(via Francisco Mora at Davidson Galleries)

Franciso Mora, Educandose [Educating each other]. Linocut, 1971.

The son of a weaver and a musician, Mexican artist Francisco Mora was born in 1922 and educated in the southwestern state of Michoacán. In 1941, he relocated to Mexico City where he began exhibiting with the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a graphics workshop that built on Mexico’s rich tradition of printmaking in order to further a variety of revolutionary political and social causes. …

Accomplished as both a painter and printmaker, Francisco Mora is best known for his gritty, poignant graphic works depicting the daily lives of miners and other laborers in Mexico’s working class.

Exhibition presents African history you can wear

I’m also reading the booklet produced to accompany the linked art exhibition, Walala Wasala: The Fabric of African Politics. It’s about the textile industry in various African nations, focussing on the popular use of political art prints for everyday wear.

Something noticable in the exhibition’s media and booklet - additional to the amazing prints - is that the artists, curators & academics involved all refer to the art as something for “daily life”.

From the Wollongong Gallery opening addressing:

“We [The African people] don’t do art only on a piece of paper, our hairstyles are art. Our art is to do with our practical day to day living. It is used as clothing, for carrying children and as a cover from the cold.”

Which is refreshing to hear.

Textile artists tend to suffer in status from ideas about Real Art being conceptual art, being something categorically different from any object created for practical use. Fine Art especially being applied only to objects or performances existing purely for the artist’s expression [and art markets cultural capital trading].

There’s been more acceptance of textile works in art media or galleries lately. But even in textile art exhibitions - abstract works, and purely expressive works gain more recognition as fine art than anything associated with domestic or everyday use.  

Duchamp puts a toilet seat in a gallery > Dadaists declare themselves anti-art >  Makes it art > Clever.

Textile artists apply considerable technical skills > Incorporate whole range of conceptual, political themes within works > Use finished works in the home, for their child, in traditional practical ways > Stuck in the craft, womens’ work, multiculturalism and history exhibits > Bummer. 

Yeah, OK a loooot of textile artists are really happy to be associated with craft movements or reviving traditional arts, but status and income wise those are still the dork seats in the playground compared to fine art.

This refers to multiculturalism to, but at least it doesn’t impose the false seperation of works applied to the body + everyday utility vs. art.