Art
Folklorist Michelle Lanier spoke with artist Allison Janae Hamilton about her new body of work Celestine, recently on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, and connections to home and the Black South. This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication. Michelle Lanier: I’m thinking about this concept of newness. And I was »
Essay
“We were accused of killing both the cotton and textile industries based on our campaigns to raise critical issues of worker health, union representation, environmental protection, and civil rights.” It may have been us who killed the textile industry, at least according to a number of the cotton mill owners who operated across the South »
Snapshot
For a century, North Carolina was a hub of the US textile industry. Since the 1980s, much of that industry has been lost to offshoring, and our state is dotted with massive, hollowed-out brick mills and the hollowed-out hamlets once supported by them. But our region still offers an abundance of textile resources. Our moderate »
Snapshot
I’ve long been fascinated by the creation and craftsmanship of the materials that fashion relies on, as well as the meaning and beauty in how we choose to adorn ourselves and our spaces. To me, fiber is more than a commodity or resource, it is a canvas for expressing our values, histories, and hopes. All »
Snapshot
The textile industry was swept along by the Industrial Revolution during the late 1700s and early 1800s, changing from a cottage industry to one where inventions like the spinning jenny, cotton gin, and power looms created more efficient production and more jobs. During the twentieth century, jobs and production shifted from the developed world, like »
Snapshot
Acadian Brown Cotton or Gossypium hirsutum is an eco-variety upland cotton originating in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. It is uncertain how or when it arrived in Louisiana, but there is a long, well-documented history of its use. Archives, oral histories, and photographs reveal how beautiful blankets were woven as dowry gifts for more than two hundred »
Snapshot
At the Fiberhouse Collective in Marshall, North Carolina, we envision a future of textiles that is place-based: a textile economy that supports small-scale farmers and producers while benefiting soil health and community resilience. Fiberhouse Collective encompasses twenty-two acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We host an artist residency in our eight-sided canvas cabin, which also »
Poetry
“I run towards the woods like a young girl in love” I run towards the woods like a young girl in lovethe ground crisp with frost my breathexultant and whiteI spent the night before praying in an empty fieldstalks of cotton reaching towards dark skyclouded with rain and thunder I wakein early dawn dress drenched head clangingwith a familiar ache and there »
Back Porch
“My hand-pieced quilts and many pairs of gifted mittens and socks reinforced both my connection to generations of talented women before me and the post-1970s second-wave feminism I longed to represent in my daily life and actions.” I bought it in my early twenties—a bright red cotton T-shirt with the emblem “Women’s Radical Sewing Society.” I had »
Interview
“I’m the Flag Boy. I love the position. I embrace it a lot. It is just like a whole character. It’s a spirit that takes over you on Mardi Gras Day.” Marwan Pleasant was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he grew up masking as a Mardi Gras Indian in the Golden Eagles tribe. Pleasant »
Interview
“If this was truly Student Craft and it was meant to reflect the students’ work and they were going to find joy in the process, they had to have some ownership over what was happening. So, we started with the Rainbow Baby Blanket.” Berea College, located in the foothills of Appalachian Kentucky, was founded in »
Essay
“The Loray had been in operation for almost a century, changing its products and expanding or retrofitting its buildings to meet the evolving demands of the southern textile industry.” In 1993, Bill Passmore started taking photographs of his coworkers at the Firestone plant, formerly called the Loray, in Gastonia, North Carolina. He cataloged the spaces »