures, and ideas.

A strong characteristic of American popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s was its fascination with all things “oriental,” or generally exotic. It was expressed in a multitude of areas, including furniture, fashion, movies and architecture. It was also evident in quiltmaking, an extremely popular pastime of the era, in the preponderance of patchwork patterns that had an exotic theme or name. Sometimes the designs of these patterns directly reflected their exotic names; most often they did not. The reasons for the popularity of exotic pattern names are varied. Certainly, pattern designers were capitalizing on the fashion for anything oriental. But, as this paper will propose, ladies' magazine publishers and quilt column writers also were reacting to Americans' ambivalence about Asians—their fear of the “yellow peril” mixed with their admiration for Eastern design. By naming and renaming patterns and, more importantly, by mixing oriental, “colonial,” and modern imagery and verbiage, they diluted the negative connotations of the exotic and potentially made it more palatable to the tradition-centered quiltmaking world.

In this chapter, I begin by exploring the rich history of activist quilting and activist quilt scholarship. I then turn to what I call the expanded field of quilting, following Rosalind Krauss’s (1979: 30-44) term “the expanded field.” Specifically, I analyze the extension of quilting practice in to different contexts and examine the work of a series of artists who do not create traditional quilts but who use the processes of quilting (such as patching, suturing and appliqué) to draw together knowledge, facts, images and artifacts into quilted wholes, often with activist or political intent. I ask whether such works can be read as akin to twenty-first century activist quilts?

The Guicciardini Quilts are two historiated embroideries supposedly made in Sicily in the late fourteenth century. They are named after the Florentine Guicciardini family to whom it is thought they have always belonged since their commission. After they were separated in unknown circumstances, sometime around the 1890s, one piece was purchased by the world’s largest museum of applied and decorative arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the other by the National Museum of sculpture and decorative arts in Florence, known as the Museum of Bargello. The Tristan Quilt and Guicciardini Bed Cover, as they were individually renamed, have been presented by scholars as the earliest living examples of the trapunto technique in Europe. Together, they depict twenty-two episodes from the vernacular version of the Legend of Sir Tristram contained in an antique Florentine manuscript.

Since their acquisition, their history and appreciation have been moulded by the museums’ different curatorial choices: the Tristan Quilt was never displayed until 2009, when the curators of the V&A decided to exhibit it folded on a special mount inside a wall case; the Guicciardini Bed Cover, on the contrary, has been admired for nearly thirty years on a master’s bed at the Museum of Palazzo Davanzati, to be replaced only in 2010 by a modern replica. The episodes, form, and size of the quilts have been at the centre of a long-lasting discussion which tries to place their commission and provenance within the historical and cultural context of the Kingdom of Naples in the 1390s. The debate, started by the Italian philologist Pio Rajna in 1913, took on an international and interdisciplinary character after the “Quilt Revival” in the 1970s and 1990s, drawing the attention of women scholars and quilters among others. They contributed to the debate by shifting its focus from the past to the present significance and relevance of the Guicciardini Quilts. Moreover, textile curators and amateurs started questioning the uncritical and neglected way museums used to display historical textiles, not valuing them as evidence of Early Renaissance life and material culture in addition to being beautiful works of art.

This paper stems from this discussion and attempts to advance it further, taking the display of the Guicciardini Quilts as a case study. At the heart of my work there is one main question: how can two almost identical artworks, which were commissioned together for the same use and purpose, convey different stories and meanings? Throughout the text, I first delve into the quilts’ antique and modern history with the use of a critical approach to grasp their significance and understand why this is not fixed, suggesting that it was continuously adapted along with the quilts’ purpose and use to reflect people’s identities and values in a particular time and society. Likewise, I also argue that, after their separation and museum acquisition, they developed increasingly different connotations which keep shaping our appreciation and understanding of them.

Finally, I question their peculiar displays at the V&A and Palazzo Davanzati to show how the curators’ work has contributed to such a layering of meanings with different interpretations, supporting the museums’ mission and broader narrative. At the same time, I seek to demonstrate that the quilts, presented as two independent objects, do not allow visitors to make sense of them as two parts of the same commission and trousseau, hence being kept apart not only geographically but also intellectually.

