Nathan Vincent. Locker Room, 2011 (installation view); 144 x 228 in. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Stephen Miller.

The terms “queer” and “craft” have both been reclaimed by their communities to dislodge disparaging and ghettoizing stereotypes (in considering the reclamation of terms historically associated with marginalized communities into ones of agency and empowerment, I am indebted to L.J. Roberts’ article, “Put Your Thing Down, Flip It and Reverse It: Re-imaging Craft Identities Using Queer Theory”).[1] “Queer” became employed as a term of agency and empowerment in the 1980s, embraced for its ability to recognize a wide and fluid range of sexual identifications, and for shedding the associations with which the term “gay” was saddled at the height of the AIDS crisis. “Queer” is by nature ambiguous, rejecting simplistic heteronormative labels and systems. Likewise, in the early 2000s, the field of craft was in dire need of reclamation. Connotations of craft as amateurish, hobbyist, traditionally feminine, or conceptually empty spurred several major art institutions to drop the term from their official title. In 2002, the Bay Area art school California College of Arts and Crafts became just California College of the Arts, despite the institution’s deep history with the Arts and Crafts movement. In 2003, the American Craft Museum in New York became the Museum of Arts and Design. These very public dissociations from the word “craft” have prompted a new generation of craft activists and theorists to fight against craft’s second-class status in visual culture. New terms like “critical craft” or “contemporary craft” are being employed to shape a new progressive discourse around the medium.

Consideration of these fields’ analogous backgrounds of repression and reclamation underscores why craft can be so advantageous in articulating queer experiences and queer identities. Disidentification, a queer theoretical tactic, is about the “recycling and rethinking of encoded meaning.”[2] Craft has been burdened with a host of gendered and disempowering assumptions, but these assumptions become assets in the hands of artists aimed at exposing essentializing and exclusionary cultural messages about identity, sexuality, and desire.

LJ Roberts. The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout During the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era, 2011; Poly-fill, acrylic, rayon, Lurex, wool, polyster, cotton lame, sequins, and blended fabrics. 138 x 114 x 108 in. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Photo: The Smithsonian American Art Museum.

For Queer Threads, artist Nathan Vincent created Locker Room (2011), a life-size installation of a men’s locker room made entirely out of crocheted yarn. This site, loaded with heteronormative machismo and a history of vulnerability and exposure for queer bodies, is now completely covered with the ultra-feminine handicraft of crochet. The clever mixing of references dismantles the stability and validity of both sets of gendered assumptions.

Melanie Braverman’s piece, titled Queer (date), is a handmade patchwork quilt embroidered with a series of queer terms. Words like “top,” “pussy,” and “fag” are carefully embroidered in the palest of pink silk ribbon. The quilt itself is small and delicate, conjuring up a girlish childhood item of comfort and protection. The text on top raises both the queer notions of being “born this way” and the enculturation of gender norms inescapable in childhood. The quilt can thus fluctuate between acting as a metaphor for the “blanket” conventions of gender that society and parents enforce on children, and the experience of knowing at a young age one’s own dissonance from such conventions.

Sheila Pepe. Your Granny’s Not Square, 2008; crocheted shoelaces and yarn. 72 x 144 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Also invested in working with familial allusions is the artist Sheila Pepe, whose Your Granny’s Not Square (2008) is a clever play on the granny-square crochet technique and a reference to the grandmotherly associations tied to the medium. Pepe also directly references her own family in her material choice, using shoelaces in addition to yarn as a nod to her father, who was a shoemaker.  She seeks to position the work formally and theoretically with seminal fiber works by Eva Hesse and Faith Wilding, putting herself in conversation with the history of textiles in feminist art practices. She is literally interweaving her personal history within a larger network of craft-specific art history.

