Winfred Rembert Beyond Memory

Chain Gang Picking Cotton, 2001.

DH, friends Alex and Robin, and I recently viewed an exhibit of paintings by Winfred Rembert at the Danforth Museum, a community art resource in Framingham, Massachusetts.  Mr. Rembert, an artist of color born in Georgia in 1945, experienced the horrors of growing up in the Jim Crow south and, in the aftermath of an arrest during a civil rights protest,  found himself sentenced to a chain gang for seven years.  While in prison he also learned to tool and work with leather. Several years after his release, he married Patsy Gammage, who encouraged him to tell his personal history in the medium in which he was already expert - carved and dyed leather. 

This material has a slight sheen, hence the bit of glare in my amateur photography, but the glare at least serves to highlight the richness and detail of the low relief carving.

In the images of chain gangs picking cotton, there is a wrenching contrast between the almost choreographic deployment of men, all in cinematic black-and-white stripes, and the reality of back-breaking, mind-numbing work.  An article about another exhibit of Mr. Rembert's work relates that men of color received heavy sentences for misdemeanors and so were over-represented in the stripe-wearing chain gangs.

In the Ditch, 2005.

Throughout his work, Mr. Rembert records costume - apparel and accessories - as a marker of status and social order, from prison garb to work clothes to Saturday-night finery, but it is the striped convict uniforms that seize the viewer's attention.  In his book The Devil's Cloth, historian Michel Pastoureau explains the origins of the convict's stripes:

The Devil's Cloth begins with a medieval scandal.  When the first Carmelites arrived in France from the Holy Land, the religious order required its members to wear striped habits, prompting  turmoil and denunciations in the West that lasted fifty years until the order was forced to accept a quiet, solid color.  The medieval eye found any surface in which a background color could not be distinguished from a foreground disturbing. Thus, striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order - jugglers and prostitutes, for example - and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often depicted wearing stripes.  The West has long continued to dress its slaves and servants, its crewmen and convicts in stripes. - Michel Pastoureau

Picking Cotton with Boss Men, 2007-8.

The Georgia convicts wear a uniform, but the blue-clad mounted guards do too -  only the horses register as individuals in the undulating, endless white and brown sea of cotton bolls. 

Loading Cotton, 2009.

Mr. Rembert began picking cotton at age six. His depiction of farm laborers reaching the end of a row of cotton shows sharecroppers dressed in work attire made from the material they are harvesting. The scene is less benign, though, than the period trucks, colorful clothes and hats might indicate, as agricultural workers were exploited in the sharecropping system.

Loading Cotton, detail.

The Mud Hole, 1996.

Other paintings capture episodes throughout Mr. Rembert's life: wearing a flowing white robe during his river baptism, an animated church service with men in black suits and women in their Sunday frills, and men after work, milling about in casual, Breugel-like groupings that form a contrast to the regimented rows of workers depicted in the chain gang and cotton-picking scenes.  At work, people are regimented in appearance and in action; at play, they decide what to wear and where to go.

Hungry Eye, 1998.

Nowhere is the freedom afforded by recreation more evident than in the wonderful depiction of a hot night spot, the Hungry Eye, where each man and woman flaunts his or her individuality in dress and demeanor.  Hats, neckties, necklines, rows of buttons and other fashion details are all lovingly depicted, and there is not a stripe in sight.

Hungry Eye, details.

There is a recent independent film about Mr. Rembert, All Me: the Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, whose work is important for both its historical and artistic merit.

Color Revolution - 1960's fashion

Exhibition title.

I caught the last day of a small but fun exhibit, Color Revolution, at Lowell's American Textile History Museum. On display from September 14, 2013, until January 26, 2014, the display featured yardage, clothing, accessories as well as publications, such as Vogue, Seventeen and the trade magazine American Fabrics.

I felt every year my age, as I recognized some of the fabrics and fashions from that era, when I was busy surviving middle school, grades 6 - 8 in the American educational system. Back then, girls took home economics  - shortened to "home ec" - and boys took shop class. My formidable home ec teacher, Mrs. Bowen, whose girdle gave her excellent posture, led us through the basics of cooking and sewing.  Home ec, a casualty of a number of cultural and fiscal forces, later morphed into something called "consumer science," enrolling both boys and girls.  There was something to be said for making sure that young people, on whatever educational track, knew the basics of clothing construction, nutrition and how to feed themselves.

