Craft and Power 1.2: Craft of the Week - Quilting and Relationality

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:11]Hi everyone. So this class session is one of our craft of the week modules where we will do a deep dive on a particular craft practice with some examples to flesh out concepts from this course. This week, we thought we'd start with one very dear to my heart, quilting, uh, which I've benefited from more as a recipient than as a practitioner, uh, with some handstitched quilts. The main concept that we would like to explore over the different quilts we're talking we're taking a look together at today is relationality. how quilts stitch together a diverse array of relationships between individual scraps of fabric, between different historical and personal moments, and between participants in the quilting community.

[00:00:58]>> This way of looking at objects is something that ties together personal relationships is one of the fundamental theoretical contributions of anthropology. It's long been preoccupied with thinking about the values that are embedded in products like quilts. Values that aren't fully captured by something like a price tag. Values that bind people together long after these objects are exchanged.

[00:01:21]>> This idea of price tag value is something that we will definitely come back to a lot in next in particularly the next week when we look at the relationship between craft and the emergence of capitalism. But the main thing to think about is how the majority of our economic interactions these days are in the form of commodity exchange.

[00:01:43]Uh which is a term we will get back to but for today what it means is we buy goods produced for exchange at the market using money that we then consume.

[00:01:54]>> Importantly the only relationships we have between the object and the producer is mediated through the price exchange.

[00:02:02]Once I own a can of Coke, it's mine to do with as I please. I have no relationship to the factory that produced the bottle, the workers that mixed up the drink, or even the original formulators of Coke's secret recipe. To use a technical phrase, commodities are alienated from the labor that went into their production. This is often called a marxian concept of commodity exchange because Karl Marx wrote extensively extensively about the role of production for exchange in modern capitalism and the social and economic implications of commodity exchange dominating our social lives.

[00:02:36]>> So we see this form of exchange all around us. But it wasn't always this way. Economic relations used economic relations used to be much more embedded within reciprocal obligations circulating inside a closerknit community mediated by things like gifts.

[00:02:56]This is the contribution of anthropologist Marcel Mouse in what the book the gift which is his most seinal work where he looks at the archaic societies and the networks of relationships that spring up from the act of gift giving.

[00:03:12]>> Crucially, these mousian modes of gift exchange don't fully disappear in our contemporary economies. Contemporary anthropologists like Anna Singh helpfully show how relational gift economies uh and alienated commodity production economies coexist and interweave. If you're looking to learn more about these anthropological concepts and the tensions between them, Singh's article, Sorting Out Commodities, provides a compelling example uh in the case of artisal mushroom harvesters and the global market for rare mushrooms.

[00:03:47]Okay, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with quilting. Jonas, you had something you wanted to share. I think here >> I'm really excited to show off one of my prized possessions. A quilt my mother Rebecca made for me when I left home for college. I immediately thought of this quilt as an example of an object that makes me feel so deeply interconnected with my relationships to other people, to home, to my own personal history.

[00:04:12]It's the type of heirloom that I'd risk running into a burning building for. And I think the reason that it has so much personal or sentimental value for me is precisely because it layers in all of these different relationship. And that's sort of inherently built into the medium of quilting.

[00:04:31]>> What do you mean by that?

[00:04:33]>> Quilting is about stitching a variety of different fabrics together and forming them into patterns. If you're a quilter like my mom, I'd be willing to bet you've got a lot a bit of a pack wrap mentality when it comes to fabrics. Old jeans aren't just destined for the dust bin anymore. They're going into the craft closet to gather dust for a few years until in the middle of a new project you think, "Hey, wait a second.

[00:04:56]I've got the perfect blue fabric for this." And then you go to pull it out.

[00:05:00]And in the process, you dig through scraps from the curtain that you had in your first postc college house, these awesome cowboy sheets you got from an estate sale two years ago, and a handful of your grandfather's ties.

[00:05:12]>> Uh, right. So, like the craft corner in our apartment that your roommate keeps telling you to throw out.

