BFATextiles

Explore the interdisciplinary potential of textiles and material thinking

One of the oldest aesthetic traditions in the world, textiles are currently on the cutting edge of contemporary art practice and critical inquiry. Artists working in interdisciplinary zones are picking up cloth and thread to incorporate the discipline’s creative and conceptual potential.

Join an internationally recognized program

With a reputation for cutting-edge work, our internationally recognized Textiles program teaches you to think beyond the crafted object. Compared to other programs in the United States, our courses are topic-driven, designed to build technical skill, while promoting critical thinking, research, and problem-solving. Students are encouraged to investigate relevant issues such as the social and environmental implications of mass production, analyze the gendering of work, and interrogate systemic forms of oppression. Contemporary critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory, and slow methodologies aid in our inquiry to understand the shape of an innovative and relevant textiles practice today.

Equal parts analog and digital, our state-of-the-art studios are designed to foster a range of applications: experimental, functional, and industrial. Planar and linear forms of textile construction and surface manipulation—including low and high tech weaving, hand and screen printing, natural and chemical dyeing, spinning, stitching, felt-making, knitting, crocheting, embroidery, and basketry—provide the backbone of our curriculum. As you refine your technical and conceptual skills, you’ll develop a distinctive artistic voice and build a body of work that culminates in a senior exhibition.

Encouraging open dialogue and critique

As a way to nourish critical conversations around textile history, theory, and practice, the Textiles seminar room functions as the hive of our close-knit community. Lively lectures, discussions, and critiques within the classroom provide the intellectual backbone to our making-intensive curriculum. The seminar space also doubles as the Fiber Sculpture Studio, where students are encouraged to harness the social and political implications of hand-work in such courses as Knitting It All Together, Darn It, and Hand Tech. These courses harness the potential to discuss culturally relevant issues through traditional forms of handwork and embellishment.

Chair Deborah Valoma’s hybrid practice integrates making, research, and writing to investigate textiles as signifiers of identity and agents of cultural continuity. She’s developed a series of courses that interrogate textile culture through theoretical lenses, including colonization, cultural appropriation, and gender- and race-based hierarchies of value. Valoma has written articles and catalogue essays; curated exhibitions; and published the book Scrape the Willow Until It Sings, which traces the Indigenous thinking and making of Julia Parker, the premier Native American basket weaver in California.

Valoma is currently working on a multi-year interdisciplinary project that began when she inventoried a collection of textiles inherited from her grandmother—many made by her Armenian foremothers in Ottoman Turkey villages. A combination of research, archiving, and responsive making, The Armenian Postmemory Project addresses the role textiles play in cultural survival in the diaspora.