Lost Weavings:
Mapping Works, Remnants and Removals
Daniel Graffin’s work in the atrium Mariott Marquis in 1985.
The atrium of the Mariott Marquis Atlanta since 2007.
Lost Weavings
“Lost Weavings” is a public craft history project focusing on Atlanta’s fiber art commissions from the 1970s through the 1990s. A pointed question raised by a student in a textile history course set this research project in motion. In studying the works of such notable figures as Lia Cook, Gerhardt Knodel, and Françoise Grossen, she asked why there were no comparable examples in Atlanta. The question wasn't something that we could readily answer. Our curiosity piqued, we brought it to a local weavers who assured us that there was, in fact, a period of concentrated coordination around the placement of textiles in Atlanta. Their living memory provided the seeds of our research. Innovative, large-scale fiber works once filled lobbies and atriums of the city’s most iconic buildings.
But you won’t see them today. They disappeared, many without a trace, taking the stories of their creators with them. With few exceptions, their fate remains unknown, as do the original circumstances of their production.
“Our project reclaims this chapter in textile history. In rectifying this (ongoing) erasure, we ask: How did these commissions come about? How were they physically integrated into the city's built spaces? How does this local history in Atlanta reveal larger patterns in the field? What does this recovery contribute to textile history in the US?”
Connections
Our project connects a newer generation of artists and scholars to a rapidly disappearing history of contemporary textile production in the US. It contributes a chapter to the growing scholarship on the understudied fiber art movement that parallels recent interest in saving extant site-specific commissions through re-installation in new spaces and museum acquisitions. "Lost Weavings" redresses the inevitable decontextualization these otherwise favorable circumstances create while also recuperating the history of works that have not been preserved and artists whose legacies have been persistently, even systematically neglected. Moreover, our project proposes to make this urgently needed new chapter widely and publicly accessible to a new generation of scholars, students, and artists. This online repository will connect artists, their works, and their production histories to correct and reshape the often superficial topography of online information on these artists, fiber art archives, and Atlanta corporate collections.