Editor’s Introduction
by Hannah Jew
Clifford Geertz conceptualized man as existing in “webs of significance he himself has spun.”1 That adage has served as a defining principle for this issue of SEQUITUR, in which we explore how the threads of man’s webs—both physical and metaphorical— create, connect, and maintain networks of people. This issue’s nine contributors discuss the ways in which these threads reveal themselves through the arts. The thread can join with thousands of others in the most elaborate forms—a blanket, a gown, an abstract installation—just as humans form connections that become communities. As such, artistic production is entwined in these social networks, as seen in teaching, training, and gift-giving. SEQUITUR interrogates these ties in all their varied forms of creations: materials take on meaning through the artistic process and at times move beyond the physical connections.
Several pieces in this issue take on the limits of accepted art historical narratives, whether they are discounting a vital part of an artist’s background or reducing them to a single instance in their life story. These historical uses of threads will, we hope, stay in our readers’ minds as they move from historical to contemporary arts and artists. The topics in this issue stretch from the ninth century to the present day. How do art historical threads stretch across time, between generations of artists? What are the threads that connect artists to their viewers and their critics, and how have these threads changed? In one example, the word “threads” immediately brings to mind the fiber crafts—weaving, sewing, knitting—often associated with domestic arts, typically female-coded in the west—that art history has historically ignored or set aside in favor of the traditional “fine” arts. That narrative itself has become a stalwart of art historical thought in the last half century. How has this particular thread helped our understanding of art—and how has it perpetuated gendered categorizations?
Thread’s layered potential is beautifully summarized in Quiringh van Brekelenkam’s 1654 Lacemaker’s School (fig. 1). While lacemaking and textile production are common themes in Dutch interiors of the seventeenth century, this illumination stands out for its comparatively crowded composition. Rather than a solitary figure, engrossed in her work at the expense of the viewer, Van Brekelenkam presents these threads’ connective power across generations of a community. At center, an older woman is seated with a lacemaking pillow, synonymous with bobbin lace, in her lap. This pillow was the canvas upon which dozens of bobbins of flax thread—itself a hallmark of Dutch industry—would be wound and woven together around pins in intricate patterns. On her left, a young girl leans in to watch, perhaps before testing out her mentor’s technique on her own pillow, abandoned on a chair, while on the teacher’s other side a second girl attempts her own creation. A third student works while seated on another chair at the far left. Above them, on a shelf, more lacemaking pillows are haphazardly piled, an indication of yet more students beyond the frame.
Through the act of teaching, the central figure forms a bond with her students and with the future, literally passing a thread from herself to the next generation. In learning this craft, the girls are absorbing not only a highly skilled art form, but developing their cultural literacy, as well. Lacemaking was a prized skill for middle and upper class Dutch women, a valuable part of the domestic economy, and a prevalent piece of a visual culture that celebrated the home. In one reading, that domestic value may be enough.2 But what else does this network of making say about its world? Learning lace production ensured the tradition’s continuation and was a prestigious show of knowledge, as well as prepared the girls to take part in the economy, and to pass those skills on to the next generation, whether their own children or as instructors themselves. Other images of lacemakers may emphasize the concentration required to carry out such an intricate art form, but Van Brekelenkam’s work calls attention to how one learns such concentration and intensity.
Lacemaker’s School clearly demonstrates the collaboration necessary to learn and create art, the tactile nature of threads, and the act of having one’s hands guided through the creative process. No art or craft is created in a vacuum. In van Brekelenkam’s painting the threads come together to make lace, but they also form connections between students and mentors and between the students themselves as makers. They are a site of cultural knowledge and a means of livelihood.
In this issue of SEQUITUR, all of the ways threads connect—in textile, between individuals, in the definition of a culture, between the individual and the world—are present across nine pieces, five of which are feature essays. In the first essay, “A Piece of the Gold Blanket,” Allison Donoghue situates a textile fragment within the colonial New York family that altered and passed it down, building a legacy for themselves in a changing world. Using Marcel Mauss’s theory of gifting, she weaves together two prominent families on Long Island with the pirate William Kidd, blending the blanket’s threads with the way the webs of power in the European colonies formed among wealthy families.