[00:05:23]>> Exactly. With the difference being that my mom actually makes quilts and I just accumulate clutter. Anyway, back to the quilt. Like I was saying, this quilt has a bunch of layers of relationships that are symbolically and material materially communicated by the quilt. A lot of these fabrics that make up the overall pattern are fabrics that I remember encountering in my childhood. There's these little motifs from the quilts and curtains that I had in my childhood bedroom growing up. And I can still remember the sunlight that came through these bright yellow curtains all the way back to when I was five. And up at the top there were some of these little red corduroy fabric swatches that you can see in the quilt. But there's even longer roots that are captured by this particular quilt. My mom learned quilting from her mother and she still has some of the quilts that my grandmother made for her like one that was made out of her father's old trousers.

[00:06:18]>> So we're talking what? Three generations.

[00:06:20]>> Exactly. And you can see how something like heirlooms and quilts gather these layers of personal relationships that can be almost endless. Stitched into my own quilt, for example, there's some stitching patterns that my mom used to bind the quilt to the backing and uh the batting. These were made using little cardboard patterns that my mom inherited when her mother passed shortly before I finished high school. Other patterns she made herself and they have a lot of personal meanings. Uh so she's a professional chist. So there's these little motifs that she designed to depict the scroll of a cello in the context of a gift itself. It's a graduation and moving out present. So she's forming a relationship between her own professional career ambitions and what I was setting out to do at the career I was starting to make for myself as a new freshly minted college student. And then there's this one. It's my favorite. It's a compass rose motif that I liked to doodle a lot when I was in high school. At one point, I made a spray paint stencil uh and I was fantasizing that I would go around and like tag different areas around Hattisburg, Miss Mississippi with this little symbol that I had designed.

[00:07:36]>> Cutie little nerd.

[00:07:38]>> Anyway, she found it and used it as a stitching pattern. And so symbolically, it's also documenting the relationship between my childhood and my future, the things from home that I'm carrying along with me, and more literally, the way that these past experiences can point me in the right direction and orient me like a compass. But then there's the way that this quilt has also acred even more relationships and meanings during the time that it's been with me. So along the way now I can recall it in my freshman dorm room in my house when I was a high school teacher moving across five different states until it arrived where it is now.

[00:08:16]>> That's incredibly cute. I see. So it's mediating your own family relationship but also relationship to time and space and history.

[00:08:26]>> Exactly. And that's why these objects are so hard to place a conventional price tag value to when they have this sort of personal sentimental value. I can't just say, "Oh, my mom spent 50 hours working on the quilt and with a hourly rate of $40 for artistic labor, that's a $2,000 quilt." Or even I can't say uh if we're doing like a supply side like the market for handmade quilts averages around about $500 a piece.

[00:08:55]These commodity exchange values are incomparable and incommensurate with something like sentimental value because they have no way of maintaining the deeply personal relationships and reciprocal obligations that get wrapped up in objects that are circulating in a gift economy. Right? So as as soon as I sold this to somebody, even if I sold it for $2 million, it would then be theirs.

[00:09:18]they have no real reciprocal obligation or relationship with me or with my mother or with her grandmother.

[00:09:27]>> So, I think this is a good jumping off point for thinking about something that I brought in that shows how quilting can form and reflect not just personal relationships, but relationships across thousands of years of history.

[00:09:40]>> You know, it's not a competition.

[00:09:43]>> I can't help it. I'm Egyptian.

[00:09:47]You're what?

[00:09:49]>> Egyptian.

[00:09:52]>> So, I want to start us off by asking, what does it mean to think of quilting, an object that holds us, that has a personal relationship to us? As Jonah started off this conversation, what we're doing is examining how collectives and cultures form around different craft practices. I'm going to take the example of the Baltimore artist Jackie Mad who is one of my absolute favorites and her usage of textiles, quilting and collage in her artwork. I want to zoom in on one work of hers in particular, unwrapping and unrolling. That's one. And then actually two, Shaki Emerge, which Mlet produced in 2023 and is currently housed in the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Milled inherited a blanket from her Egyptian aunts. Over time, this blanket developed holes, lost its function as a bedding that she can use. However, Mlette felt uneasy about throwing it out because while it's a pragmatic solution, it's still a reminder of her aunt, a blanket that once protected her from the cold and held her. She decided instead to move it to the to move the blanket from her bedroom to her art studio and began incorporating it in her artwork. Her decision recycle recycling this blanket into her artistic practice rather than fully tossing it out raises important questions for us around craft communities.