Like the episodes of the legend they depict, we must reconstruct the scattered vicissitudes of the Guicciardini Quilts to grasp their full meaning and value. Suggesting an “exhibitionary” compromise, I therefore provide a model to unravel these stories with the aim of reuniting the quilts under a new and comprehensive light.

What is activated at that joint where time is at once toofast and tooslow? What is felt? Propositions for Social Dreaming, a quilt-based project by Andrew Goodman and Erin Manning, explores this active interval of time in the making by inquiring into the dreams that fissure it. Thoughts swirl from algorithmic potential to the disorder of beds of unmade. Living otherwise is the problematic that moves the thinking, living in modes neurodiverse, in an ethos of minor sociality.

A comprehensive analysis of 650 quilts made between 1870 and 1945 revealed two related yet divergent trends. On one hand, many quilts embody the anti-modern sentiments common to the era, in particular those of the Aesthetic Movement and the Colonial Revival. Reacting against the negative aspects of industrialized life, these two movements looked to exotic cultures and past eras for inspiration. The Aesthetic Movement influenced crazy quilts of the 1870s and 1880s, with an emphasis on foreign-inspired motifs and needlework methods. The Colonial Revival reintroduced quilt styles that had been popular in America prior to the Civil War. On the other hand, technological advances, such as the sewing machine, dye synthesis, and improved communications, simultaneously transformed quiltmaking into a fully modern pastime. While these parallel developments may seem contradictory, they are characteristic of a nation struggling with what it means to be “modern.”

Women fiber artists have engaged in the core concepts of Modern Art, including color theory, geometry, and abstract composition, in ways that have not always been acknowledged by art historians. Through research, writing and an accompanying quilt project, artists Nora Renick Rinehart and Rachel Wallis (otherwise known as Craft/Work) have documented the parallel history of fiber art and artists in Contemporary Art - beginning with the often overlooked artists of the Bauhaus Weaving Workshops - and continuing through Modern Art history to one of the most talked about works of Contemporary Art on the market today.

Fashion conscious consumers demand updated and up style look for themselves. They not only look at the functions of the product but also the aesthetics according to the current fashion. They are now more conscious of what they buy, about the style, visual appearance, etc. The use of faux leather instead of natural leather can cater the demand of fashion products as well as will also take care of the environmental, economic and religious concerns of the consumers. This research is on the utilization of faux leather as the design element for the apparels. Using different techniques, innovative designs collection is developed. Further, the selected techniques have been applied as the surface enhancement on Indo-western outfits. 1. SOURCES OF LEATHER Leather could be obtained from cattle, pigs, goats, and lamb. Creatures like alligators, ostriches, and kangaroos are slaughtered in China, which exports skin all over the world. Most of the leather comes from developing countries, for example, China and India, where animal welfare regulations are possibly non-existent or not reinforced strictly. In India, a PETA study discovered that workers break cows " tails and apply tobacco, chili peppers to their eyes in order to force them to get up and walk after they collapse from fatigue on the way to the slaughterhouse. Within the U.S., most of the other creatures that are murdered due to their skin along with the countless cattle withstand the horrors of manufacturer farming extreme deprivation and crowding in addition to castration, dehorning with no painkillers and docking. At slaughterhouses, pets regularly have their throats cut while they're conscious. Purchasing leather contributes to slaughterhouses and factory farms since the skin is the economically significant by-product of the meat industry. The leather is not environment-friendly, as it is responsible for all ecological destruction caused because of the beef industry in addition to the pollution due to the toxins found in tanning. [1], [2]. 2. SHORTCOMINGS OF LEATHER Natural leather has few shortcomings in its functions and also in the manufacturing process of end products. It is very difficult to launder leather because of poor resistance to watermarks after laundering. Leather has weak resistance to mildew formation. Hence, the end products require frequent maintenance treatments. Its natural origin makes it unsuitable for the mass production system, as it is very difficult to obtain consistent quality. Also, deliberate animal killing is associated with natural leather. It is of major concern due to decreasing population of these animals. Animal skin is turned into finished leather through the use of dangerous mineral salts, formaldehyde, coal-tar derivatives, cyanide-based oils and dyes, chrome, and other toxins. People who work in and live near tanneries die of cancer caused by exposure to toxic chemicals used to process and dye of leather [3]. 3. FAUX LEATHER Faux leather, artificial leather or fake leather is a synthetic material used for clothing, furniture, and even in cars. Faux is a French word that means fake, or not real. Faux leather is used when the use of real leather is too expensive or unsuitable or even unethical. Faux leather was created in the early years of the twentieth century, but it was very rigid and had an unpleasant smell. The major problem of past faux leather was that it was not breathable. This meant that wearing faux leather would leave a nasty smell and a nasty feeling. In the sixties, a company called DuPont invented a new way of manufacturing faux leather, by added tiny holes in faux leather, with the use of a new technique [4]. For many people, the thought of wearing animal skin is just unacceptable, that is why there are many brands that specialize in making faux leather clothing and accessories. Real leather is costly as compared to faux leather and more difficult to work than faux leather [5].