The American family is also on Victoria Kenyon’s mind in “Ties That Bind: Hairwork as Family Portrait in the Nineteenth Century United States.” This essay focuses on seventeen year old Lucy Grow’s hairwork album, a handmade documentation of her extended family in nineteenth-century Vermont. Kenyon takes an in-depth look at an understudied medium, touching on hair’s individualistic and haptic qualities, and opening the door to a hairwork’s further cultural implications about race, gender, and labor in the nineteenth century.
Iris Giannakopoulos’s essay “Cut With the Tailor’s Scissors” interrogates Hannah Höch’s early textile work and its position in her later Dada collages. She challenges the male-centric modernist narrative surrounding Höch’s work, offering a new, craft-based perspective that follows Höch from the women’s magazine to the gallery. By opening up artistic narratives to less expected routes of training, Giannakopoulous presents a more complete image of Höch’s artistic person. This question of making also appears in Tracey Davison’s “Skeuomorphic Textiles: Stitches in Stone.” Davison, in examining a ninth-century British sarcophagus, likens its stone carvings to contemporary funerary textiles. She asks her readers to consider the transformation of a flexible medium into something as impenetrable as stone. She finds that in reconciling the two media, a connection forms between artists and artisans across disciplines, a design collaboration and a testament to art’s ability to reach others throughout time.
Isabella Dobson takes a different approach to threads. Her essay, “Folds: Female Sexuality in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Danaë” explores the limits of established female-centric art historical narratives, namely the centering of Gentileschi’s rape trial in the story of her life and art. Dobson considers the folds of the female anatomy in a nude like the Danaë. In putting it in conversation with other female nudes of the period, Dobson finds Gentileschi’s work a celebration of female sexuality, presenting a more nuanced illustration of Gentileschi as a sexual being.
This theme, through its association with material, has drawn two visual artists into the collection of contributors. Through media varying from dryer lint to forgotten jewelry, both Adelaide Theriault and Noah Greene-Lowe’s works tie humanity to their environment, an increasingly difficult task in today’s industrialized, tech-reliant world. Theriault’s works use textile waste—laundry lint—as the nourishing space for native grasses, in order to tie refuse and synthetic textile back to their natural origins. The threads that hold the blocks of lint together are a visualization of the increased effort in binding humans and their environment together. Greene-Lowe, meanwhile, uses a multitude of media to create striking tangles that at once connect and alienate. The variety of textures he employs in his work can at once bring discarded objects together and create an impassable barrier. Taken together, these artists demonstrate the ways in which threads can find new connections and uses, can bring together and exclude.
This issue’s exploration of living artists continues with an interview with the artist Snighda Tiwari. Sakina Ahmad asks her to discuss her practice and her influences, but also her relationship with the materials she uses. Tiwari’s approach is spiritual; it is grounded in the origins of the things she creates with, as well as art’s potential to transcend the physical, to reveal their inward depths through their outward transformation into a work of art. In a similar vein, Michelle Kelley reviews the presentation of this year’s James and Audrey Foster Prize winners at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston. Kelley stresses the three winners’ emphasis on family ties, which she describes as the influence of those who came before them. She also notes that, despite media in the works that ranges from pewter to plastic plants, each artist was especially eloquent in discussing the relationship between themselves and their materials. Contemporary artists, with their freedom to choose from more unorthodox media, have opened themselves to deep connection between themselves and their tools, a personal thread that is then tied to the public in deeply impactful ways.
Geertz’s description of the human condition is brought to bear throughout these nine works, as these authors take on the thread as connector, limiter, part of production, and the start of a network. Through media ranging from silken archives to stone, they demonstrate the many ways a thread can spin beyond an artwork’s tactile form. As in Lacemaker’s School, the painted threads connect artists to viewers, to families, to ideas, to narrative, to their materials, and to each other.
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Hannah Jew is a PhD student at Boston University. She studies seventeenth-century Dutch painting, print, and material culture. Her research interests pertain to the collision of the period’s global and domestic economies in relation to imagery, especially that of women and their work within the home.
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1. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
2. Wayne Frantis, Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth Century Dutch Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1.