I Dream a World, 2016
Fiber, Dimensions variable, Commission: Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art at the Enclave, New York City
The School of Visual Arts will be hosting a virtual workshop about knotting and weaving with upcycled materials on September 25, 2020 at 12 PM EST. This workshop is part of their annual symposium about art and activism. I’m planning to check in during my lunch break, hopefully you can make it!
Free registration on Eventbrite
This reminds me of an exhibition that was on display at the Museum of Art and Design in New York in 2018, Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft & Care. Founded by Aguiñiga and launched in 2015, AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides) is a long-term, initiative involving sites leveraging collaborative art-making and storytelling projects to share the experience of people living and working across the US/Mexico border. One of their projects involved the making of quipus, a traditional, pre-Columbian system of recording history through the tying of knots. Commuters crossing the border were asked to represent their feelings at the time of the crossing by tying knots in two strands of thread. The collection of these threads are then displayed, showing the collective experiences of those crossing the border. Learn more about the Border Quipu
Contemporary artist Cecilia Vicuña creates textile artwork from a variety of materials. She calls these works “precarios,” referring to an unstable and ephemeral nature, and “basuritas,” referring to discarded items and debris. She too uses the quipu as a form in her artwork, referencing “ancient spiritual technologies—a knowledge of the power of individual and communal intention to heal us and the earth.” Here, the knots of the quipu may refer to the interwoven and complex nature of relationships, the interwined energies of the cosmos, or even the process of synthesizing the “threads of personality” (Ronnberg & Martin, 2010, p. 516).