[00:11:25]So, we could ask, how do collectives actually form around craft objects? And what relationships can these objects hold or communicate?

[00:11:35]>> Exactly. So, maybe in Mlette's case, the blanket held the spirit of her own.

[00:11:41]Other questions we can raise about this are what happens when knowledge passes between generations through crafted objects? Meaning, how do communities actually share different types of expertise? And when do multiple people contribute to a craft object over time?

[00:11:58]Who gets the credit as the author? Is Jackie's aunt the primary creator? Is it Jackie? Or is it both of them?

[00:12:06]>> You told me this story about your grandpa's pajamas. And I think you should tell it here because it's really related to these things.

[00:12:14]>> Okay. So, MED's relationship with her aunt's blanket mirrors this like personal story for me about inherited textiles. And when I was speaking to MLED, I shared how I have taken my grandpa's pajamas after he passed away.

[00:12:31]Um, I wore them for only one month. Then I stopped. I freaked out and I panicked and I stopped because I couldn't bring myself to actually wash them because in my head that would erase the memory of my grandfather's scent. Well, the memory and the actual scent and I couldn't keep wearing them because then I might wear them out completely. So, both the story of my grandpa's PJs and Jackie's aunt's quills show sort of the same tension.

[00:13:02]These aren't just functional objects for us. They're repositories of different layers of family memories, relationships, connections. The anxiety about preservation, what it is, what it means to preserve an object versus its functional use, how a blanket just makes me warmer, reveals something important about how craft objects function in the everyday within different communities.

[00:13:28]They carry more than just the maker's technical skill. They hold relationships, memories, culture, and knowledge that all extend far beyond their original creator.

[00:13:39]>> It also raises the question like with the Koch example of whether or not we can even trace the original creator.

[00:13:46]What does it mean to be an original creator or or an original author in something like a craft practice?

[00:13:52]>> Exactly. So here I'm also thinking about this question because craft communities are not about one individual creator sort of like folk music as opposed to a singular song writer rather they form around crafting as a process of making something together. Let's look at quilting more closely in Mlette's case.

[00:14:15]So the quilt is an inheritance and now she wants to preserve it i.e. preserve the relationships that the blanket symbolized for her. When she took the blanket to use it in her artwork, she explicitly said, "I didn't cut into it."

[00:14:30]Because for her, cutting felt very violent. Instead, she painted over the blankets with additional elements to it.

[00:14:37]She added new layers while preserving what was underneath, which is her aunt's blanket. Why am I taking this case? Why am I highlighting it? Well, one because I love it, but also two because her artistic approach with her aunt's quilt shows us something that is much more crucial and symbolic about craft collectives and how they actually work across time and space.

[00:15:01]So, the community around this single blanket now includes multiple participants, right? There's this Egyptian aunt who originally made it.

[00:15:10]There's Millet who transformed it into an art piece. There's the Baltimore Museum of Art which even eventually acquired this piece and all the viewers who then encounter it in the museum, me included. Each participant brings different types of knowledge, technical textile skills, artistic vision, institutional preservation expertise, all of them together, these like different communities create various forms of interpretive engagements with this good. Notice that this collective did not form through any formal in like organizations or institutions. It emerged organically around the quilt as an object itself and its history as it moves along from one space to another and from one time to another.

[00:15:56]>> So it's like the blanket becomes a point for gathering these different people and relationships into cultural memory. This is what we're talking about when we think about mousian gift objects and relationality, right? These objects become symbolic manifestations of individuals of institutions of practices.

[00:16:16]>> So you point something very important here which is another layer which is culture and memory. Why are we saying culture and memory here? Because Millet was born and lived in the US. However, her mom is Honduran and her dad is Egyptian. Something we a lot of us can relate to. Her aunt's blanket held another relationship to Mlet, which is a relationship to Egypt, part of her heritage that she was not perhaps physically present in. But her art piece was not just about her aunt's quilt. It also contained knowledge moving across different generations in her family. And to understand this, we need to look at Mlet's childhood experience. She spent hours under her father's uh workbench who was a goldsmith. This wasn't a formal apprenticeship situation. She was just present while he worked. But she absorbed crucial ways of doing things.

[00:17:10]We may call them lessons, not only in crafting as technical expertise, but also in the values of different materials she uses later in her artwork.