This writing represents my early attempt at a transdisciplinary reading of Yvonne Vera’s fiction through theoretical writings about the textile. First published in 2004 in The End of Unheard Narratives: Contemporary Perspectives on Southern African Literatures (Heidelberg: kalliope), the text was anthologized in 2012 in Textiles: Primary and Critical Sources (Berg). While quilting is undeniably a European and North American tradition, its place in women’s fiction written in the English language is considerable. Quilting may not have deep historical roots in Zimbabwe, but projects such as the While quilting is undeniably a European and North American tradition, its place in women’s fiction written in the English language is considerable. Quilting may not have deep historical roots in Zimbabwe, but projects such as the Weya Appliqués prove its presence and function as an adopted structure in Zimbabwe’s landscape. It is for this reason, rather than any intentional privileging of euro-centric metaphors, that I want to suggest a reading of Yvonne Vera’s fiction that acknowledges the existence of an unassembled patchwork of fabrics in her writings. I assert the quilting pieces apparent in Vera's fiction mirror her 'unassembled' writing style and are one example of the experimental manner in which she attempts to tackle topics that have otherwise remained shrouded in silence.

African American quiltmaking began to gain recognition as an expressive form distinct from European American quiltmaking in the countercultural climate of the 1970s. Representations of it since then have served to update the Eurocentric, patriotic image of quiltmaking in the United States with components of multiculturalism and cultural critique. These representations in turn caused tensions along the lines of class, race, gender, and scholarly discipline. This study shows the power of words and things when used together, as in museum exhibits, to affirm or challenge the existing social order.

The needle arts are traditionally associated with the decorative, domestic, and feminine. Stitching the Self sets out to expand this narrow view, demonstrating how needlework has emerged as an art form through which both objects and identities – social, political, and often non-conformist – are crafted. Bringing together the work of ten art and craft historians, this illustrated collection focuses on the interplay between craft and artistry, amateurism and professionalism, and re-evaluates ideas of gendered production between 1850 and the present. From quilting in settler Canada to the embroidery of suffragist banners and the needlework of the Bloomsbury Group, it reveals how needlework is a transformative process – one which is used to express political ideas, forge professional relationships, and document shifting identities. With a range of methodological approaches, including object-based, feminist, and historical analyses, Stitching the Self examines individual and communal involvement in a range of textile practices. Exploring how stitching shapes both self and world, the book recognizes the needle as a powerful tool in the fight for self-expression.

The 1845 essay “The Patchwork Quilt”, printed in The Lowell Offering, is among the
earliest descriptions of quilt-making and is now seen as both a celebration of and a
eulogy to pre-industrial work processes. The essay posits the miscellaneous odd bits
and ends of calico used in a patchwork quilt as a “precious reliquary of past treasures”,
an “herbarium of withered flowers”, and a “bound volume of hieroglyphics”. As an
elderly woman, the author, simply recorded as Annette, takes us back to when, as a
child, she began the quilt and learned to sew. She recalls the “exaltations, aspirations,
the hopes, the fears, the mortifications, and the perseverance” of the endeavor. She
admits that she engages in poetizing and spiritualizing her “patchwork quilt”, and goes
on to describe the martyrdom of the pricks and inflictions of the needle and calls them
her first lessons in heroism and fortitude.

