Women and Craft-based Artistic Practices

This lesson will explore connections between craft practices and Modern and Contemporary art in in the USA, with a focus on the historical and cultural associations between women and craft-based artistic practices. It is a broad (and non-comprehensive) introduction to these ideas, with a few specific thematic threads running through it, including the role of collectives in some craft-based practices, the embrace of tradition and cross generational connections in craft, and the relationship of some craft-based practices to broader social and political issues. The lesson begins with quilts and women’s quilting collectives in the American South, then turns to Pueblo ceramics artists in New Mexico, reflections on craft and collective work from second wave feminist artists, and finally a few contemporary examples. Many of those artworks also highlight the ways that the Western art world has sometimes marginalized both craft and collective or tradition-focused approaches to artmaking in service to upholding the idea of the individual artist-genius.

This lesson introduces students to a broad and diverse range of American artists. It also helps students to see some of the complexities (and limits) involved in how art history is constructed, and to challenge their own definitions of broad concepts like Art and Craft. The connections it presents between women artists and craft practices can also be an excellent entry into conversations about women’s roles in art history and the marginalization of so-called women’s work in the broader society.

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

  • Analyze the cultural and historical factors that link women to craft-based art forms.
  • Critically evaluate the role of the “genius” myth in reinforcing patriarchal structures within the art world.
  • Identify and interpret key works by Modern and Contemporary artists who engage with or subvert traditional craft practices.
  • Reflect on the value of collectives and community traditions in art-making.

Reflect on their own experiences with crafted objects and craft traditions

Themes

  1. The terms “art” and “craft’ both have shifting meanings, and have sometimes been considered separate categories, though the boundaries are often unclear. We will explore the history of these terms and the distinctions between them with a range of examples
  2. We will explore the role quilting and other needlework in various US art historical contexts, including the idea of quilts as a way to communicate stories, operate as part of collective artmaking practices, and uphold or celebrate specific community traditions.
  3. Craft has sometimes been associated with collective artmaking and / or reliance on cultural traditions. Both of those associations, along with its associated with women, have helped to marginalize craft in the history of art. We will explore that aspect of craft in American art history, and various artists’ ways of reflecting on that marginalization.

Background Readings: organize by themes

  1. Art vs. Craft / introduction:
  1. Quilts, Quilt Codes, and African American Women’s History
  • Tobin, Jacqueline L., and Raymond G. Dobard. Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 1999.
  • Laurel Horton, “Truth and the Quilt Researcher’s Rage: The Roles of Narrative and Belief in the Quilt Code Debate,” Western Folklore76, no. 1 (2017): 41–68.
  • Article (read for background on this artist): Harriet Powers
  • Article/Audio (goes over the idea of quilt codes and why they are controversial for some historians): The Enduring Story for Underground Railroad Quilts
  • Article (read for background on this collective): Freedom Quilting Bee.
  • Article (this one unfortunately has a bunch of pop-up ads, but it is a good one, and it discusses the Gee’s Bend Quilters and Annie Mae Young): The Fabric of Their Lives.
  1. Two Pueblo Ceramic Artists

–Puebloan: Maria Martinez, Black-on-black ceramic vessel. 

– Contemporary Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson created a tribute to Maria Martinez’s black-on-black pottery with her custom lowrider Maria. This is a longer video (13 minutes) and if you want to skip to where she discusses Maria that’s at minute 7:30, but I definitely recommend watching the whole thing if you can. 13 minute Video: Rose B. Simpson in “Everyday Icons”

  1. Meditations on craft and collectivity in artworks by Faith Ringgold & Judy Chicago
  1. Three Contemporary Textile Artists / Projects

2:45 minute video (CBS news segment on Butler’s work): Artist Bisa Butler on Creating New Narratives Through “Portrait Quilts.” YouTube, uploaded by CBS Mornings, 6 Feb. 2021

Glossary

 Art: Though notoriously complicated to define, in this lesson I’m using the term ‘art’ to refer to objects that the art world has invested with cultural and historical value. I refer to distinctions between art and craft to help demonstrate some of the complexities in both terms, and to draw out the ways that assumptions about what makes an artwork valuable have helped to marginalize women in art history. Here’s a helpful video on this term and its complexity from the Art Assignment