Pantsuit, yardage and caftan.

During the time covered by this exhibit my public school system allowed girls to wear trousers to school for the first time, but trouser-wearing women were not welcome everywhere. According to guest curator, Madelyn Shaw, the pink pantsuit in the image above allowed the wearer, if refused seating in a restaurant, say, to retreat to the ladies' room, remove the offending trousers and re-enter the restaurant sporting just the tunic top, now considered a mini-dress.  The bonded rayon pantsuit, designed by Suzy Perrette, was manufactured in New York, and this show is also an elegy to American clothing manufacturing.

Dresses, tennis outfit and yardage.

In the image above, the short pique dress that is second from the right was donated by the curator herself, and made in 1967, using a commercial pattern. Until 1986 the Bureau of Labor Statistics included home sewing as part of our gross domestic product, and this is reflected in the fact that quite a few items in the display were created by home seamstresses. Set-in sleeves were a bit of a challenge for the home stitcher, but otherwise the simple lines of popular A-line and sheath styles were easy to sew. The visual interest came from the eye-catching colors and patterns.

As you can see on the wall behind the garments above, the exhibit was organized by contemporary, color-related song titles, which continuously looped, giving an aural dimension to the display. Since I grew up near Detroit, the sound-track of my adolescence was of course Motown; I did the dishes while listening to the Supremes on the kitchen radio.

Center, 1969 dress by Geoffrey Beene. 

The hard-to-miss solid yellow dress in the image above was donated by Helen Delich Bentley, a former US representative from Maryland and an expert on maritime affairs. Yellow is now a step-child of the fashion world, but it is a color that demands attention and makes the presence of its wearer hard to ignore.

Left: Leo Narducci outfit. Right: dress of aluminized polyester film.

The allure of pleats stretches (pun intended) from the early 20th-century neo-classical dresses of Fortuny to the "PleatsPlease" line by Issey Miyake and the suit in the image above forms a link between the two.  Synthetic fibers, like the polyester used in the suit above, were viewed as time-savers for working women, as, unlike silk, synthetics could be machine-washed and, unlike cotton, did not need ironing.

The exhibit also tracked the dead-end trend of throwaway fashion, exemplified by paper dresses and gimmicky clothes like the "aluminum" gown above, produced by General Fabrics of Marion, Ohio, as a marketing tool for the makers of Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil.

While the aluminum dress is an artifact, the fashionista can still purchase dresses by now-iconic Marimekko company, begun by a husband-and-wife team in Finland, and popularized in this country by the retailer Design Research. Marimekko translates, roughly, as "Mary's little dress."

Marimekko dress in multiple colorways.

The heavy cotton fabric for these intensely-colored dresses was silk-screened, which brings us to an interesting observation.  This bright color palette was available, in silk-screen inks used on cotton and linen at any rate, in the early 1950's. Although textile color chemistry for synthetic fibers may have lagged behind a bit, there was plenty of eye-popping, even "psychedelic," color in the 1950's. So, colors we often associate with the 1960's were available a decade earlier.  For example, Tammis Keefe (1913 - 1960) designed fashion accessories and domestic linens in saturated, vivid colors during her career.

What then was the impetus for the explosion of boldly-colored, large-scale floral, paisley and abstract prints for apparel?  The exhibit hints at some of the influences - textiles designers had greater exposure to the culture and colors of exotic locales, such as India and even Hawaii, the origin of some of the garments on display.  Carnaby Street, Scandinavian designers, costume for color television and live performance would all have had an impact, too.

Left: dress by Jorot Creations, Paris, c. 1962.

Some of the personal stories associated with the garments are quite moving.  The long dress at the left in the image above was lent by Cynthia Ehrenkrantz, whose late husband, architect Ezra Ehrenkrantz, always took her measurements with him when he travelled, so he could order something made especially for Cynthia, such as this tri-acetate knit confection from Paris.

Pant-dress and swimsuit with cover-up.