[00:17:20]Millet's dad was a goldsmith. She explains that for a goldsmith, nothing gets wasted. dust, filings, scrap material, everything can be melted down and reused. It is gold after all. And so because her father was that goldsmith, she learned that throwing gold scraps away basically means losing thousands of dollars instantly. They created an this like this experience created an understanding for her that these materials, this knowledge are too valuable to discard.

[00:17:54]So I guess we're also seeing like how the sensibility from goldsmithing transfers into the sensibility of quilting where Milad is much more comfortable with constantly repurposing, reusing, recycling motifs and materials from her artwork.

[00:18:12]>> Yeah. So the the knowledge she inherited wasn't just about specific techniques.

[00:18:19]She learned an entire philosophy about transformation, about value, and about preservation.

[00:18:25]Knowledge transmitted through what we might call an implicit pedagogy learning, a a sort of learning that happens through presence and observation rather than a form of explicit instruction. And so this challenges how we usually think about learning craft.

[00:18:44]We usually expect formal learning and structured lessons. But for me in her experience, what it shows us is that meaningful learning also happens just by sitting around someone while they work and absorbing their approach. And that's sort of the power of like active rather than passive observation.

[00:19:04]>> So what kind of knowledge does Milad bring together around her quilt?

[00:19:10]So Mlet's artwork includes another craft in addition to quilting which is collaging. Her artworks incorporate multiple languages and cultural references. You find Arabic script, Spanish script, ancient Egyptian symbols, contemporary pop culture references, and personal family photographs all layered together and on top of each other, including her son's images and friends letters to her across the years. And so when viewers ask her or her students to translate these different elements, she refuses and she explains that not everything should be immediately understandable for everyone that is looking at something. If someone doesn't understand one reference, they might connect with another one. She explains that a Kendrick Lamar lyric, for instance, might speak to viewers who don't read Arabic. Ancient Egyptian symbols might resonate with people who miss the hip-hop references. And so this reveals how craft communities actually share knowledge but also shows how knowledge travels between different contexts. There's no single expert who possesses all necessary information to understand this art piece. For example, um instead communities around craft and art function through what we might call distributed expertise.

[00:20:30]And that means different members bring different cultural literacies. Um so someone who's familiar with Coptic textile traditions might not recognize contemporary music um references.

[00:20:43]Someone who may be more wellversed in current popular culture but might miss historical Egyptian symbolism.

[00:20:53]So, we're seeing the craft object as it becomes a site where different knowledge systems and networks encounter and sometimes contradict each other. It's a quilt. It's literally weaving in these different stitches uh of different cultural expertise, different authorships.

[00:21:08]>> Exactly. So, learning happens across these exchanges rather than more traditional apprenticeship topdown instruction approach. One where knowledge flows linearly i.e. straightforward from the master to the exp to the apprentice. Which brings us to a more complex question here. When multiple people contribute to a craft object across time, who should be considered the author? We have already alluded to this question already. And Sumlet's collages, what they show us, they include photographs of her hands holding museum artifacts, letters from past lovers, drawings from her son, and her aunt's blanket. Each of these elements carries someone else's creative labor and intention which at that time of creating that little fragment was not actually meant to go into that final art piece that Mlet created. So the author authorship question thus becomes even more complicated when cultural and heritage institutions get involved i.e a museum or a gallery. After the BMA, the museum uh the Baltimore Museum of Art acquired the piece incorporating u her like Millet's uh aunt's blanket, Millet would jokingly say, "Where is my baby?"

[00:22:26]And this sort of revealed the tension about ownership and agency when it comes to crafted objects and artwork. The object she produced was a collage of personal objects. It emerged from these collaborative processes that are themselves the very personal encounters with her. So when I interviewed Millet, she told she told me about how she was influenced by performance arts and she graduate in her undergrad. She uh she studied performance arts and so she gave me the example of Yoko Ono's 1964 piece which was entitled cut piece. Um Ono didn't just create an art piece but incorporated a performance around it as well. She handed scissors to members of the audience and told them to cut away pieces of her dress. Millet describes this as an act of trust and surrender to the unknown.

