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.
Current/Upcoming Courses:
Revivals: Colonial, Gothic, and Craft (Spring 2025)
This course will examine so-called stylistic revivals in the history of modern decorative arts and design. Through an examination of “revival” objects, the philosophies informing their facture, and the critical discourse surrounding their function and reception, the course will consider questions such as: What constitutes a “revival”? How are decorative art and designed objects marshalled for different ideological ends/purposes/narratives? What values appear to be imbued in certain materials and aesthetics? How have such associations been made/become naturalized? What assumptions regarding race, class, gender, and power are embedded in these associations and narratives?