Contemporary Handicraft in England

This undergraduate travel seminar examines the resurgence of craft within contemporary art and theory, with a focus on the institutionalization of handicraft in England. With a focus on the multiple legacies of designer William Morris for artists and activists working today, we will read formative theoretical texts regarding questions of process, materiality, skill, bodily effort, domestic labor, and alternative economies of production. In a time when much art is outsourced -- or fabricated by large stables of assistants-- what does it mean when artists return to traditional, and traditionally laborious, methods of handiwork such as knitting, jewelry making, or woodworking? Though our emphasis will be on recent art (including the Black feminist reclamation of quilts, an artist who makes pornographic embroidery, a transvestite potter, queer fiber collectives, do-it-yourself environmental interventions, and anti-capitalist craftivism), we will also examine important historical precedents. Throughout, we will think through how craft is in dialogue with questions of race, nation-building, gendered work, and mass manufacturing. A trip to sites in London and Manchester (such as the textile mills that inspired Marx and Engels and several museum collections) will emphasize the contradictions of "slow" making within the accelerations of capitalism.