[00:23:17]>> So what you're saying about distributed authorship, what we're really talking about is a form of authorship that's collective. Uh so think of it in opposition to the intellectual property or copyright ideas that we have today where one single individual is the person who owns the object or owns the medicine, the technology, the artwork, the intellectual property. Uh in we have this idea of authorship as something that is created by one person and one person's genius and that sort of dominates in the art world in a way that is different I think from the craft world. Right? thinking again about these relationships between art and craft. Uh yeah, and the way that there's a sort of dynamic tension between those two.

[00:24:02]>> And I think you've raised something important here, which is it's more predominant to think of this in relation to craft world rather than art world.

[00:24:12]And what Millet sort of brilliantly does is that she blurs that distinction art and craft >> in a way that actually basically she argues for no distributed form of authorship, a collective authorship and that artwork does not have to be uh the genius author but actually multiple people come around something. So what's interesting here to see in juxaposition for MLED and others in craft work communities who try to argue for this is that they're saying we are part of a longer and bigger lineage than us. We're not the center of the universe on purpose. Their craft is about dividing up what we may call creative control. It means the original creator intentionally and consciously distributes control and surreners to others around them so that others can have space to say something and relate to that object or piece.

[00:25:11]Think of the example I just told you about with MLE including multiple languages and symbols in her work. What she's doing with this technique is saying here I made this space for you for multiple modes of creative participation. We're all making this piece together.

[00:25:30]>> Okay. Why is it important? Why are we what's the point of talking about distributed authorship uh and distributed control over craft or artworks or products?

[00:25:41]>> Because this means that so many people can be involved in a work. the quilt makers, the inheritors, curators, viewers. Instead of thinking of yourself as a viewer in a museum that is very passive, you ask actually can start thinking of yourself as someone who's active in the way in which you make meaning to this art piece. Each person contri contributes to the work's significance in different ways depending on their own vantage point and what these works trigger for them personally.

[00:26:12]So, okay. What does it mean to preserve crafts here? I feel like we're getting kind of into that art history definition of uh sort of craft as a specific type of art or production that can sort of be put behind a glass case and seen in a museum. What does preservation of craft mean?

[00:26:31]>> So, this is very important and you kind of said a little bit what I I was thinking of here. So, Millet is a fascinating example for that.

[00:26:39]preservation for her takes a very different form from the conventional way of preserving the object like you said putting it in a glass class glass case.

[00:26:49]So, so what first are so what first are these conventional ways of preserving that object?

[00:26:56]>> The main example that comes to mind is exactly what you said. It happens in museums. For museums and conservators, preservation means no one can touch an object but the expert but the conservator because otherwise our fingerprints might get it dirty or they can be oily or we can accidentally break the object while handling it. Fair point. Totally fair. But the problem with this mode of preserving is that we aren't always going to freely experience that object which affects the way in which we can relate and interact with it. And I'm thinking here of my own personal experience. I'm Egyptian and what could be immediately assumed is an Egyptian will always relate to their ancient Egyptian history and like >> like know every little thing about this queen and that king and the mummy and the this like object and chapy etc. But actually that doesn't always happen with us in that way because a lot of times if I only if I come from a city like Cairo where ancient Egyptian civilization is not as prominent as other cities like Luxor for instance, I don't get to see it as part and parcel of the space I live with. And so what ends up happening is my only interaction with those ancient Egyptian artifacts is through a museum which puts these things in glass.

[00:28:16]So I can't touch it and the only thing I can learn about it is through these three lines that tell me about this object. And a lot of times I actually don't necessarily relate to these three lines that tell me oh this is the date of date of that object or this is a person that comes from that dynasty. And so what's very revolutionary about MLED's definition of preservation is actually caring. For her, caring um isn't just about maintaining the object's pristineess in an untouchable state. It also means allowing them to be in a public engagement. For her own work, she is very comfortable with the idea that it might deteriorate over time. Some pieces will fall fall apart, for instance. And yet, she's super okay with it. She sees that this is part of the process rather than a failure of hers of some sort. she understands this as part of the transformation of the object. The side effect of allowing people to touch her artwork um would probably be that it they might not live as as long if it were untouchable. And so she prioritizes increasing engagement to their work through allowing people to relate relate with it not only as like a passive watcher, a distant watcher, but also someone that can touch it or that's someone that can just come close to it and actively engage with it. And my question here is what does it remind you of when you touch a piece of her quilt for instance? Um your own grandma's quilt, another artwork that you've seen in another museum, your friend's collage. So anyway, I spoken a lot about Milad's example of quilting but also of collaging today. Both are sort of co constitutive in millet art practice and this is because we think they raise interesting questions about cultural and knowledge transmission within and around these craft communities. Her quilt is not just an object that is forever unchanged but it continues to be part of different creative projects and engagements which allows it to have new and different meanings.

