Anna Dumont
Art, Craft, Industry, Housework: Gendered Labor and Italian Textile Production, 1870–1945

As Italian society was remade by industrialization and national unification in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the question of what kind of work women were doing as they produced lace, woven fabrics, carpets, and tapestries became a consistent preoccupation of critics, artists, politicians, and activists. At the cutting edge of aesthetic modernity, and economically crucial to the fledgling Italian state, textile work emerged as a paradigmatic form of women’s labor. This talk presents work in progress, tracing debates over what kind of work women making textiles were doing, from the post-unification lace revival in Venice and Bologna to Fascist interventions in the textile industry during the ventennio of the twenties and thirties.

Anna Dumont is the Lily Auchincloss Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University.

Sara Enrico
Drape, Draped, Draping

Drape, Draped, Draping plays around different declinations of a term, as an open action to investigate the multiplicity and intertwine of semantic effects, from certain pictorial paradigms to considering the fold as a generative tool, in the relation between the surfaces and their contexts.

Sara Enrico’s work examines the concept of “weaving” in the material and figurative planes, and as a conceptual process, such as the combination and translation of different media. She observes the connections between the body, clothing, and space through experimentation with textile or industrial materials and through manual and digital processes. As a physical and linguistic system, her work interprets reality by experiencing “tactile proximity.”

The Turin-based artist Sara Enrico is the Fondazione Sviluppo e Crescita CRT Italian Fellow in Visual Arts and a lecturer in the Department of Painting/Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Art in Bergamo.

The shoptalks will be held in English.