Unravelling women's art Creators, rebels, & innovators in textile arts

A survey of the history of women in the textile arts. Henderson, an art historian who previously wrote a case study in Feminism and Museums: Intervention, Disruption, and Change (2017)and co-authored Great Women Artists(2019),presents readers with a wide-ranging cataloglike survey of women's work in the textile arts. She starts with a historical survey of textile work from a cross-cultural perspective, beginning with the shift in the perception of embroidery as a domestic activity to a professionalized art. From there, she provides a sweeping look at the many forms and uses of fabric-based art, with chapters on such themes as recycling/upcycling, fashion, and politics, and a significant emphasis on the art's use in protest and its role in marginalized cultures. Other chapters include interviews with specific artists in the field. Appropriately, the book is full of color and black-and-white photos of the textiles surveyed, from various sources. Henderson's work looks at a broad swath of societies and traditions related to traditional and nontraditional uses of this highly specific art form, and mostly does a good job placing examples in their historical contexts. Still, there are noticeable omissions; for example, there's no mention of Jewish textiles, aside from a couple of paragraphs related to the Holocaust and a brief acknowledgement of the "Russian Jewish heritage" of a contemporary textile artist. It also doesn't address Yemenite Jewish embroidery, which would have had import when talking about the significance of textiles to marginalized groups. Also, its definition of textile arts is so broad, even encompassing cloth-based sculpture, that the focus is not always clear. Still, this book is likely to accomplish its purpose of getting more readers to take textiles seriously as a form of expression. An ambitious but overly broad approach to an intriguing set of artistic disciplines. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.