[00:30:27]So, sticking with our theme of craft empower, we thought we'd also take a look at communities who have used quilting as a means of empowerment and resistance.

[00:30:39]>> We wanted to share with you a bit about the quilters of G's Bend, a small hamlet in Alabama, populated mainly by African-American descendants of enslaved workers. In the decades following emancipation, this community fell on extremely hard times and was also largely isolated from the outside world.

[00:30:56]Eventually, Roosevelt era uh dep great depression era relief and farm ownership programs would become very interested in this community because it became one of the poorest regions in the country. So this gave them some reprieve but further hardships emerged during the civil rights movement uh when the extremely close-knit and politically engaged community was maliciously cut off from registering to vote and from gaining economic independence through their craft work when the state discontinued ferry service uh in and out of G's bend.

[00:31:30]>> Across the varied struggles that define these different eras from enslavement through sharecropping and later the struggle for civil rights. The women of G's Ben preferred prefer perfect perfected the art of quilt making developing their own idiosyncratic style. Take a look at some of these examples and you will see how unique some of these designs and patterns are.

[00:31:53]The expressive use of color, the sprawling asymmetrical ad hoc geometric geometrical designs.

[00:32:01]And a lot of this distinctive style came precisely from the economic demands of the time and the unique formal demands of quilt making that we've talked about in a lot of our previous examples. You use the fabrics that are available to you. So from depression era quilts, you see the extensive use of workear fabrics, seed and feed sacks and the like. Then you see an explosion of what might be conventionally called mismatched colors that G's Ben quilters wo into their own distinctive styles and patterns. Uh they turned one of their own distinctive styles my way quilts which uh follow the intuitions and instincts of the quilter rather than these preset plans or unified symmetrical patterns.

[00:32:45]So the community at Gizband eventually made waves in the contemporary art world as more and more people learned about their artwork through the hard work of the artists and the curators and volunteers in the civil rights movement.

[00:33:00]In 1966, a group of quilters led by Minder Coleman, Aaylor Carson Mosley, Ma William Ma Willie Abrams, Estelle Witherspoon, and Netty Young founded a workers collective called the Freedom Quilting Bee with a goal of bringing economic opportunities to their isolated town.

[00:33:19]And they ended up landing contracts with New York department stores and Sears.

[00:33:24]You can see here precisely Anna Singh's argument that we've referred to earlier about traditional economies overlapping with commodity exchange. We can also see the tensions that we mentioned in the first lecture between art, the art world and functional handiccrafts, right?

[00:33:41]These are artists who are very traditional who then make it big on the art scene.

[00:33:48]And of course the power dynamics between what a tradition what is traditionally viewed as women's work.

[00:33:54]>> But what we really wanted to draw your attention to here is the ways in which communities can come together around their own unique heritage especially with a recombinant brick medium like quilting to empower their communities and contribute to a story that spans centuries.

[00:34:12]So the work of G's Ben quilters are now in the permanent collection of over 40 museums and art institutions across the world. Thanks to the work of the souls grown deep organization who have been distributing these works to diversify the traditional lineages of art history.

[00:34:30]We highly recommend if you want to learn more about this community, there's a PBS documentary recounting their struggle for recognition linked in the description along with a more recent New York Times opin quilters.

[00:34:43]>> We hope you've enjoyed this craft of the week session on quilting. If you're a quilter or like me, you're just a grateful recipient of cozyquilts, drop us a mention on our social media, craft power on either Twitter or Instagram and show off some of your favorite quilts.

[00:34:59]You can also email us some photos and we'll post some over there.

[00:35:03]Alternatively, tell us about the objects in your life that are invested with sentimental value because of the craft work that made them and the relational networks that they engage, mediate, and connect. Thank you so much. We'll see you next week.

[00:35:18]>> Bye.