Dean Kissick in Harper’s Magazine:
My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford and was run over by a bus outside Victoria Station. This was on a Friday morning in early May. The next day, in my apartment in Manhattan, I received an unexpected call—my mother never calls me—from a trauma ward in West London. “I’m in a lot of pain,” she said in a loud, anguished, slurring voice I hardly recognized, “but I’m in very good hands.” A few hours later, I was on a flight home.
When I visited her in the hospital, Mom asked me whether the show was worth losing her legs for. “No,” I told her, though at that point, I hadn’t seen it. When I did, two weeks later, my answer proved correct. Unravel featured tapestries, quilts, needlework, sculptures, and installations by modern artists, the majority of whom were of historically marginalized identities. The curators proposed that textiles themselves had also been marginalized, having been gendered as feminine and regarded as “craft” rather than “fine art.” As a result, the exhibition’s introductory text argued, the more politically radical aspects of textile making had been obscured. “What does it mean to imagine a needle, a loom or a garment as a tool of resistance?” the text asked.
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