Textiles: Modern Entanglements

Textiles: Modern Entanglements. Erica Warren, Session Chair

Jensina Endresen

University of Colorado Denver, MA Student

The Italian Job and the Body Politic: The Legacy of Italian Futurism on Fashion

“One thinks and acts as one dresses,”Giacomo Balla wrote in his 1910 Futurist manifesto on the

Anti-Neutral Suit. A lifestyle piece, an extension of his paintings and values, the suit aimed to

embody the Futurist ideal of integrating art and technology into the everyday. Not only was the

object (and the theory behind it) radically different than anything seen before, the suit’s

explosive, aggressive masculinity and shine-bright dandyism illuminated future fashion forever.

All that light, however, was not without a shadow cast.

The following study of Balla’s Anti Neutral Suit follows its journey from conceptual drawing to

embodied performance theatre. I will discuss its eventual imprint on, and opposing trajectory to,

fellow Italian and bastion of femininity couturier Elsa Schiaparelli in order to explore the ways

each designer made their clothing into gendered political statements. I will argue that both

designers owe credit to feminist seamstress Rosa Genoni, a master tailor and outspoken Milanese

labor activist whose published call-to-arms articles had her branded as an anarchist and

subversive figure by the Italian government. Finally, I will showcase the ways in which 21st

century designers, including Alexander McQueen and current Schiaparelli designer Daniel

Roseberry, use Futurist concepts of the bionic body in their designs today.

Trevor Brandt

University of Chicago, PhD Student

Folk Art Feminism: The Textile Diplomacy of Dr. Hanna Rydh

In June 1938, the Swedish American Line passenger ship, the MS Kungsholm, docked in Philadelphia to great acclaim. Onboard, the Swedish royal family prepared for the first stop on a series of state visits around the East Coast to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Swedish presence in the United States. The first stop of this Tercentenary tour centered on the dedication of Philadelphia’s new American Swedish Historical Museum (ASHM), the first such institution in the nation.

Among the many Swedes joining the royal court in Philadelphia, there was only one woman participating in an official capacity. Dr. Hanna Rydh (1891-1964), Scandinavia’s first female archaeologist and a women’s rights activist, acted as both an academic and diplomat at the Tercentenary, presenting to ASHM seventy-two folk revival textiles designed and woven by female craft organizations in each of Sweden’s historical provinces.

Long in storage, this rich and diverse collection acted as a mediator in a dialogue between Swedish and American women in 1938. Specifically, Dr. Rydh’s unique status as both an academic and an activist enabled her to frame these objects as communicating three themes of female empowerment in Sweden. These were the artistic and manual abilities of the historically anonymous Swedish craftswoman, the material value of the work of Swedish women, and the political dimensions of Swedish folk art. Ultimately, I argue that these textiles formed a feminist system of communication which was not limited to Sweden, highlighting other Nordic folk textile collections entering American museums in the interwar period.

Jenny Harris

University of Chicago, PhD Student

Lenore Tawney’s Water Birds Hanging (1956)

This paper offers a focused study of Lenore Tawney’s 1956 work Water Birds Hanging in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nearly seven feet tall and more than four feet wide, this large scale, vertically-oriented work presents a dynamic scene of long-beaked birds bounding through water against a vibrant and multi-hued sky. With its nearly rectangular format, its recognizably figurative imagery, and colorful exuberance, Water Birds might be read in sharp contrast to the monochrome sculptural work for which Tawney is best known—works that positioned the artist as a pioneer of the fiber art movement. Within this narrative, Water Birds appears as somewhat of an outlier; it belongs to a body of work typically bracketed in the scholarship as “Student” rather than “mature” work.

In the face of such readings, this paper explores what it would mean to take such work seriously, asking what it can tell us about her more celebrated objects as well as the broader aims of her modernist project at midcentury. Attending closely to the object’s materiality, I highlight the ways the work deploys innovative approaches to materials stemming from her fine and applied arts training to position nature and art as integrated, even co-constitutive things. For Tawney, depicting nature was not simply a matter of visualizing it, but of conveying its feeling spatially. Focusing on this early example in her output allows us to understand nature’s centrality in her broader artistic project: her desire to stage art objects as thresholds or portals to a spiritual or non-material world. In the wake of formalist histories of modernist autonomy, it yields a messier picture of intermedial pursuits at mid-century.