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Angela Hennessy
b. 1971, USA
Mourning Weave
2014
Woven velcro, velvet fuzz, and frame
Courtesy of Part 2 Gallery, Oakland, CA
As living objects, textiles can reveal a great deal about how humans cope with loss and absence, across time and place. Drawing primarily on textile objects from the Textiles collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition explores physical, psychic, spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic responses to various kinds of losses and absences. The exhibition will display objects of corporeal and psychological loss, mourning, and trauma; together with objects of resistance, survival, healing and recuperation. These will include burial shrouds, mourning and mending samplers, funerary hangings and garments, coffin covers, and fragments. The exhibition will be organized spatially and conceptually around themes of death, reflection, passage, trauma, memory/memorial, survival, resistance, conservation/preservation, and healing.
The collaborative exhibition project “On Loss & Absence: Textiles of Mourning & Survival” between artists / educators connected to the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute — Anne Wilson, Nneka Kai, Isaac Facio and L Vinebaum will be in view in the Textile Galleries at the Art Institute of Chicago the 6th of September 2025 through the 15th of March 2026.
Carina Yepez
b. 1985, USA
Mujeres/Women
2023
Made in collaboration with auntie Mari (auntie) and Lula (mom) and in gratitude to Amalia M. Herrera from La Haciendita, Guanajuato, Mexico
Cotton and synthetic fabrics; printed; appliquéd; quilted and machine embroidered
Collection of the artist
Over the years that we have been working on the Loss and Absence project, it has been very touching to hear the stories, anecdotes, and ideas that these words, loss and absence, conjure for others based on their own experiences – be it a childhood memory, or something related to their work or profession. Most interesting are the varied avenues of conversation as we find solace in one another's discoveries, and triumphs through those moments.
"I try to grasp onto anything that I've lost over the years. I've tried to grasp onto people who I've lost, whether that be through distance or death, I want to hold onto them. When they inevitably slip through my fingers, I revert to a time I've lost a little less, my childhood, though through constant exploration of that, I've lost many things & people then, too. Whether it be a loss of a house, a relative or innocence as a whole..."
-Anonymous, 2024
"I wear my mother’s clothes a lot. After she died her clothes were packed up, but I took them out because I knew they wouldn’t be missed. I took them because in a very tangible sense there is a lot of her left in them. The memories that were once shared between me and my mom are now shared between me and garments that I took out of bins, from a closet they were meant to be forgotten in..."
-Camilla, 2023
Tell us your stories!
Tell us your stories!
What is loss and absence? What words, memories, ideas and concepts do these words mean for you from life experience, your line of work, or other connections?
Please add your thoughts and stories. Include links to music, lecture(s), podcast(s) or video(s) that resonate with you to be added to the playlists below.
Thank you!
Check us out on Instragram for more updates!
@IG_Loss & Absence
@IG_MicroMacroSAIC
@FMS_SAIC.EDU
Bibliography
Bibliography
BOOKS
Clavir, Miriam. Preserving What Is Valued: Museums, Conservation, and First Nations. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008.
Flecker, Lara. A Practical Guide to Costume Mounting. London: Routledge, 2013.
Landi, Sheila. The Textile Conservator’s Manual . London: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997.
Lennard, Frances, Patricia Ewer, and Laura Mina, eds. Textile conservation: Advances in Practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2024.
Richmond, Alison, and Alison Bracker, eds. Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths. Abgington, Oxforshire: Routledge, 2020.
Tishman, Shari. Slow looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation. New York, NY: Routledge, 2018.
EXHIBITIONS
Gala Porras-Kim: Precipitation for an Arid Landscape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 14 February 2022 - June 30 2022
Well/Being: An Exhibition on Healing and Repair. Albany, NY: University Art Museum, August 4 2021 - 11 December 2021
Less Than Perfect. Ann Arbor, MA: University of Michigan, 2016-2017
EXHIBITION GUIDE
Cloth That Stretches: Weaving Community Across Time and Space. Berkeley, CA: Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, 13 February 2020 - 21 June 2020.
Traces of Displacement. Manchester: the Whitworth, 7 April 2023-12 May 2024.
SOUND
Belli, Olivia. Daguérrotype: 2 Juliette (acoustic instrumental), YouTube, 2019.
Jones, Tom. I Won’t Crumble With You If You Fall (Live from Real World Studios), YouTube, 2021.
Santiago, Felipe Perez. Cicatrice, Soundcloud, 2012.
ARTICLES
Bean, Susan S. “Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Indian Independence.” Essay. In Cloth and Human Experience, 355–76. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
Goggin, Maureen Daly. “Suturing a Wounded Body—Wounded Mind in Red Silk on White Linen: Embodied and Hand(y) Knowledge of Trauma.” Linguaculture 2012, no. 1 (January 1, 2012). https://doi.org/10.2478/v10318-012-0016-4.
Holly, Michael Ann. “Mourning and Method.” The Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2002): 660–69. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177289.
Holm, Christiane. “Sentimental Cuts: Eighteenth-Century Mourning Jewelry with Hair.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 139–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30053632.
Lutz, Deborah. “THE DEAD STILL AMONG US: VICTORIAN SECULAR RELICS, HAIR JEWELRY, AND DEATH CULTURE.” Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (2011): 127–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41307854.
Renken, Sophie. “The Performativity of Hair in Victorian Mourning Jewellery.” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, June 4, 2021.
Sheumaker, Helen. “‘This Lock You See’: Nineteenth-Century Hair Work as the Commodified Self.” Fashion Theory 1, no. 4 (November 1997): 421–45. https://doi.org/10.2752/136270497779613620.
Smith, Rachel. “Eighteenth Century Objects of Grief: Beyond the Mourning Ring.” New Directions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art, October 29, 2021. https://ndenca.wordpress.com/blog-2/.
WEBSITES
Carr, Karen. “Why Visiting a Museum Is Like Seeing My Friends in Jail.” Hyperallergic, July 20, 2021. https://hyperallergic.com/661952/why-visiting-a-museum-is-like-seeing-my-friends-in-jail/.
Ramos, Sam. “Why Connecting Legal and Medical Professionals to Art Is Essential.” Hyperallergic, August 24, 2021. https://hyperallergic.com/671020/why-connecting-legal-and-medical-professionals-to-art-is-essential/.
Suttie, Jill. “How Small Moments of Empathy Affect Your Life.” Greater Good, August 31, 2021. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_small_moments_of_empathy_affect_your_life.
Umolu, Yesomi. “On the Limits of Care and Knowledge: 15 Points Museums Must Understand to Dismantle Structural Injustice.” Artnet News, June 25, 2020. https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/limits-of-care-and-knowledge-yesomi-umolu-op-ed-1889739.
Yancy, George. “Death Has Many Names .” The New York Times , February 14, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/opinion/Yoruba-religion-death.html.
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