During a public dialogue in 2019 African-American artist Faith Ringgold described her original publisher’s disappointment that the biography she had written did not recount experiences of subjugation – experiences Ringgold suspected were an expectation of her gender and race. This ‘rejection’ precipitated Ringgold’s turn to the textile as an alternative surface upon which she could publish. After hearing Ringgold recount this
experience, I found a new appreciation for her story quilts, exemplified in works such as Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima? (1983), Slave Rape Story Quilt (1985) and The Purple Quilt (1986), which mark a particular phase in her career. The effectiveness of Ringgold’s insistence that her quilts be understood as art rather than craft remains unclear. What can be acknowledged is that these textiles provided a useful, and ultimately successful, route to publishing narratives drawn from her experience and imagination which defy the narrative expectations of her generation of black women artists and writers.

Rhetorical scholarship has recently made significant contributions to an emerging "meta-field" that we might loosely call "shit studies." In this essay, we review scholarship pertaining to the study of "shit" in communication. Specifically, we review current trends in the theoretical orientation of shit studies by advancing the ideas of points de sensorium and/as the stank of rhetoric. Drawing on theories of the point de capiton (quilting point), we are able to note some commonalities in the study of shit in communication scholarship. The stank and the points de sensorium speak to a theorization of affect and bullshit-texts.

The Tentmakers of Cairo or Khayamin (derived from the Arabic word for tent, 'khayam'), can demonstrate ongoing engagement with the changes in the usage, composition and production of their traditional craft: khayamiya (Egyptian Tentmaker Appliqué). These changes have resulted in new patronage from quilters, moving khayamiya from a locally-marginalized folk product to global recognition as a spectacular Egyptian craft. This collaboration highlights the long-term engagement of non-Egyptian audiences by the Tentmakers, who responded to changing local conditions and attitudes by directing their work to the interests of foreign collectors, rather than the local Egyptian market. In turn, this has prompted new evaluations of their largely unexplored history.

By reviewing these changes, it will be shown that contemporary khayamiya serve longstanding cultural imperatives that are both Egyptian and non-Egyptian. For over a century, the Tentmakers have engaged with orientalist imaginations without losing their cultural foundations. Their collaboration with quilters presents a logical continuation of their adaptability to exigencies that has enabled them to sustain their distinctive and diverse craft. In turn, this mutual engagement has resulted in the deeper contextualization and re-appraisal of khayamiya as contemporary craft.

Quilting as a craft and as art is performed mainly but not exclusively by women however it is relatively hidden in British culture. Folk ideas of patchwork include bed quilts and baby quilts as utilitarian items made by mothers, or grandmothers. These are destined for domestic use. However there are art forms of quilting which are usually referred to as textile art rather than quilts.

Free-motion quilting patterns are functional and decorative patterns sewn on pieced quilts using a single-line continuous stitch path for each region of the quilt. Seven families of quilting patterns are commonly used by quilters [3]. We present an approach for computationally generating three of these families. The user can control the design for each family based on a set of parameters, including the density and general layout of the pattern as well as the decorative elements. Our algorithm starts by sampling a point set in a designated region, generates a skeleton path over that set, then inserts decorative elements along the skeleton. We provide digital and quilted examples for each type of pattern.

On December 4, 2016, more than two hundred people
wrapped Bogotá’s Palacio de Justicia in hundreds of testimonial
quilts, repeatedly chanting “Memory wraps justice,” like a mantra.
The quilts were made by women who were victims of the
Colombian armed conflict. From every region of Colombia, they
slowly walked side by side, clasping their stitched memories. They
held them up like banners, and they covered their bodies with
them like clothes. They created an ephemeral history of the war
from their own recollections, complaints, and hopes.

Stitch by stitch, victims of the armed conflict have made
visible the disappearances, sexual violence, crimes, and forced
displacements chronicled in judicial records and the media.
Although most of the Colombian survivors are women, their
stories about the impact of war on their own families and bodies
are unknown to many Colombians. It was a war suffered by others
who live in the countryside, far from the country’s larger cities.
That day, these women stitched a second skin onto the rest of us,
turning us into witnesses of their struggle against oblivion,
injustice, and impunity.

