The work of Suchitra Mattai (pictured above) is emblematic of the art world’s current fixation with “craft” and textiles. Last week I led a group visit to the new Espacio 23 gallery in Miami to view the stunning show To Weave the Sky: Textile Abstractions from the Jorge M. Perez Collection. Here is what the show’s curator Tobias Ostander had to say about the art world’s current love affair with “craft” and textiles:
“Traditionally marginalized or relegated to the genre of craft or decorative arts within Western art historical contexts, these artistic practices are receiving signification attention.”
I find this language of “marginalized” and the self-congratulatory celebration of the “inclusion” of craft and textile into the “higher” arts deeply colonial. The same rhetoric happens in fashion: last year, when Dior lavishly staged a expensive runway show in Mexico to celebrate the “inclusion” of Mexican artisan labor into the realm of “high” fashion a similar dynamic was at play. It is the age old center/periphery modern/traditional dichotomy that is colonial at it’s core. (see this older essay for more on Dior and Mexico: click here: #diormexico)
In the artwork pictured above, LA-based, Guyana-born artist Suchitra Mattai uses her family’s vintage saris and incorporates crafts like embroidery, needlepoint and beading which she learned from her Indian grandmother. According to the Observer, “Mattai’s learned processes and use of culturally significant textiles collapse the division between high and low art, presenting a joyful “future” space full of possibility.”
It is precisely this divide between “high” and “low,” the colonial dynamic this replicates, and the third space which is possible by eradicating this dualistic thinking that I hope to address in this essay. While it merits a much longer exploration I keep seeing in current both art and fashion discourse.
As aforementioned, this essay was prompted by a gallery tour to Espacio 23 - the new Miami contemporary art gallery of local real estate mogul Jorge M. Perez - to see the stunning show To Weave the Sky: Textile Abstractions. One of the show’s curators Patricia Hanna sums up the choice to focus on textile based art and its slower more “meditative” process:
“With art, we’re in a hurry. We’re looking, we’re looking, we’re looking at paintings and sculpture, but when it comes to textiles, I think it makes you pause a little bit…You admire the process. You admire the technique. You question how it’s made. Every piece has a story.”
It is not a coincidence that the owner of said art work and gallery space, Jorge Perez, the consummate Miami real estate mogul, is voracious in both his art collecting and real estate developing, even when the latter means displacing marginalized communities and building atop of sacred indigenous land. It is ironic that an entire section of the show, “Spiritual Constellations,” is devoted to indigenous cosmologies which center the sacredness of land while Perez is literally at war with the living descendants of Miami’s Native population for THEIR land. But then again, this is classic global art world (and un checked capitalism in general) dynamics as seen in current repatriation conflicts all over the globe. However, I am always suspicious of privately owned collectors pushing scholarship towards leveling up the critical and monetary interest in their own collections (assets), but I digress. The exhibition in question grew out of Perez’ vast personal collection which hovers around 5,000 pieces. Even the language is colonial, as curators and collectors often speak of s acquiring:( buying or obtaining an asset or object for oneself.)
Included in the show is work by artists whose artistic practice revolves around protesting developers just like Perez, this includes Colombian Carolina Caycedo, an interdisciplinary LA–based artist whose work “is grounded in vital questions related to asymmetrical power relations, dispossession, extraction of resources, and environmental justice."
Carolina Caycedo, “El Hambre Como Maestra (Hunger As Teacher)”, 2017
The colonial language of including craft and artisanship into the “high” art, and the dichotomy between Art vs Craft is also replicated in fashion studies. The questions around what clothing systems are traditional vs. modern, and what is considered “fashion” vs non-fashion, I.E. othering, is omnipresent in the marketing of fashion.
