Biography
Erica Warren is a curator and scholar with over ten years’ experience working with collections, in museums, and teaching. Her area of specialization within decorative arts and design histories centers on textiles and alternative modernisms in the nineteenth century and through to the present day. Within this broad expanse, her current research focuses on the human and ecological costs that attended industrial innovations in modern textile production, the American designer, entrepreneur, and weaver Dorothy Liebes, the Good Design exhibitions at the Chicago Merchandise Mart, intermedial and sensorial readings of modern art, and the unbounded material practices of contemporary artists working with textiles.
Her recent publications include the essay “Fission: Design and Mentorship in the Dorothy Liebes Studio” for the catalog accompanying the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s exhibition A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes (2023). In 2021, her essay "Beyond Weaving: Transdisciplinarity and the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop," appeared in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and the year before, she edited and contributed to the catalogue Bisa Butler: Portraits (2020).
From 2016-2022, Erica was a curator of textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she organized numerous installations, including the critically acclaimed exhibitions Bisa Butler: Portraits and Weaving beyond the Bauhaus. She is currently the editor of the James Renwick Alliance for Craft Craft Quarterly.
Crafting Modernity in America [Winter 2024]
This course proposes that craft defined artmaking in the United States during the period after World War I and through to the post-World War II era. For the purposes of the course, craft will be broadly understood to encompass handmade items designed for practical use as well as artworks that, through concepts, materials, and/or processes, trace their lineage to a functional and handmade past. In framing this modernist history through craft, and discussing pedagogy, practitioners, objects, and theories of making, the course positions craft as a primary propagator of modernity. Artists with diverse material practices, such as Anni Albers, Emma Amos, Ruth Asawa, Faith Ringgold, and Lenore Tawney, will be central to the discussion and will foster an assessment and interrogation of craft’s role in producing and popularizing modern art more broadly.
In addition to foregrounding the ubiquity of craft and its wide-reaching impacts on culture and society (including educational initiatives and programs, exhibitions and museum collections, and publications), this course will also question craft’s relative absence (until recently) in narratives of twentieth-century modernism in the United States. Furthermore, while craft has the potential to surface the classism, sexism, and media hierarchies in modern art historical discourse, the need to critically examine craft’s relationship with colonialism, racism, and sexism will also be addressed. [MAPH/Art History]