Material world | Weaving textiles into museum programming

From being displayed in the 16th-century building that houses the Museum of Cambridge to wrapping the brutalist exterior of the Barbican, textiles are finding their way into museums, galleries and community spaces across the country.

Last year, the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz created sculptures from woven fibre at Tate Modern. Also in 2023, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) held its Africa Fashion show, while the Design Museum staged The Offbeat Sari, which brought together dozens of the items from designers, wearers and craftspeople.

Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge recently staged Material Power (July–October 2023), which explored the historical life and contemporary significance of Palestinian embroidery.

And V&A Dundee had a big hit with Tartan, which ran from April 2023 to January 2024 and looked at tartan’s impact on fashion, architecture, art and design.

Kettle’s Yard

Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery (8 July–29 October 2023) at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge was the first major exhibition of Palestinian embroidery in the UK for more than 30 years. It featured more than 40 objects lent from private collections in Jordan and Palestine.

The item shown above is from Hebron and is in the collection of Dar Al-Tifel Al-Arabi Museum for Palestinian Heritage in Jerusalem

These exhibitions, as well as their focus on textiles or fashion, also looked at how their subjects intersected with activism, community, the environment and cultural heritage. The number of textile exhibitions has continued to increase this year.

Tate St Ives held a show this year by Outi Pieski, a Sámi visual artist based in Finland. Pieski’s work incorporates the traditional craft practices of Sámi people, using materials such as wood and textile.

The Barbican, London, held Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. Running from 13 February to 26 May, it featured 50 artists who use textiles to communicate ideas about power, resistance and survival.

At the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia in Norwich there is Jeffrey Gibson: No Simple Word for Time, on until 4 August. In his first solo exhibition at a UK museum, the American artist is showing a range of works that feature murals, paintings, textiles and historical objects.

Also running to 4 August is the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Sukaina Kubba. Dundee Contemporary Arts hosts this multidisciplinary artist whose work features textiles as well as a wide range of other media, including drawing, painting, audio and video.

And at the Museum of Cambridge, The Stories Behind the Stitches (on until autumn) explores wellness, disability and self-expression through local textiles.

Unpicking its significance

What does this all mean? Why the sudden growth in interest in textiles inside and outside the contemporary art world? What does it have to offer our understanding of material and crafts?

The impetus for many exhibitions about textiles, and the textile work of women in particular, is the historical lack of them. Many will quote revolutionary texts such as The Subversive Stitch by Rozsika Parker and make the case for establishing the exhibition as the chief metric of remembrance that we judge the history of art by.

The exhibition guide for Unravel at the Barbican argues that “the medium has been historically undervalued within the hierarchies of western art history”.

We are in an art and literary landscape of rediscovery, retrieval and reparation. There are many examples of the financial, cultural and intellectual devaluation of textiles, and the literature on this issue is vast. Fray: Art and Textile Politics by Julia Bryan-Wilson is a great place to start.

Tate Modern

Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle of Thread and Hope was held at Tate Modern, London, from 17 November 2022–21 May 2023. The Polish artist creates works made of organic materials such as horsehair, sisal and hemp rope. With a career spanning over 50 years, Abakanowicz (1930-2017) changed what it meant to be a sculptor and led the way for other artists working with fibre.

These exhibitions have successfully supported contemporary textile artists and collectives by putting their work on their walls and given sustained attention to lesser-known archival or collection pieces. This, in turn, encourages interest from the general public, the art world and academia, ensuring the survival of these histories for future generations.

The surge of mainstream curatorial interest in textiles can also be attributed to their function as a way to communicate ideas relating to activism, liberation and politics.

For instance, Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery at Kettle’s Yard looked at a history of conflict, displacement and material heritage in Palestine through embroidered dresses and objects from archives and collections across Jordan and Palestine.

Similarly, the Pieski exhibition at Tate St Ives showcased Sámi duodji (handicraft) techniques in large-scale textile installations to explore their Indigenous philosophies and the colonial practices that have attempted to eradicate them.

Tate St Ives

Outi Pieski’s first large-scale exhibition in the UK at Tate St Ives (10 February–6 May 2024) explored several themes, including the culture and identity of the Sámi people and the relationship between humans, animals and nature. Pieski often incorporates duodji (the traditional craft practices of the Sámi people), using materials such as wood and textiles in her work. Practicing traditional craft is a way to revitalise links between generations.