“As the anthropologist Sandra Niessen formulates it, binary oppositional thinking like dress versus fashion, traditional versus modern, Western versus non-Western, is not only a way to preserve the boundary between the West and the Rest and to protect Europe’s position of power, but also to ensure the maintenance of a conceptual Other on which to rely for purposes of self-definition.” (For more on this see the work of Angela Jansen)
This 2015 editorial in Vogue shot by Arthur Elgort could not be more colonial, the Maasai and their rich textile traditions are not only used as the “exotic” background for Western fashion, but the model, a thin white woman, is placed on plane above the darker inhabitants of the Global South, just in case the implied distinction between high and low culture is not clear. The model is not engaged with the Maasai but rather looking above them in a self-engrossed way. According to Angela Jansen, “[t]hese stigmatised ideas of the ‘Other’ are remains of Western imperialist rationale when colonised societies and cultures were defined as traditional (e.g. unchanging), authentic (e.g. geographically isolated) and ancestral (e.g. historically disconnected) to emphasise their difference with European society and culture, believed to be ‘modern and cosmopolitan,’ as a means to justify oppressive and abusive colonial politics.”
At least some things in mainstream fashion are slowly changing as evident in this recent collaboration between Ralph Lauren and Native American weaver Naomi Glasses.
This Ralph Lauren campaign (see above) markets their first collection with Diné (Navajo) artist in residence Naomi Glasses who designed a capsule collection of 32 pieces that, as Glasses says “highlights the indigenous excellence behind the scenes and in front of the camera.” The campaign featured mainly indigenous models and collaborators: photos were shot by Ryan RedCorn (Osage) and Daryn Sells (Diné/Navajo), video from Lonnie Begaye (Diné/Navajo)plus a film shot be Shaandiin Tome (Diné/Navajo) whose cast features indigenous models.
Nicholas Galanin and Merritt Johnson, Creation with her Children, 2017.
This sculptural work by Galanin (Lingít/Unangax) and Merrit Johnson represents a child whose 17th-century dress is cut away to reveal animals’ mouths being pried open where the feet should be, and the chomped off bits are also front and center. According to the artists, the figure has “endured hundreds of years of colonization, corporatization, commodification, and subjugation.”
According to Galanin, “the deeply-rooted colonialist frameworks of craft have just begun to fracture. It is our job to break open the cracks and continue to question, reveal, and abandon the colonialist spine upon which the craft discourse is built. It must be ruptured.A new decolonized perspective must be built…The distinction between craft and art is, in and of itself, a Western concept and a symptom of cultural colonization.”
His art questions what is traditional and what is modern, and the idea that the former is atemporal while the latter, the “modern” is dynamic. It is the trope of the industrial revolution as a symbol of progress re packaged for our era. But as I have discussed here, contemporary artists of the Global South who utilize the crafts and artisanal methods of their ancestors are very much contemporary, even though that label continues to imply “Western.”
I want to end with one more example, of a “contemporary” Western fashion brand “borrowing” i.e. culturally appropriating, from “traditional” Mexican artisan labor.
The “inspiration” behind the 2020 collection pictured here was the lifestyle of the brand’s namesake founder, Carolina Herrera, who is Venezuelan, as well as the idealization of a “Latin holiday.” The 2019 N.Y. Times article “Homage or Theft? Carolina Herrera Called Out by Mexican Minister,” fashion critic Vanessa Friedman aptly called the use of traditional Otomi embroidery as an “ignorant” display of the exploitation of others. The designer of said collection, Wes Gordon, said that he and his husband had taken a trip to Mexico, where they were “mesmerized by its beauty.” The show notes for the resort collection were a summary of all the typical colonial fantasy projections of Latin America: “Sunrise in Tulum; the light of Lima; Strolls in Mexico City; The waves of José Ignacio; Dancing in Buenos Aires; The colors of Cartagena.” This is something I will explore in the next essay for I am out of Substack space!
I want to end with another quote by Angela Jansen: “Today, dominant Eurocentric fashion discourse upholds this narrative by arguing that designers outside the dominant fashion capitals are ‘modernising traditional dress,’ as if it was happening for the first time in centuries. We conveniently forget that, as part of indigenous fashion systems, these practices have been innovating and adjusting to new fashions throughout history by merchants, craftsmen and designers, a fact that has been and continues to be systematically erased and denied by our Eurocentric discourse.”
Outstanding writing, great comparisons💯