"A premiere work offering a rich chronicle of weaving in Michigan. Colorful stories tell of Michigan's textile people, places, and events, and show the important role that this state played in preserving and progressing the culture of cloth locally and nationally. I came away with a new sense of pride and joy at being a part of this rich human history and inspired to continue exploring within this great tradition!"
---Chris Triola, Fiber Artist

"Fascination with Fiber is a well-documented history, with consequence! The authors reveal surprising continuity in relationships, with results that are far-reaching. Readers will be moved beyond border as they come to realize the extensive influences generated in Michigan."
---Gerhardt Knodel, Director, Cranbrook Academy of Art

Fascination with Fiber is the first complete look at Michigan's rich tradition of handweaving, from pioneer log cabin days to the contemporary era of digital computer-aided looms.

Michigan has been at the center of handweaving and fiber arts and crafts since early settlers brought their skills with them from countries where handicrafts and weaving were traditionally strong. The textiles they produced in their new country, from linens to coverlets to rugs, took on a distinctly American expression. In the twentieth century, the formation of guilds, craft communities, and formal art programs created a revival of interest in handweaving as an opportunity for artistic expression so that by latter part of the century the state played a vital role in the national fiber movement.

Weavers and historians themselves, authors Marie A. Gile and Marion T. Marzolf focus on the people and forces that have kept the craft of handweaving alive in Michigan and indeed throughout the country for over two centuries: a passionate group of individuals and weaving communities enlivened through shared necessity, opportunity, and creativity.

Gile and Marzolf base their book on oral histories, interviews, and documentary and artifact research. With its tales of colorful characters such as Mary Atwater, the gun-toting weaver from Montana who helped organize the handweaving industry; to the formation of the Michigan League of Handweavers in 1959; and the "Fascination with Fiber" exhibit that opened in 2004; Fascination with Fiber brings the story of handweaving in Michigan to life like no other book.

Marie A. Gile is Textile Specialist and Research Associate at Michigan State University Museum in Lansing. She has been a weaver and fiber artist for twenty-five years. Marion T. Marzolf is Professor Emerita in the Department of Journalism and Communication at the University of Michigan. Since retiring in 1995, she has taught basic weaving, has served as president of the Michigan League of Handweavers, and has exhibited in galleries statewide.

Heidi Kumao: Real and Imagined documents and contextualizes narrative fabric works and animations from Kumao’s 2020 solo exhibition at the University of Michigan’s Stamps Gallery. Using fabric cutouts and stitching of everyday objects, Kumao invents a tactile visual vocabulary that distills unspoken aspects of ordinary exchanges into accessible narrative images. Weaving in her experiences as an Asian American woman, artist, and educator, Kumao creates poetic and playful open-ended visual haikus, generating a range of associations to current events, gender roles, and institutional power structures. Captured midstream, interactions from intimate relationships, medical procedures, the workplace, and the political sphere are suspended in time within felt film stills. Real and Imagined presents the reader with an opportunity to experience this remarkable oeuvre of over thirty fabric works and video animations.
 
For over thirty years, Kumao has developed an expanded art practice that includes animations, video installations, photographs, machine art, and fabric works that give physical form to the intangible parts of our lives: our emotions, psychological states, memories, thinking patterns. Her hybrid artworks have included electromechanical girl’s legs that “misbehave,” video installations about surviving confinement, surreal, experimental stop motion puppet animations, performative staged photographs, and hand crafted cinema machines. 
 
She has exhibited her award-winning artwork in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Art Science Museum Singapore, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Museum of Image and Sound (São Paulo) and the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. Her work is in permanent and private collections including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Arizona State University Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
 
This exhibition catalogue marks the first significant publication on Kumao’s work and includes a selection of works from across her career. It includes written contributions by: Srimoyee Mitra, curator and Director of the Stamps Gallery and NYC-based art critic; Wendy Vogel; an interview between the artist and writer Lynn Love; and poems by the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Award winner Marilyn Chin.

Ohio’s long quiltmaking heritage prepared the wayfor the contemporary “pioneer” artists of the 1970s and 1980s, who, through individual vision and dedication, have created a new art form and added a new chapter to quilt history. Uncommon Threads: Ohio’s Art Quilt Revolution reveals for the first time the remarkable role Ohio artists, curators, institutions, and organizations have played in the evolution of today’s internationalart quilt movement.

Against the backdrop of America’s counterculture and civil rights movements, author Gayle A. Pritchard’s compelling narrative threads its way through the emergence of the art quilt, from artists working in isolation to the explosive “big bang” of the first Quilt National and its inevitable reverberations. Pritchard provides a fascinating and personal glimpse into the private world of these unique artists through in-depth interviews, rare photographs, and abundant quilt illustrations.

As Uncommon Threads demonstrates, the art quilt movement could not have occurred without Ohio’s unparalleled contribution. Quilt lovers around theworld will relish discovering this tale of the uncommon energy, vision, creativity, and devotion to self-expression that truly made a quilt revolution.