An ambitious but overly broad approach to an intriguing set of artistic disciplines.
A survey of the history of women in the textile arts.
Henderson, an art historian who previously wrote a case study in Feminism and Museums: Intervention, Disruption, and Change (2017)and co-authored Great Women Artists(2019),presents readers with a wide-ranging cataloglike survey of women’s work in the textile arts. She starts with a historical survey of textile work from a cross-cultural perspective, beginning with the shift in the perception of embroidery as a domestic activity to a professionalized art. From there, she provides a sweeping look at the many forms and uses of fabric-based art, with chapters on such themes as recycling/upcycling, fashion, and politics, and a significant emphasis on the art’s use in protest and its role in marginalized cultures. Other chapters include interviews with specific artists in the field. Appropriately, the book is full of color and black-and-white photos of the textiles surveyed, from various sources. Henderson’s work looks at a broad swath of societies and traditions related to traditional and nontraditional uses of this highly specific art form, and mostly does a good job placing examples in their historical contexts. Still, there are noticeable omissions; for example, there’s no mention of Jewish textiles, aside from a couple of paragraphs related to the Holocaust and a brief acknowledgement of the “Russian Jewish heritage” of a contemporary textile artist. It also doesn’t address Yemenite Jewish embroidery, which would have had import when talking about the significance of textiles to marginalized groups. Also, its definition of textile arts is so broad, even encompassing cloth-based sculpture, that the focus is not always clear. Still, this book is likely to accomplish its purpose of getting more readers to take textiles seriously as a form of expression.
An ambitious but overly broad approach to an intriguing set of artistic disciplines.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-913641-15-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Supernova Books
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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