Walking through the open doors of the Claremont Lewis Museum of Art, I was immediately confronted by a wall covered in string wrapped around placards of random words. I felt myself gravitate to the white pedestal that held different colored yarn and scissors. Taking red yarn, I began my journey at the word “Let,” not sure where to go next. I kept circling around words, letting the yarn wrap tightly around each one.
I reached the final word, “tangle,” which seemed fitting as when I stepped back, all I saw were tangles of yarn. I could hardly see my own path, but regardless, I remembered each word I securely wrapped it around, “Let the door resist and I tangle.” Unsure of the statement I created, I began to navigate my way into the galleries, letting it marinate in my mind.
In “She Opens the Door: Women Artists and Writers Shape Language and Space,” I was met with poems revolving around artworks, words tangled around images.
Walking into the final gallery, my eyes were caught by a piece made by Adrian Culverson titled “Float.” From the side, I saw layers of stuffed fabric. I turned to look at the front, seeing colors that varied in a range of yellows, pinks, purples and greens. With the slight use of paint, it looked like a cascading waterfall of fabric attached to a single piece of wood hanging on the wall.
As I tried to fully grasp the spectacle in front of me, the line “Let the door resist and I tangle,” reverberated in my mind. In the spirit of the exhibition’s combination of art and poetry, I decided to write a poem comparing “Float” by Adrian Culverson to my experiences sewing.
Rebirth
Reading the headlines feel
as if the world is unraveling and
it is completely out of your control.
Out of pure frustration you pull
stitch after stitch watching and
feeling
you rip apart your own creation.
Trying to right the wrongs yet
it seems to be of no use and
you are stuck with yards of
fabric
in your hands.
But you feel a release of
tension and that
for a moment
you have been rebirthed.
So stitch after stitch
you bring the pieces back together
until
you read the headlines the next day.
With the resurrected abstract creation
in your hands,
history is doomed to repeat.
Culverson grew up in Claremont, and now works as a professor at Citrus College teaching beginning drawing. Her work constantly explores the in-between of the defined spaces in our contemporary world.
“Float” felt like an abstracted creation of the in-between. Visually, it looked like a pillow, one that would be displayed on a couch at home. Yet, it was hung on a wall in a public space. The liminal spaces in her work made me think about our own hidden interior and exterior thoughts formed by binaries.
Our society is filled with imagined binaries — we often construct hierarchies, with mental structures governing how people view each other. Walking through the museum, I was struck by how many of the artists played with these binaries between nontraditional and established mediums of art.
I often think about the binary between craft and art. Throughout history, textile art has been characterized as a form of craft in order to inferiorize women artists and artists of color. Culverson’s use of fabric and paint sits in the middle of craft and art — creating a dialogue between two materials often seen on opposite sides of this binary. She plays with the functionality of the artwork by creating a pillow and displaying it rather than using it. This resists the characterization of craft being only functional and not aesthetically expressive. These notions of craft fail to realize how much power the practice holds.
When I think of the word craft, I often think of my mother, who learned the process of sewing from my grandmother. When I sit in front of a sewing machine, or take a needle and thread, I am reminded of their hands. In my head, sewing has become a very intimate act that carries so much history and empowerment. It has been a way to survive, pass time and resist in my family. This passing down of history around textiles makes it more than just a craft, but a form that continues to live through resistance, and especially through artists such as Culverson.
Soon, the phrase I created at the beginning started to make sense, “Let the door resist and I tangle.” This piece, along with the others, release histories revolving around issues that plague our thinking with binaries, like craft versus art. Culverson’s piece invited me to look deeper through the layers of fabric, to not tangle myself in all of these binaries, but to resist through finding the in-between.
As I walked out of the doors of the museum, I felt kinship with the artists and writers that felt the constant tanglement in the world. They created art and poems that resist those tangles, unraveling them for us to see. I felt like a part of this community, a part of this resistance.
Meiya Rollins PO ’29 believes, like Michelangelo, that art takes time – most of that time being snack breaks and watching “Good Mythical Morning.”
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