 Craft: A form of making that produces items that art, or could be, functional, like a blanket or a vase. The boundary between Art and Craft as categories is very ambiguous, with many artists deliberately working to blur those lines and investigate the value judgements and assumptions included in each term. (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/craft)

Old Master: A term used casually to refer to the most recognized and celebrated artists from Art History. Generally it is used to talk about famous European artists from the 15th-19th centuries, though I use it more broadly here, to refer to ideas about who we celebrate in art history, and why. (https://www.artsy.net/gene/old-masters)

Quilt Codes: The idea of Quilt Codes comes from stories about how quilts that might be hung in a window or draped over a fence would communicate coded messages via symbols and patterns, helping enslaved people who were attempting to escape via the Underground Railroad.

CONTENT SUGGESTIONS 

In one hour and fifteen-minute lecture you should be able to cover the following:                               

  1. Harriet Powers, Bible Quilt, 1886.
  2. Harriet Powers, Pictorial Quilt, 1895-98
  3. Arthur Rothstein, Jennie Pettway and another girl with the quilter Jorena Pettway, Gee’s Bend, 1937
  4. Annie Mae Young, Work-Clothes Quilt with Center Medallion Of Strips, 1976
  5. Maria Martinez, Black-on-black ceramic vessel, c. 1939
  6. Rose B. Simpson, Maria,
  7. Rose B. Simpson with Maria (1985 El Camino). Photograph by Kate Russel.
  8. Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1991
  9. Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1979
  10. LJ Roberts The Queer Houses of Brooklyn… 2011
  11. Margaret & Christine Wertheim, The Crochet Coral Reefproject (2005 – ongoing). Photograph depicts 2013 installation at the Institute for Figuring, Tübingen Germany
  12. Bisa Butler, Don’t Tread On Me, God Damn, Let’s Go!— The Harlem Hellfighters, 2021–22

Click for images:  slide presentation

 

Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1991

Lesson structure and notes

 Intro activity & discussion:

I like to begin this lesson with a reflective activity: I ask students to take 5 minutes to remember and then write about a hand-made textile or other hand-made object that is part of their life. After they’ve thought and written, I ask volunteers to share. Someone will always quickly mention a blanket or a sweater that was made and passed down to them by a female relative, and that can prompt discussion among students about family traditions, how they are tied to hand-made objects, and how they are so often created and maintained by the women in their families.

Introduction cont. presenting the main terms:

Next, I present a slide with the terms “art” and “craft” on them, and ask students to explain the difference (which right away will make clear how fuzzy the distinction is). I ask them to think about the object they described from the intro activity, and if they think that is art or craft, and why. I show several examples of things that might be categorized as craft (in that they are potentially functional, or hand-woven, etc) but that are clearly also artworks. In discussing these terms and examples, students usually find their way to noticing that part of what ends up qualifying something as craft (and as less valuable or important than fine art) is that it is made by a woman or associated with ‘women’s work.’ If they don’t get there on their own, I make sure to end on explaining that idea.

I’ll also stress that craft work tends to be labor intensive and can therefore lend itself to collective work, which can put it at odds with the ‘old master’ way of looking at art history (in the sense that Western art history since the Renaissance is often taught through the lives and work of a series of famous, typically male artists who are household names and used to exemplify a particular style or era). I will often quickly show familiar images by Leonardo, Van Gogh & Picasso to help make that point.

Mini-lecture section: Quilts and African American Women’s History

Think back to your examples from the first activity, were any of them needlework? And who made them? If you don’t know who made yours, who would you guess made it?

 Needlework has been practiced by women of nearly every culture and time period, and it often reflects regional and cultural traditions. In those ways, it is collective & community minded; passing down techniques and themes through the generations. Our initial needlework examples today are quilts made by African American artists in the American South.

