Domestic Aesthetics: Textiles and the Museum at Home

Grant Johnson

I propose to speak on my experience as a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of Art, particularly the creative expansion of my role via Zoom. The extended closures enacted last spring around the world and ongoing limitations continue to reshape our access to museums, their collections, and the communities they encourage. Not all bad, new ways of working and connecting have encouraged us to re-imagine where and how a‘museum’ experience occurs. Meditating on the lessons afforded by my experience of making the museum at home, I will focus on the program I devised specifically for this new remote format. Entitled, ‘Domestic Aesthetics,’ it proposed the handful of textiles in the Whitney’s permanent collection (including a quilt by Rosie Lee Tompkins and a sculpture by Marie Watt) and depictions of them (in painting by Charles Sheeler or photography by LaToya Ruby Frazier) as prompts for appreciating the aesthetic experience afforded already by the environment of our own homes. Considering these textiles, I propose, connects us to the experience of the otherwise remote museum while also reminding us how objects describe our connection to others,encouraging a sense of escape from any moment of apparent isolation.

The Center for Knit and Crochet: Digital Strategies for Preserving and Sharing Our Knitting & Crochet Histories

Jennifer Lindsay

Creators of textiles from home can find inspiration from the Center for Knit and Crochet (“CKC”), www.centerforknitandcrochet.org, a breakthrough nonprofit digital archive and museum, established in 2012 and dedicated to collecting, preserving, studying, exhibiting, and appreciating knitting, crochet,and related arts. Central to CKC’s vision is elevating these under served, understudied textiles by providing open access to knit and crochet objects and archival materials from public and private sources. In 2018, CKC launched its Library and Museum Collections (via DPLA) and its Crowdsourced Collection. Individuals, private collectors, and craft communities can use CKC’s Crowdsourced Collection to upload and share knit and crochet treasures hidden in their closets and drawers, preserving them in situ, and encouraging local appreciation for these objects and their stories. Global searches in CKC’s collections allow makers, their families, scholars, collectors, museum professionals, and the public to view these objects side by side with objects from museums and archives for the first time, whether for research or inspiration. By democratizing access to public and private collections and to online preservation tools, CKC centers makers’ skills and knowledge in how their craft histories are preserved, studied, interpreted, and exhibited. Jennifer Lindsay, CKC President, will discuss how craft-centric organizations like CKC can encourage collaboration and mutual respect among stakeholders, catalyze new preservation efforts, and offer opportunities to redress persistent inequities of representation. Jennifer will also hold a tutorial to help conference attendees add their own knit and crochet treasures and stories to CKC’s Crowdsourced Collection.