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
An unflinching self-portrait.
The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.
In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.
An unflinching self-portrait.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593582503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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