Since the turn of the millennium, woven textiles have experienced renewed interest within contemporary art and design practices. Careful examination of a cloth’s history, structure, and thematic interlacements allows us to better understand their specificity of meaning in the past and their potent capacities for new aesthetics, functions, and embodiments into the future. In this class, students draw inspiration from the lives and work of historic and elder weavers—such as Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Kay Sekimachi—using floor looms to weave cloth influenced by the revolutionary artists who came before. Through woven homages, students are encouraged to challenge, subvert, or exaggerate the techniques and materials seen within historic pieces and intervene through individual creative concerns. Students learn to analyze and draft weave structures by hand, are introduced to digital design in FiberWorks, and experiment with a variety of weaving techniques.

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