Sunday Read: Textiles × Art: How Textiles Are Shaping Contemporary Art

In recent years, textiles have moved decisively from the margins of contemporary art to its very centre. Textiles × Art: How Textiles Are Shaping Contemporary Art, by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson, offers a timely and expansive survey of this shift, tracing how fibre, cloth and thread have become some of the most potent materials through which artists address the complexities of the present moment.

Cover Artwork for Textiles × Art: How Textiles Are Shaping Contemporary Art by Ramona Barry and Beck Jobson

Published by Thames & Hudson and richly illustrated with more than 300 images, the book brings together the work of forty-four artists from across the globe. Rather than positioning textiles as a niche or medium-specific category, Barry and Jobson present cloth as a shared, deeply human language — one that collapses distinctions between art and craft, the personal and the political, tradition and innovation.

The authors begin from a simple but profound premise: textiles are everywhere. From cradle to grave, they shape our environments, bodies and memories. Yet for much of Western art history, textiles were rendered invisible or dismissed as decorative or domestic — categorisations that mirrored broader hierarchies of gender, labour and power. Textiles × Art charts how contemporary artists are actively undoing these legacies, reclaiming textile techniques as tools of resistance, storytelling and critical inquiry...

(...)

Want to read more of this article?
We are proud to be a subscriber-funded publication with members in 185 countries. We know our readership is passionate about textiles, so we invite you to help us preserve and promote the stories, memories, and histories that fabric holds. Your support allows us to publish our magazine, and also ‘what's on’ information, and subscription interviews, reviews, and long-read articles in our online blog. 

ALREADY A SUBSCRIBER? CLICK HERE TO ACCESS CONTENT

Or, to continue reading….


Magazine subscribers automatically get free access to all our online content. We send the access code by email with the publication of each issue. You will also find it on the envelope containing your magazine. Please note the access code changes every issue.

-

Image Credits:

Lead: White Sands, 2018, site-specific installation composed of various textiles, vinyl and thread. Rachel Hayes x Missoni. Photos: Missoni.

All further images as credited in photo captions.