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Amanda Denham

January 25, 2017


Fold Unfold
Susan Falls & Jessica Smith
Savannah College of Art and Design
Center for Craft, Creativity and Design
Dear Ms Falls and Ms Smith,
Congratulations on your upcoming exhibition F
old Unfold. As a weaver and graduate
student of anthropology and material culture, I am thrilled to see a call for submissions focusing
on American textile history. American coverlets are visually stunning and the tradition was sadly
lost by the turn of the twentieth century. This exhibition seems as if it will showcase the legacy
of American weaving through the skills of contemporary weavers.
Upon first glance of Fold Unfold, I immediately contacted my colleague, Sarah Gotowka,
to collaborate on what would have likely been a naturally dyed coverlet. However, after reading
the overview of the exhibition, my excitement recoiled and inspired me to write this letter I am
writing to you.
Textiles in the United States are frequently overlooked. Weaving in the US has been
viewed as womens work for centuriesand its products were typically found in the homes of
middle-class women who were either slave owners or employed their daughters. Today,
weaving is a skill practiced by white middle-class women who do not weave for its lucrative
potential or necessity, but for love of the history of the craft or its meditative tedium. What has
always struck me about fabrics and textiles is their transparency. We can only weave with
accessible resources. If I cant get my hands on madder root or afford alpaca fibers - I simply
dont use them.
What Im getting at here is that textiles are shaped by the resources available to
individual weavers or cooperatives. Despite this reality, youve proposed an exhibition which
aims to undermine traditional signifiers of class and race [by using] a modernist color scheme
of black, white, and gray. Undermine race and class by exhibiting a textile tradition that
emerged from labor delineated by race and class? Undermine race and class by using a
modernist color scheme? Werent the modernists largely white men many of whom had
seemingly unlimited access to institutional legitimacy? It is comforting to think of color, or lack
thereof, as politically or socioeconomically neutral, but it just isnt. Our associations with color
are dripping in colonial politics.1 Your color limitations do not erase race or class, instead they
reinforce your own aesthetics resulting from a long process of social conditioning and privilege.
1

Man in a state of nature, wrote Goethe in his book on color, uncivilized nations and children, have a
great fondness for colours in their utmost brightness. The same applied to uneducated people and
southern Europeans, especially the women with their bright-colored bodices and ribbons in northern
Europe at the time in which he wrote in the early nineteenth century, people of refinement had a
disinclination to colors, women wearing white, the men, black. Taussig, M. 2009. What Color is the Sacred.
Chicago: Chicago University Press. p 3.

Why undermine class and race in textiles? Has that not happened enough? Women of
color (WoC) and low-income white women are underrepresented or erased in textile collections
across the world. Theyre either exoticized or not at all present. We, as scholars of textiles,
should know better. Why perpetuate a known problem within textile history and scholarship?
Privileged white women should be sitting down and listening. A person cannot undermine
something they have never experienced.
Aside from the issue of limiting the color palette to a modernist scheme, how is it that
you expect to undermine traditional signifiers of class with the size requirements youve
proposed? The dimensions you require are 80x88 which means a weaver needs access to a
loom thats over 80 inches wide. Those are the dimensions of a professional (expensive) loom
which requires serious storage space. Sarah and I, even if we wanted to support this exhibition,
would not be able to contribute a piece at that size. Between the two of us we have access to 5
floor looms, yet not one of those would be large enough (or have sufficient harnesses) to weave
a 40 wide overshot double-cloth that could be opened up to meet your specifications. Earning
the skills, having leisure time to practice, and gaining access to space and resources are
denotative of class privilege. I have a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from Kent State University
in weaving. I am a cisgender white woman whose parents were able to support my early
adulthood academic whims. These circumstances are quintessential class and racial
privilegeand every piece I weave is inherently charged by them.
Artists, craftspeople, and hobbyists cannot separate their subjectivities from the work
they make. For this reason, Sarah and I are proposing a counter exhibition in response to Fold
Unfold. It will be titled Sold Unsold. As a direct response, our exhibit will foster dialogue around
the commodification of womens labor and bodies. We want to celebrate the people weaving
today, while remembering the racially charged, class-based history that brought us here. In this
exhibition we will encourage applicants to explicitly address issues not limited to race, class,
gender, age, religion, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, or ability. After all, a woven fabric is a
series of intersections in repeat - is it not?
Those of us fortunate enough to have travelled to the Textile Society of Americas
symposium this past October heard the fantastic closing plenary given by Stephanie Syjuco.
Syjuco asked us, the predominantly white ciswomen in attendance, to do better. She called us
out. She used her platform to remind us that there arent enough voices from WoC or LGBTQ
people. Syjuco was right, its time to do better.

Sincerely,
Amanda Denham

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