Friday Fibers Roundup: Patterned Body

April 27, 2018

This week’s Friday Fibers Roundup looks at the body and the various ways patterns and designs are used within fashion, exhibitions, and textile works.

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1) “‘Black Panther’ Costume Designer Draws On ‘The Sacred Geometry Of Africa’” by Mallory Yu looks at the costuming details from the recent Marvel Blockbuster and how Wakanda’s Afro-futurism is grounded in the past. Colors, shapes, jewelry, and textures were pulled from tribes all over Africa, telling a story “of brilliance, royalty, intrigue…through clothing” (via NPR).

2) “The Curious Victorian Tradition of Making Art from Human Hair” by Allison Meier looks at how art crafted from hair—a 19th-century tradition in which tresses were braided into jewelry, looped to resemble flower petals, even ground up for use in pigments—remains frozen in time (via Artsy).

3) “How Japan Invented the ‘Caftie’” by Kevin Murray inquires into how selfie culture has affected how people take in works at museums and galleries (via Garland).

4) “Vogue Knitting Cover Girl Krysten Ritter Teaches Stephen Colbert the Art of the Craft” by Kelly Faircloth enjoys the moment when Ritter pauses her interview with Colbert to teach him how to knit (via Jezebel).

5) Finnish artist Raija Jokinen creates sculptural bodies out of flax, revealing the complicated relationship between the mind and body (via Colossal).

6) “Sheila Hicks Takes the Pompidou” by Lauren Collins highlights how the legendary 83-year-old textile artist filled the Parisian museum with bales and balls of her fibre art (via The New Yorker).

7) In “Jewelry as a Means to Reflect on the Essence of all things Surrounding Us” examines how contemporary art has a mission to interfere actively in the political, social, and environmental discourse, and how the exhibition Myths Jewellery commented on these themes (via UK Association for Contemporary Jewellery Magazine).

8) “The Little Art School That Could” by Kate Wallace spotlights how the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design has managed to attract more students now than at any other time in its 80-year history (via Canadian Art).

9) “Crafting New Material Vocabularies” by Susannah Schouweiler and Elizabeth Ginsberg highlights the creative process of Sheila Pepe who creates web-like installations of crocheted yarn, string, shoelaces, tow lines, and rope, which speak to art history, gender, architecture, political power, and family (via MMAA).

10) “Jodi Colella” by Ann Landi spotlights the SDA member and how she works with all manner of materials that extend the boundaries of what we think of as sculpture (via Vasari21).