Teaching
TEACHING
TEXTILE HISTORY
Layering Culture:
The Textiles of Africa and the Americas
This course examines the textiles of Africa and the Americas, focusing on how art practice has ensured the tenacious survival and continuity of indigenous cultural traditions over centuries and under adverse conditions. This course investigates such diverse textile genres as African printed cloth, Peruvian textiles, Cuna embroidery, Lakota beadwork, and Navajo weaving, and examines conceptual issues common to these fiber traditions such as the use of textiles as a narrative medium and its role in syncretized ritual practices common in colonized cultures. Because CCA is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, a focal point of this course will be the basketry tradition, past and present, of native Californians.
Women’s Work:
The History Of European and Contemporary Textiles
In European history, textile arts came to be uniquely associated with notions of femininity. What accounts for this correlation and how has it influenced the historical understanding of spinning, weaving, embroidery as art forms? This course examines the textile arts of Europe, colonial American, and contemporary Western culture with a special focus on gender ideologies, economic modes of production, and the shifting status of textiles. Students investigate the following topics: prehistoric textiles, the role of spinning in Greek gender ideologies, tapestry weaving and its aesthetic influence, embroidery and the creation of the feminine, the impact of mechanization on hand processes, the role of textile production in the Industrial Revolution, the contributions of needle workers to the labor movement, the reclamation of hand processes during the Arts and Crafts movement, European and African American quilt making traditions, the Bauhaus, and the 20th century fiber arts revival.
Crossing The Continent:
Textiles of the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania
This course investigates the textile traditions, ancient and modern, of the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. Curriculum concentrates on how these art forms were influenced by the movements of people, trade along the Silk Road, and European colonization. We investigate the underlying aesthetic, religious, economic and political significance of different traditions including Bedouin embroidery, Central Asian ikat, Indian weaving, Japanese surface design, Indonesian indigo dyeing, and Maori twining, and builds a historical context for contemporary textile practices.
Concealed and Revealed:
A Conceptual Investigation of Body Adornment
For millennia humans have transformed the physical surfaces and spatial contours of their bodies by concealing, revealing, embellishing, expanding, and constricting. In doing so, they have fashioned personal space and defined communal identities. This course investigates the human impulse to modify the body and the diverse ideologies used to construct the social body from a cross-cultural perspective. We investigate notions of humanness, nakedness, protection, power, spiritual transformation, gender identities, ethnicity, beauty ideals, and modernity. We will examine material such as the Islamic veil, African masking, Polynesian tattooing, Classical drapery, European cross-dressing, Chinese foot binding, and Japanese armor. Further, we examine how these models have influenced other disciplines, including sculpture, photography, and painting through the work of artists such as Christo, Nan Goldin, and Louise Brooks.
GRADUATE SEMINARS
Thinking Textiles
Textile metaphors abound; we speak of the "worldwide web," "spinning a tale," a "thread of discourse," and a "network of ideas." The word "text" itself derives from the Latin textere, meaning "to weave." The definition of textile art, once securely bound to utility, has given way to a practice based loosely on a constellation of material, technique, and concept. Textile structures pose distinctive physical possibilities and limitations, but more importantly they foster cognitive processes and suggest metaphoric meanings. Building through the interplay of threads and multiple intersection points is inherently a time-consuming and additive process. It builds a cohesive whole from disparate, equal elements. This arrangement offers a blueprint for thinking about interconnectivity, textures, and nonhierarchical structures in linguistic, social , and interpersonal arenas.
Chromophilia
Chromophilia, n. The property possessed by cells of staining readily with dyes. The title of this course is derived from a chapter in David Batchelor’s book, Choromophobia, in which the author eloquently traces concepts of color in nineteenth and twentieth-century Western art and literature as they relate to notions of purity and contamination. This course analyzes how color is folded into to a complex set of Western cultural narratives and how the so-called neutrality of “whiteness” in the museum setting is constructed on racist and gendered stereotypes. Offering alternate perspectives on color, this class investigates the diverse meanings of color in different cultural landscapes. In addition, the histories of specific colors, dyestuffs, and pigments will be traced, looking at modes of production, trade, and the eventual industrialization of color. Texts are selected from multiple disciplines including anthropology, art criticism, art history, and fashion theory.
Pattern Language
One of the fundamental concepts in visual art, dance and music is repetition of movement. Such repetition manifests as pattern, and artists in many media employ pattern and symmetry to generate meaning. There is, however, a unique correlation between textiles and the visual language of pattern. The rhythmic movements of weaving, looping, knitting, and crocheting inevitably manifest as both structure and surface ornamentation. This seminar investigates the diverse uses of pattern in a cross-cultural perspective. We look at topics such as the literary nature of African pattern, Islamic pattern as an expression of infinity, pattern as mapping in Aboriginal art, patterns as spiritual landscape in Buddhist art, pattern as personal obsession, and the shifting function and status of pattern in the hierarchies of Western Art.
Is Beauty a Beast?
This graduate seminar investigates the Western relationship to beauty in the nineteen and twentieth centuries and examines the aesthetics of beauty in other cultures. Why has beauty been controversial concept in twentieth century Western art? Have we exiled the experience of beauty from our Western art experience? Has beauty made a comeback in the twenty-first century? What has beauty to do with pleasure, women and sentimentality? What do other aesthetic traditions say about beauty as a goal for life and art making? What does the Navajo concept of hozho have to teach us about beauty, balance, harmony and health? How do Japanese artists and artisans distill and refine the force of beauty? How do the traditions of the Way of Tea and the Haiku poem embodied the Japanese concept of beauty? This class focuses on beauty as an experience in everyday life and art making.
Textiles Program of the California Collge of the Arts