Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

String, Felt, Thread presents an unconventional history of the American art world, chronicling the advance of thread, rope, string, felt, and fabric from the "low" world of craft to the "high" world of art in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence today of a craft counterculture. In this full-color illustrated volume, Elissa Auther discusses the work of American artists using fiber, considering provocative questions of material, process, and intention that bridge the art-craft divide.

Drawn to the aesthetic possibilities and symbolic power of fiber, the artists whose work is explored here-Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Claire Zeisler, Miriam Schapiro, Faith Ringgold, and others-experimented with materials that previously had been dismissed for their associations with the merely decorative, with "arts and crafts," and with "women's work." In analyzing this shift and these exceptional artists' works, Auther engages far-reaching debates in the art world: What accounts for the distinction between art and craft? Who assigns value to these categories, and who polices the boundaries distinguishing them?

String, Felt, Thread not only illuminates the centrality of fiber to contemporary artistic practice but also uncovers the social dynamics-including the roles of race and gender-that determine how art has historically been defined and valued.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Auther (Univ. of Colorado at Colorado Springs) chronicles fiber artists' successful efforts to elevate the longtime low status of fiber as a medium, beginning in the 1960s. In three case studies, she debates the hierarchy of fine art that designated work in fiber as women's work, connected to utility. She begins with MoMA's Wall Hangings exhibition in 1969, which introduced mostly nonwoven and large-scale work by Lenore Tawney, Claire Zeisler, Sheila Hicks, and others, as pieces of art. Even though the exhibition broke ground for an autonomous genre of work constructed of fiber, separate from utilitarian textiles and work produced by amateurs, it was received lukewarmly by the larger world of art. In her second comparative case study, Auther discusses the work of Robert Morris and Eva Hesse, who employed felt and rope in process art and postminimalism, with their acknowledged high art status. Finally, she discusses feminists' politicization of fiber-based art, aesthetically distinct from professional fiber artists' work, which challenged the hierarchy of media, linking it to the social status of gender and race. This valuable, thorough volume includes numerous illustrations, notes, and an extensive bibliography. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. M. Tulokas Rhode Island School of Design

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Elissa Auther is associate professor of contemporary art at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.