While some of the apparel on display could be worn today, the majority of the garments are very much "of their time," such as the sleeveless outfit on the left, above, wide-legged trousers with tiered layers beneath a sashed tunic top.  It's a bit ambiguous whether it's a dress or a pantsuit, but the print and coloration are most assertive.  In the curatorial remarks for this dress, Ms. Shaw tactfully quotes Dorothy Liebes (1897 - 1972), a noted textile designer, "There are no bad colors, just bad color combinations."

Accessories, including scarf by Vera.

Blouse, Emilio Pucci, mid-1960's.

 
The exhibit includes items by Emilio Pucci and Vera Neumann, but, somewhat surprisingly,  I didn't notice anything by Lilly Pulitzer, who founded her eponymous company in 1959, producing clothing, in bright floral prints, that was very popular, at least in warm weather, for many women in the mid-Western suburb in which I grew up.

Center: Dress by Lanz.

The dress in the center, above, was, as noted by curator Shaw, clearly related to the style of artists such as Peter Max, but also, I think, to album covers and images such as Milton Glaser's 1966 Bob Dylan poster.  In this long garment areas of flat color ooze and puddle in a bright print so busy it's hard to determine the repeat of the pattern.

Indeed, with these large scale prints the observer loses comprehension of the fabric as having any repeat at all  - the dress is  more like a canvas for a single motif, with perhaps a partial repeat at best.  In addition, although the commercially-made dresses were factory-produced, due to the over-size scale of the fabric design, each garment would have had the printed design placed in a unique way once the garment was constructed.  It's as if the nonconformity trumpeted by the age demanded that even factory-made clothing be individualistic.

As one of the exhibit-related activities, scholar Regina Lee Blaszczyk spoke about her latest book, The Color Revolution (ISBN 978-0-262-0177-0) I didn't make it to the lecture, but I look forward to reading the book.

Knit, Purl, Sow - Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Eastern Parkway Entrance, Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Detail, entrance gate, and possible floral inspiration.

During a retreat by the Polar Vortex, which has had the US Eastern Seaboard in an icy grip, DH and I took in an unusual exhibit at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG). Knit, Purl, Sow was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, putting knitting on the map in a way this fiber medium seldom is, sadly.  The BBG was one of the few cultural institutions open on Martin Luther King, Jr., day and, better still, admission was free.

Tatyana Yanishevsky, Anatomically Correct Hibiscus.

The exhibit, which ran from October, 2013 until January, 2014. was presented in the atrium space of the Steinhardt Conservatory, a rather heavy-handed piece of architecture, but home to the BBG's own Terrace Cafe, where we enjoyed a delicious cauliflower-gruyere quiche, washed down with the Juice of the Day, a ruby blend of carrot, beet, celery and ginger.  Between the juice and the reviving warmth of the conservatory greenhouses it was better than a trip to a Canyon Ranch spa.

Visitors and artwork.

The work impresses in its craftsmanship and use of color and composition, and the unexpected scale of the forms elicited from this viewer a certain frisson of delightful menace - Granny's afghan meets Ridley Scott.  Knitting with an edge.

Tatyana Yanishevsky, Anatomically Correct Passionflower.

Lotus, Ruth Marshall.

Detail, Lotus.

Detail, Lotus.

Knitting goes truly monumental in the work of Ruth Marshall, one of three artists featured in the show; the other two were Tatyana Yanishevsky and Santiago Venegas.

Sweater Turns into Maidenhair Fern, Santiago Venegas.

Tatyana Yanishevsky, Tiger Lily.

Of course, we had to see some actual plants and, no matter the season, it's a gala of form and texture.

 Flower, leaf, stem and bark.

The new Visitor's Center, a green building worthy of the name, has a good gift shop; I was tempted by the wonderful selection of potted plants.

Visitor's Center gift shop.

Many items can be mail ordered.

We bundled up and walked back to the subway station, admiring the garden - leafless, dormant, yet fascinating.

A venerable vine twists and turns sinuously on the orthogonal trellis.

Torii gate in the Japanese garden.

From December to March, there are for many of us three gardens - the garden outdoors, the garden of pots and bowls in the house, and the garden of the mind's eye.