Harriet Powers, Pictorial Quilt, 1895

Harriet Powers (American, 1837–1910) was born into slavery near Athens Georgia, and spent her childhood working on a plantation; it is likely that she learned how to sew there from other enslaved women. She was eventually able to live as a free person, and though little is known about the details of her life, two of the quilts she created have been preserved a celebrated.

Her Bible Quilt is the earliest extant work from her. It is a cotton piecework quilt consisting of numerous pictorial squares depicting biblical scenes and celestial phenomena. It was displayed at a Georgia state fair in 1886, where a local artist and teacher (a white woman called Jennie Smith) noticed it and tried to buy it. Powers didn’t wish to sell it at that time, but she and Smith kept in touch, and Powers sold it to her a few years later, and also explained some of its imagery, which Smith put in writing. This written narrative has ended up being particularly important for our understanding of Powers’s work. Less is known about the second extant quilt from Powers, which is called Pictorial Quilt. It does include some of the same design and imagery as the Bible Quilt and it is believed to have been commissioned by friends and colleagues of Jennie Smith.

Compare and discuss: Compare Pictorial Quilt to a Modernist painting like Matisse’s Joy of Life (that is the one I use, but others could work well too). Ask students to note any similarities, for example they might note the strong contours, simplified forms, and layered flat backgrounds. Use this comparison to make the point that Powers is using some of the same visual vocabulary as Matisse, but her work is not widely celebrated as visually innovative in the same ways that his has been.

Quilt Codes and the Underground Railroad

The role of quilts for communication and storytelling is clear in Powers’s Biblie Quilt;  we can see that she is using her imagery to communicate specific meaningful stories. They were probably meant in part as stories for her husband and her nine children, who would have lived with this quilt, but also for anyone who saw it at the state fair where she displayed it. The idea that quilts were meant to communicate takes a really interesting form with theories about Quilt Codes. Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard’s 1999 book Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (Random House) proposed that “messages encoded in quilts helped slaves escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad.”

Here are a few examples of the quilt patterns they discuss in this book, and what they may have meant, for example: Drunkard’s Path: A warning signal to take a zigzag route to elude slave hunters in the area, or Bear’s Paw: A signal to follow a mountain trail, out of view, and then follow an actual bear’s trail which would lead to water and food.

The theory got a lot of press and was picked up by Oprah. [Ask if anyone in class has heard this theory before, and where. I’ve found that often a few have]. The idea that quilts were used to communicate coded messages to enslaved people who were escaping to freedom is so powerful, and it follows logically from the way that quilts were already used to communicate stories (as we saw with  Powers’s examples). But there have also been some doubts about the veracity of the theory. When Tobin and Dobard’s book came out, it became a topic for strong debate amongst craft scholars because it was based on family legend rather than other types of ‘hard’ evidence. Lead students in a discussion of this: can we discredit something because there wasn’t written evidence of it? Does the setting (in which many of the key players would not have been able to write) change that?

Quilting Collectives in the American South: The Gees Bend Quilters and the Freedom Quilting Bee.

We will stay in the American South for our next examples, but jump forward many decades.  Gee’s Bend was an area in Alabama where many impoverished African-American farmers lived and worked. It had been a cotton planation before the abolition of slavery, and many of the people who tried to work the land there were descendants of people who had been enslaved in that area. They have a distinctive local quilt style featuring bright colors and asymmetrical geometric abstraction that had been passed down (most likely from women to their female descendants) for generations. Those traditions (and that specific geometric style) was  “discovered” by the art world in the 1960s, and it has continued to be popular through the decades, and into the present. Gee’s Bend quilts were featured in a major travelling exhibition in the early 2000s called The Quilts of Gees Bend.  [Here, show several images from the exhibition, as well as some contextualizing photographs]. At first, quilts that the women of Gee’s Bend made would sell for $10-15, but as momentum grew prices reached over $100 per quilt. Textile designers purchased some of the designs as well, and they were sold in high end clothing stores, including Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Recognizing that their quilts held value outside of their immediate region, a group of Southern African American women established The Freedom Quilting Bee in 1966.  It was founded and organized by a group of African American women in the community of Rehoboth, 46 miles from Selma Alabama. This is near Gee’s Bend, and several Gee’s Bend quilters (including Annie Mae Williams, whose quilt we saw earlier) were among the roughly 60 core members. They came together to collectively create quilts, sell them, and earn money for their families and communities. They also used their time together to organize rallies for voting rights and discuss issues related to their towns and to the civil right movement. Estelle Witherspoon, an activist and political organizer, was the first manager, and the group would meet in her home.