Similarly concerned with a forging of new queer connections is the artist LJ Roberts, whose work, The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Brueklen, Boswyck, and Midwout During the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era (2011), is a vibrant assemblage of  knitting, embroidery, and quilting that documents queer collectives in Brooklyn. Making reference to both the AIDS quilt and ACT UP iconography, it aligns itself with a lineage of queer advocacy. Its DIY aesthetic, overwhelming scale, and the detail of the work are ripe for examining the effort and endurance required to make new safe spaces for the queer community. It is an archive of the new families that are built in an enduring quest for belonging.

Queer Threads is a thoughtful record of the ongoing conversation between queer theoretical investments and critical craft theory. It also accentuates a shared potency between craft and queer thought: the ability to articulate difference and even flexibility within their own labels. As the art historian Julia Bryan Wilson has said, “Craft objects, like queer desires, are multiple….they refuse to be any one thing.”[3] The works in this show epitomize this ability to oscillate in their meaning. They underscore the strength of critical frameworks that disavow overdetermined and essentializing expectations, and thus make space for a richer multiplicity of identities, practices, and interpretations.

Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community is on view at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art through March 16, 2014.

[1] L.J. Roberts, “Put Your Thing Down, Flip It, and Reverse It: Re-Imaging Craft Identities Using Queer Theory,” in Extra/Ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Elena Buszek (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011).

[2] Jose Esteban Munoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pg 30-31.

[3] Julia Bryan Wilson, “Queerly Made: Harmony Hammons Floorpieces,” The Journal of Modern Craft,Volume 2, Issue 1 (March 2009): pg 59-80.

Today from our partners at Art Practical we bring you an essay on the New York-based LTTR, who describe themselves as “a feminist genderqueer artist collective with a flexible project-oriented practice.” As author Julia Bryan-Wilson notes, “…LTTR rallies people together with ardent enthusiasm.” This article was originally published on December 4, 2013.

LTTR. Cover of “Listen Translate Translate Record,” no. 2; August 2003; edition of 1000; 12.5 x 12.5 in, folded. Silka Sanchez. Untitled, 2003. Courtesy of LTTR.

“It is our promiscuity that will save us,” AIDS activist and art theorist Douglas Crimp asserted in 1987, a time often marked by the brutal vilification of gay sex, when a devastating health crisis was portrayed in the media as punishment for pleasure. Crimp defied this moralism by arguing that gay men’s sexual flexibility might help them adapt to safer sex strategies. While the AIDS crisis continues, albeit cushioned for some by the effects of life-extending drugs, it is nevertheless difficult to render Crimp’s claim intelligible today. The value of promiscuity considered literally, as Crimp did, seems impossible to imagine given the profound conservatism of much of the contemporary gay and lesbian movement. (The terms of public discourse have changed, clearly, when debates focus on the participation of gays in the institutions of marriage and the military.) Gay couples have perhaps become more tolerated in U.S. society, but other queer practices and community formations have arguably become more limited. Given the current, narrow visions of queerness, there are still lessons to be learned from Crimp’s promotion of openness and diverse encounters.

An embrace of a kind of promiscuity, then, has driven the New York–based collective LTTR from the outset. LTTR is a shifting acronym; it started in 2001 as “Lesbians to the Rescue”—a superhero slogan if there ever was one—and has since stood for phrases ranging from “Lacan Teaches to Repeat” to “Let’s Take the Role.” Just as the words behind its initials are variable, so too are its membership and output. Founded by Ginger Brooks Takahashi and K8 Hardy, LTTR has been joined by Emily Roysdon and Ulrike Müller; all four have ongoing individual practices as artists, videomakers, writers, and/or performers, and they frequently participate in other artistic and activist projects. (Lanke Tattersall was also an editor for the fourth issue.) While LTTR began as a collectively edited and produced journal, the group now also organizes screenings, exhibitions, performances, read-ins, and workshops. The original phrase “Lesbians to the Rescue” suggests that someone, or something, needs to be saved (the phrase is missing only an exclamation point to drive home its campy urgency)—and it is clear from the excited, even libidinal ethos of its projects that LTTR sees this redemption as rooted in desire.

Read the full article here.