- Katherine S. White

Cocoons into Thread - Silk Reeling by Hand

Detail, silk reeling machine.

As part of our focus on silk during our textile study tour, we visited the retail outlet of one of the last silk reeling mills in Japan.  The store offers an educational  activity too, silk reeling as it was done before mechanization, similar to the practice shown in the image below.

ca. 1915 - 1923. Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/4245211785/

Those interested took a turn at two reeling set-ups, selected cocoons dyed in primary colors, and turned a handle to reel our silk.  We got to keep our reels, with the wound silk, of course, as a souvenir.

Silk reel.

Red, blue and yellow-dyed cocoons in water, to keep filament pliable.

Two silk reeling stations, Pat and Allison at work.

In the video below, produced by my talented DH and starring Pat, you will see our reeling instructor loop the filaments from the cocoons through the reeling mechanism, and get an idea of how the machine works. We didn't replace the street noise with a sound track, such as Ellmenreich's Spinning Song, so that you can hear the "whirr" of the reel and occasional comments from the peanut gallery.

The previous day, we visited, briefly, a Japanese silk yarn factory.  DH was only able to record a glimpse of industrial production. The short movie  does not attempt to elucidate the whole factory process, but just gives an idea of the scale and speed of production.  We hope the two videos provide a graphic illustration of the vast difference between the pre-industrial hand process and modern mass production. 

My reel of silk, back home in Newton.

Back to hand-reeling. The spun thread would have been woven into some kind of silk fabric; below a weaver works her loom with a wall of reels behind her.  I know next to nothing about weaving, but it must have taken a quite a few full reels of silk to warp  the loom and to weave any considerable length of cloth.  I enjoyed my recreational hand-reeling, and have renewed respect for the labor that goes into traditional textile production.

Weaver at work.

Silk reels.

Hidden splendor - Beni Itajime silk textiles

Floral design created with safflower dye; pink accents added after primary dyebath.

When we think about extinction, we tend to focus on organisms in the plant and animal kingdoms - passenger pigeons and the Carolina parakeet, long gone from American skies, for example - but extinction occurs in textile history too.  There is now no living practitioner of the surface design tradition known as beni itajime, a resist dyeing technique involving folding and clamping silk fabric between carved boards.  The brilliant orange color is imparted by safflower dye, or beni.  Yes, safflower, not saffron, and one of the most precious dyestuffs in the pre-modern dyer's palette.  Beginning in 1875 synthetic dyes displaced the expensive natural safflower dye.

Saffron colorant, with small cosmetics bowls stained orange by the dye.

Our 2012 tour leader, artist and researcher Yoshiko Wada, and her international associates, are doing their best to record, preserve and even recreate bygone fiber arts. This quest led us to the home of Mrs. Yoshimura, of Takasaki in Gunma Prefecture, who generously shared her family's collection of fabrics and artifacts from the Yoshimura Dye-Works archive. In addition, researcher and textile engineer Masanao Arai gave us a presentation on the research and dyeing experiments he and Yoshiko presented to the Textile Society of American in 2010.

We drove up hours late due to our packed schedule, but Mrs. Yoshimura could not have been more gracious, in her beautiful kimono and iris-patterned obi sash. The Yoshimura Dye-Works, owned by Mrs. Yoshimura's family and the last of its species, so to speak, made beni-itajime from 1889 until the concern closed in 1932. With two helpers, our hostess, on the left in the image below, demonstrated the use of this special fabric in juban, a under-kimono worn as a layer beneath the outermost garment.

Lifting up outer kimono to show flash of under-kimono.

I won't even pretend to understand the intricacies of historical Japanese costume, but suffice to say that there are a lot of layers involved in kimono-wearing and that beni-itajime fabric was used in the construction of the layer beneath the outermost kimono. When the wearer moved, however modest and sedate the design of her outer kimono,  a flash of the bright orange would be revealed. It's as if the wearer is stating "Yes, I'm a perfectly demure lady on the outside, but there's more to me than meets the eye."  How sexy is that? Once you know to look for the fabric, you'll often find a glimpse of tell-tale reddish-orange in many 19th-century wood block prints of stylish women.