The exhibition also featured Pieski’s work on the ládjogahpir, fabric headdresses traditionally worn by Sámi women. As a result of the Christian Pietism movement of the 19th century, these horn hats were banned and many of them displaced from Sápmi, the Sámi people’s traditional territory. Here, the gallery became a space to reinvigorate craft knowledge and practices with a decolonial lens.

The work to diversify museum programming comes in no small part due to the tireless efforts of activists, who have pressured institutions to do more to make their programming reflect the world around them – a pronounced shift that caught spark during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, before a more recent acceleration in the wake of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

In March 2024, a number of participating textile artists and lenders replaced their works in the Barbican’s aforementioned Unravel exhibition with statements of protest, denouncing the art centre’s decision to cancel a talk by Pankaj Mishra.

The Barbican

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art (13 February–26 May 2024) at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, featured artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles. Among the artists represented were Cecilia Vicuña and Teresa Margolles.

The talk (which has since taken place elsewhere in London) addressed the genocide, and many of the artists – whose textile works similarly explore moments of conflict and violence in history and the present day – decried it as an act of censorship, and have called for accountability.

Another contribution to the increase of textile exhibitions in the UK was the pandemic. The UK’s months-long lockdowns saw many people turn to crafts and hobbies as a means of reclaiming feelings of joy, calm, productivity and accomplishment.

With many workers furloughed, working from home or made redundant, there was a sense of disposable time that could be spent turning to things that would otherwise be left unfinished, or never tried at all.

While the pandemic negatively impacted many craft businesses and makers due to disrupted supply chains, cancellations of in-person events and shared studio spaces becoming untenable, the amateur maker prompted what the Guardian newspaper referred to as an “arts and crafts renaissance”.

This combination of overdue attention from museums and an increased uptake in amateur craft practices made fertile ground for what has been a marked increase in the number of exhibitions about textiles in
the past five years.

Developing in parallel to this shift in institutional exhibitions, however, has been a significant number of craft projects that are consciously situated outside the gallery walls.

The fabric of community

In 2023, artists Beau Brannick and Alice Bigsby-Bye created the Norfolk Trans Joy Community Quilt. Through introductory sewing workshops and craft days with other community groups – Out! Norwich, the Norfolk LGBT+ Project, and Queer Craft Club – they helped their local queer community sew 58 patches reflecting what trans joy meant to them.

Taking inspiration from the Aids Memorial Quilt, the Trans Joy quilt sought to introduce people to a practice that could help them process and express their feelings towards gender nonconformity, with emphasis on the project being open to everyone, including those who had never sewn before.

In spring 2024, a grassroots group called Sheffield Families for Gaza began Quilt for Palestine, another community project where people can contribute handmade fabric patches with messages of solidarity. On the website for the quilt, they note: “You don’t have to be an expert quilter. You just need to have a heart, two hands and a few materials to make your square quilt block.”

Knitting initiatives such as Men Can Knit and David Shenton’s Men’s Knitting Group are also happening in community spaces and libraries in the UK, all with the aim of welcoming and encouraging people to take up craft, perhaps for the first time.

The perception of working with textiles as solely a pastime of women is slowly shifting. I hope we can continue to learn from our elders who pioneered weaving, sewing, knitting, crocheting, lacemaking and quilting, to name a few.

But now we can also begin to imagine a world inside and outside of the museum that represents the diversity of crafters today and in the past.

Five years ago, I started a small publishing project called Common Threads Press. Inspired by grassroots publishing histories, I wanted to create a space to tell the stories of craft.

In that time, I’ve read hundreds of book proposals looking at the intersection of craft, community, activism and heritage from people all over the world – from a recent book on embroidery created in incarceration, to upcoming titles on topics as diverse as Hawaiian quilting and Caribbean Carnival costumes, to the history of doilies.

My hope is that our books can extend the lifetime of craft practices by capturing the diverse histories, techniques and cultures that they encompass.

In 2024, there is room for textiles made independently and collaboratively, locally and internationally, expertly and amateurly. Exhibition walls, community spaces and the pages of books are all demonstrating the manifold possibilities for craft to belong in both the home and at protests, and everywhere else in between.

Inside and outside the gallery, textiles contain the multitudes of us all – their strength bolstered by the many hands encouraged to hold them.

Laura Moseley is the founder of Common Threads Press and is the assistant curator at the Women’s Art Collection, Cambridge