#flagasart

Studio Project #1: Awesome/Terrible Banners!

Our first studio project starts with a site: the fiber studio ceiling above our heads. This is the place where our studio project will be installed as a collaborative installation of individual artworks incorporating each of our individual artistic voices into a collective installation experience.

Inspired by the complexity of translations in a fiber reference from the Bible in Song of Soloman (Song of Solomon 6:10) and the plethora of flag based artwork about identity and culture in recent years by contemporary artists, as a class, we will be creating an installation experience with each of us contributing a flag/banner like work that hangs from the ceiling in the center of our fiber studio space. The challenge for each of us is to create an individual object that works in chorus with other artworks to create a unified installation experience.

What do you want to say in your work? How does your individual artistic voice hope to contribute to the conversations happening in art?

Here are the studio project #1 rules:

1.) You can choose what fabrics (cellulose, protein or synthetic or a combination of these) you use for this project. Your ideas should be the drivers of your material choices.

2.) The fabrics you use for your flag/banner should be primarily dyed and designed by you. You can use any of techniques we have covered and will cover in this class so far. This is not a project about using commercially sourced fabric.*

3.) Your project can include a composition of patched fabrics or can be a single piece of fabric. Use your sewing knowledge to patch together a larger piece of fabric from smaller parts. You can use the sewing machine, hand sew, or a combination of both.

4.) This is a mixed media friendly project. You are encouraged to use surface embellishments in your projects, things like embroidery, beading, sequins, etc. You can also include skills and materials you already have from outside of fiber into your fabric designs (such as photography, design, painting, etc.). Your ideas should be the drivers of your material choices.

5.) Your banner/flag will have 2 sides: one that faces the door of the studio and one that faces the back wall of the studio. Your concept should consider and utilize both sides of your fabrics surface toward meaningful ends.

6.) Your banner/flag should be about some of the ideas of current interest to your work at large. It should serve articulate your own point of view as an artist. Your flag represents you in the larger structure of the installation environment, much like an American flag functions in an international context.

Deadline: Thursday, October 19th. Your project should be installed and ready to discuss together by the beginning of class.

Images above from top:

woven flag project by artist Sonja Clark called “Monumental Cloth: The flag we should all know”

both sides of one of the banners included from the larger installation called  “In the Wake” project by Cauleen Smith for the 2017 Whitney Biennial

artwork by Kimsooja 

film still from 1960s Japanese film “Samuri Banners” 

an image of the women’s March in Washington DC in 2016

an image of one of artist/educator Corita Kent’s annual Mary’s Day parades from the 1960s

historic photo of suffragette protest with banners

an example of a suffragette banner preserved by the Oklahoma Federation of Colored Womens Clubs Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

one major inspiration for our project: the fiber studio site