Compare and discuss:  Close out this section with a quick comparison between Harriet Powers’s quilt, some of the Quilt Code images, and a quilt from the Freedom Quilting Bee. Some key questions to help lead this discussion could include: do these objects have any visual similarities? (Have them practice noting and describing those). The Powers & Quilt Code images are both about communication, are the Freedom Quilting Bee images about communication? If so, what do they communicate? If not, does that change how you think about what they are for and what is valuable about them?

Next Mini-lecture section: Two Pueblo Ceramic Artists

We’ve been focusing on needlework, but there are lots of other media that get categorized as craft but overlap strongly with art. Think back to our introduction activity about handmade objects that you have around your house. Did anyone pick a ceramics example? [Let them share about those if there are volunteers]. Our next examples come from two ceramics artists from New Mexico. We will begin with Maria Martinez (1887-1980), a Native American artist who was born and raised in San Ildefonso Pueblo (that’s in Santa Fe County, New Mexico), and whose work is widely collected and well known internationally. When Martinez was young, commercially produced housewares were becoming a lot more common, and in turn, the practical utility of handmade pots was disappearing. That is likely part of why she started thinking of pots more as art objects than as the traditional functional items they had always been for her community. She ended up being someone who revived traditional styles from her tribe, and re-framed them as art, even working with the director of a museum in New Mexico (he would give her shards of excavated pots, and she would recreate them). She and her husband, Julian Martinez, collaborated to develop new designs and new surfaces, and became best known for their black-on-black vessels, which were widely celebrated. Maria Martinez’s work became a symbol of Southwestern craft and Pueblo aesthetics, and she herself became an ambassador for them, demonstrating pottery-making techniques at worlds fairs, including the 1914 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego.

Community and tradition-based artworks don’t often put a big premium on originality or individualized styles, which has made it hard for them to fit into the mainstream Western art world. Martinez’s choice to sign her name on her work, and to make herself a part of how it was sold and displayed (by demonstrating techniques at fairs and so on) are an example of how she is adapting a traditional and collectivist art form to an art world that privileges individuality over collectivity.

These adaptations don’t, of course, erase the power of the traditions they represent, and we can see that those traditions persist, and have often been kept alive and evolving by women. We can find a particularly clear example of that in the work of contemporary ceramics artist Rose B. Simpson. Simpson grew up in New Mexico about 10 miles from where Maria Martinez grew up. She is a potter and a multi-media artist, and also someone who has been working on and customizing cars since she was a teen. Her Maria (a 1985 Chevy El Camino that she customized) is a tribute to Martinez’s signature black-on-black pots.  In the artist’s own words “I am paying homage to the back-and-forth ties of history and preservation and customization and recycling and inspiration and cultural integrity. Vessels such as the ones that Maria Martinez created are no longer in daily functional use for many Pueblo people, but vehicles are.” (Simpson, quoted in Archer, Power Object..)

Simpson did a lot of the work on the car as part of a residency at the Denver Art Museum, and at the end she presented it in a performance that included sound, the car in motion, and models walking in costumes the artist designed. We will look at some images from that performance here, as well as an image of the car with a Martinez pot. The two pieces were installed alongside one another in the 2020 Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists exhibit at the Smithsonian.

Compare and discuss:  Close out this section with a quick comparison of these two artists (the image from the Smithsonian showing the two pieces in the same room can be a good one for this). Some points to draw out in this comparison: each artist adapts their work to fit the current moment (Martinez by signing them and marketing them as art objects, Simpson by thinking of the idea of a vessel so differently, and also integrating performance aspects). Both ask us to think about what ‘functional’ means when it comes to art and craft. Both build on heritage and community traditions, while also adopting or adapting to aspects of a more individualistic art world.