Before the idea of ‘work’ takes shape and affects the imaginary/ imagery, it is the preliminary germination of a flimsy thought that begins work. The state before ‘work’ begins is the stage that is replete with theatricalities, embedded in delicate forms and obscure materiality.Cultivating the Craft is a series of five sculptural panels that immerse the viewer within this theatrical stage of delicate conversations. The work is brought to shape (cultivated) in the mind as a series of disparate images, which represent the tedium of any skilled craft. Often, the tasks are broken down into a series of infinite steps hinging on absurdity and non-meaning (abstractions).

The shortage of personal protective equipment—N95 masks, surgical masks, caps, gowns, and gloves—amid the current COVID-19 pandemic is well-documented. In researching women’s leisure quilters for 20+ years, there is no doubt that they will act quickly to fashion home- made protective equipment in a time of crisis because they can. They have the raw materials on hand. They have the skill set. They have already-established local networks through quilt shops and quilt guilds, as well as access to quilt-related social media. As they engage in gendered cultural production, they glean comfort from doing carework for themselves and carework for others.

The harsh life imposed upon Antebellum slaves in Louisiana was not only physically dangerous, but also strangled their socio-cultural maneuverings as they grappled with losing their identity as Africans. Female slaves, working both in the fields and in the plantation house, sustained constant uncertainties in their everyday life. Without the ability to predict, protect, defend themselves, or be protected by others, it seems to reason that they would invoke new strategies of processing their violent world through the one outlet that was available to them, quilting. This project asserts that quilts themselves became a complex diasporic expression that could artfully disguise traditional religious beliefs, invoke protective charms, and profess both cultural assertions and constraints.
! The research for this project encompassed both primary and secondary sources to examine and interpret important symbols, colors, and writing, utilized in the quilt- making of female slaves. The work of scholars from a variety of backgrounds such as Art History, Folklore, African-American and African-American Women’s Studies, Humanities and Religion as well as experts in the fields of English, Anthropology, and Archaeology provided a cultural and historical architecture from which to construct preliminary ethnographic theory into a group of individuals that had been forcibly prohibited from leaving written evidence of their experience. The quilts themselves, provided by The Louisiana Quilt Database Project, offered a virtual opportunity to be visually analyzed, allowing for their artistic and cultural improvisations to become part of fluid historical conclusions.
! Like the quilts themselves, the experience of African American female slaves during the early to mid-Nineteenth century, was rich with gender complexities that were multi-layered with components of race, class, and socio-cultural considerations. The quilt art that they left behind is a vibrant representation of their cultural heritage, their language , and their beliefs. Through examining the work of female slaves in a non- linear way, we can begin to decipher the coded meanings and strategies that were woven into the fabric of their oppressors' lives by Africans who refused to be silenced.

Best known for her quilts that that combine painting, fabric and storytelling, Ringgold has exhibited in major museums in the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her work is in the permanent collection of most of the country’s major museums, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.

Free-motion quilting patterns are functional and decorative patterns sewn on pieced quilts using a single-line continuous stitch path for each region of the quilt. Seven families of quilting patterns are commonly used by quilters [3]. We present an approach for computationally generating three of these families. The user can control the design for each family based on a set of parameters, including the density and general layout of the pattern as well as the decorative elements. Our algorithm starts by sampling a point set in a designated region, generates a skeleton path over that set, then inserts decorative elements along the skeleton. We provide digital and quilted examples for each type of pattern.

A multitude of masks have been sewn in an attempt to cope with the COVID-19 crisis. The people involved in this fabrication often practice sewing as a hobby or engage in more specialized needlework activities such as patchwork and quilting. However, the production of COVID masks requires the application of precise technical and scientific standards, for instance those of the French standardization authority AFNOR (Association Française de Normalisation). In an ongoing study, we question the passage from one to the other of these activities, with a view to understanding what this production means for those who take part in it. The study is based on an anthropological investigation combining in situ field methods with the exploration of virtual worlds. The seamstresses and tailors involved in the making of masks were interviewed by means of an online questionnaire, which allowed us to meet, despite the health context, the people who engage in this production. Beyond what is sometimes presented as makeshift bricolage, the examination of this mobilization ultimately raises the question of civil participation in times of crisis.