Under-kimono featuring beni-itajime in crane design on display.

So, how was this wonderful fabric made? Most of the tradition was handed down orally, so written contemporary accounts of the process are minimal. Mr. Arai proved to be a Sherlock Holmes of silk, however, and after many attempts, was able to recreate the fabric.

The process goes something like this:

First, carve six pairs of wooden boards with an identical, but mirror-image design, so that here are "left-hand" and "right-hand" boards.  The registration of the designs must be perfect. The length of each board equals the width of the thin silk fabric used for beni-itajime.

Mr. Arai with left-hand and right-hand carved boards of crane design.

Next, lacquer the boards, except for the edges and a spot in the middle. The lacquer  keeps the grain of the wood from swelling, ensuring a nice crisp design, and prevents the boards from absorbing the dye. Next, soak the boards in water for two weeks; this makes the boards more pliable, for easier clamping. 

Left, carved board with dye-stained, unlacquered spot; right, carving in progress.

Next, take a length - several yards - of fine, thin silk fabric.  Accordion-fold it into four layers.  The width of the layers is the same as the width of the boards.  Place four layers of folded fabric on a board, carved side up. Then put the mirror-image board on top of the layers, carved side down.   Continue with the remainder of the length - folding and placing the fabric between board pairs -  until the length of fabric is folded and inter-leaved with six pairs of matching boards (twelve boards total.)

Mrs. Yoshimura folds fabric and places it between mirror-image boards.

Finally, once the sandwich of folded fabric and board pairs is complete, the whole assembly is clamped and moistened thoroughly. Then dye is poured between the edges of the boards. Where the matching boards clamp the fabric, the dye cannot penetrate, and those areas stay white.

In the olden days, the layers would have been tightly wedged into a wooden frame with shims.  To make the "new" beni itajime fabric, Mr. Arai used a modern jig set-up.

Mrs. Yoshimura and helpers with antique carved boards.

Stack of board pairs and folded fabric.

Poster of process.

In lieu of an actual dyeing demonstration - not possible in Mrs Yoshimura's home -  Mr. Arai displayed a very informative poster of the process, showing dye being ladled over the clamped fabric-and-board assembly.

Close-up of hot dye being poured over clamped assembly of fabric and boards.

The historic process. Source: www.trocadero.com/haruko/

Fabric and the board used for the fabric's design.

Beni itajime fabrics.

In some of the fabrics, it's fairly easy to distinguish the "repeat" or the area of fabric that was folded between one  pair of boards. In other designs, however, the design appears almost seamless, so cleverly does the pattern mask the fact that the fabric was folded into segments.

The boards themselves are beautiful artifacts and feature designs full of meaning and symbolism, such as cranes for longevity, the hemp plant for health and well-being, and the sakura, or cherry blossom, emblematic of the fleeting beauty of life.  While the layers are largely hidden from the view of the outside observer, the woman wearing the safflower-dyed juban has carefully chosen and arranged her ensemble, enveloping herself in tiers of meaning and beauty.

Carved boards with iris, hemp and peony designs.

Antique garment made using beni itajime.

As shown in the image above, pink could be added to enliven the basic orange and white. I'm not sure if this involved additional folding and clamping or if some other method was used.

Hats off to Wada-san and Arai-san for their investigative and artistic skills and their tenacity - it took over twenty attempts to create a new piece of beni itajime as they re-discovered the historic process.

The bottom fabric imitates the shibori technique.

In our sock feet, we admire the yardage.

I love anything flavored by green tea.

Mrs. Yoshimura and her assistants prepared a delightful snack for us.  She also showed us her own artwork; below are Mrs. Yoshimura's hand-dyed fabrics. A truly lovely lady.

Mrs. Yoshimura shares her beautiful creations.

Although beni itajime is not as well known as some other Japanes textile traditions, there is a study group, Takasaki-Beni-no-Kai, and we did see a collection in the town of Kiryu, another town with a history of silk production in Gunma Prefecture  There has been one major recent exhibit of these fabrics and garments, at the National Museum of Japanese History, in 2010, and the museum has more images of juban on its website.

Private collection of beni itajime garments, Kiryu.