Next Mini-lecture section: Meditations on craft and collectivity in artworks by Faith Ringgold & Judy Chicago

 Now we will change locations (and time periods) once again, to focus on two contemporary artists whose early work coincides with second wave feminism in the United States. Both are known for artworks that address questions around the role of craft in art, and the role of gender in both. We will begin with Faith Ringgold, who was born in Harlem New York, and began her career as a painter. She attended community college in NYC and then taught in the public schools there. Her early paintings were mostly political and related to civil rights causes. She was also a founding member of “where we at” (WWA) collective—it was a group of black women artist who got together in 1971 to write about one another’s work and organize their own exhibits. Also in the 1970s, Ringgold switched from traditional painting to working with textiles, and eventually became known for her painted quilts.

We will focus here on an example from Ringgold’s “French Collection” series of painted quilts, which explore and critique elements of European art history and poke fun at painters like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Vincent Van Gogh. In her Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (which exists as both a painted quilt and a lithograph), a group of heroic and influential African American women, including Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, & Sojourner Truth, work together on a sunflower-pattern quilt, while Vincent Van Gogh looks on from the background, holding out a vase of his own Sunflowers. This scene speaks to ideas about collective work and the power in community, and contrasts that with an artist (Van Gogh) who is so strongly associated with the idea of individual artistic genius. Note too the call-back to quilting collectives, like the Freedom Quilting Bee, that we discussed earlier in this lesson.

Our next example, The Dinner Party, comes from Judy Chicago, who was working in collaboration with many volunteers. It is a collectively produced artwork, but is generally credited to Judy Chicago (we’ve already seen how much the celebration of an individual artist’s name has been important for the American art world, for example in Maria Martinez’s choice to sign her pots). The Dinner Party is one of the more visible, well known works of feminist art from the 1970s, and it is currently on view in a permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum. First exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it includes 39 custom made place settings. The artists who created these used media associated with craft, including needlework and ceramics. Each place setting was designed to celebrate a female figure from history or myth. An additional 999 women’s names are embroidered into the tablecloth at the bottom, representing some of the many other female figures that the artists would wish to be included in a dinner party like this. In using symbolism around cooking and hosting, as well as craft techniques, this artwork emphasizes the idea of  “women’s work.” It was also deliberately decorative, even garishly so, throwing an aggressively “feminine” sensibility back in the face of those who had marginalized it. This artwork is, from our perspective in the present, incomplete; it symbolizes women based on some reductive imagery (most centrally the abstracted vulvas that are decorating each plate), and it mostly excludes women of color in the list of figures it celebrates. And yet it spoke eloquently to many issues related to women artists in the 1970s, and to women’s treatment in art history’s traditional narratives.

Compare and discuss:  Close out this section with a comparison of the Dinner Party to Ringgold’s Sunflower Quilting Bee. Some points to draw out in this comparison: both pieces imagine women spending time together who would never have actually been in the same time and place, and both pieces ask us to think about the power of collective artistic work). They both also reflect, in their own ways, on the meaning of collective work in an art world that values individuality, and on connections between women and craft practices.

 Next Mini-lecture section: Three Contemporary Textile Artists / Projects

As we reach the end of our lesson, we’ll briefly consider three more recent artworks that show us some of the variety of ways that needlework has continued to play a varied and important role in Contemporary Art. The first of these three examples comes from contemporary textile artist LJ Roberts (they/them). Roberts worked with friends to design some aspects of The Queer Houses of Brooklyn, so it includes some elements of collectivity, and it is also an artwork that is very much about community. Roberts is known for their needlework, and also for their dedication to representing their community and its history. The Queer Houses of Brooklyn is a type of map meant to commemorate sites of collective artmaking and support (queer collective houses) that were part of the artist’s extended Brooklyn community. The full title of the piece is: The Queer Houses of Brooklyn and the Three Towns of Boswyck, Breukelen and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era.  When exhibited, it includes 1” buttons with logos for each house that were designed by Roberts’s collaborators. Those buttons are meant to be claimed and worn by viewers of the piece, which can be interpreted as a statement about the openness to collaboration and inclusion that is a core part of this community. You might notice that the piece includes some aspects that appear unfinished at first, including unwoven, loose-hanging sections of yarn. Roberts has talked about this deliberately unfinished look as a metaphor for the constant ‘becoming’ and flux of their community.

 Roberts connects craft to their community, and in that way it becomes a political work (as queer communities are, in the present politicized). The relationship between craft and political or social issues isn’t new, we’ve seen in a little bit in today’s lesson, and there are lots of other examples out there that we didn’t have time to explore. One that we can briefly touch on here is Crochet Coral Reef Project. This is an ongoing collaborative work developed by sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim, and it brings together several themes from this lesson.

The Reef, which has been displayed in sections in many different locations, is an ongoing, collective creating that nearly anyone can participate in (if they can learn some basics of crochet). We can compare it to some of the other artworks we’ve learned about today that have elements related to collective work and collaboration, including The Dinner Party, Queer Houses of Brooklyn and quilts from the Freedom Quilting Bee.

The final artist we will focus on is Bisa Butler. Butler, who spent a decade as a high school art teacher in the New Jersey Public School System, has seen a lot of recent success, with major exhibits of her work featured at a number of large museums over the past few years. Her work is not collectively produced like our last few examples, but it does build on a long tradition of quilting and needlework that we’ve seen a few examples of today (works we’ve seen from Harriet Powers and Faith Ringgold are two such examples).

Bulter’s style is quite easy to recognize once you have seen a few. The Harlem Hellfighters, which we will focus on here, is an excellent example of her signature style, and it is also huge, took her two years to complete, and is the largest quilt she has created so far. It is a portrait of members of a World War One regiment called The Harlem Hellfighters. Her quilts can look very much like paintings, but they are not, she creates the painted effect with layers of colored fabric. The portraits she creates are often based found photographs. This one, Don’t Tread On Me, God Damn, Let’s Go!— The Harlem Hellfighters, is based on a specific group portrait photograph. During WW1, the US military was still segregated, and the Harlem Hellfighters were an all-black combat unit. They were assigned to the French military (who were fighting on the same side as the US). They were in combat for 190 days- the longest of any regiment in the war, and they were awarded with the highest military honors from the French. The photograph that this quilt is based on was taken in 1919, on the day they returned to the United States. As we can see here, Butler is using this traditional art form in a very new way.

Wrapping up / Discussion and reflection:

See “at the end of class” below for some ideas about how to wrap up this lesson.

DELIVERY SUGGESTIONS

  • This lesson is meant for a general audience of first or second year college students. I’ve found that it introduced students to a range of artists that they get excited about digging further into on their own, raises questions related to craft, gender, and their roles in the art world, and gets students thinking. If you wanted to have it be a meatier and more detailed look at the subject, each section could be made into one full class meeting, by bringing in some relevant readings to discuss and also filling out the details (covering a wider range of Pueblo 20th century potters, for example, not just Martinez).
  • In the section on LJ Roberts’s Queer Houses of Brooklyn there is a great opportunity to bring in the AIDS quilt as an additional example of activist craft, as Roberts has cited it as an inspiration for this piece.
  • The reflective assignment I explain at the start of the lesson notes works really well as a quick (3 minute) in-class writing activity, but it could also become a more substantive pre-class assignment that students do at home, before the class meeting, as part of their preparation (or as a pre-lecture discussion board prompt in an online course).

AT THE END OF CLASS…

Review the main images, and set up a few comparisons for students to discuss (in order to highlight connections). If there is extra time, have students discuss any of the following:

  • Has your definition of craft changed today? How would you define it?
  • For you, which example of collaboration / community art that we looked at today is most powerful, and why?
  • Which artwork that you learned about today will stick with you the most? Why?

Cara Smulevitz, PhD, is a Professor of Art History at San Diego Mesa College, where she teaches courses in Modern and Contemporary Art, with a special focus on gender studies and on the history of popular culture. She has co-authored multiple Open Educational Resources texts for Art History, and also serves as a peer instructional design coach, specializing in online course design and active learning.