Part 2: Expanding the American Textiles Conversation with Karen Hampton
Continuing our interview with Karen Hampton from last week, this week we learn about Karen’s current projects. Part 1 for the interview can be found at this link.
You recently finished hosting a 4-part conversation series supported by the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design entitled, Moving Forward: Redefining the American Textile Conversation. Why was it important to create this series and can you tell us a bit more about these important conversations?
I have loved the conversation format since I was in high school. Back then, I would dream of getting an internship at a radio station. When April/May hit and we had been in lockdown for a few week, I realized that I was becoming really popular on the webinar circuit and that people wanted to hear me talk. Then, one day while I was teaching summer school, I had Stephen Hamilton come and speak to my class. We started talking about having a conversation. It was right around the same time that the Center of Craft, Creativity, and Design announced the Craft Future Fund grant, and I thought, “I can do something with this.” My proposal was Moving Forward, a series of four webinars where I could have conversations with contemporary black fiber artists. My goal was to enrich and expand the field, therefore, making it a more open and diverse environment. I feel really good because over the course of four months, I featured conversations with seven amazing black fiber artists and helped them gain a larger audience. I know how isolation feels and I do not want anyone to be held in that place. For so long when I was a single mom with two kids, working and trying to make it as a weaver, the doors kept closing in my face. Now that I had the opportunity, it was time for me to extend a hand and help others gain exposure. I live by two philosophies: each one, teach one and the power of storytelling.
The first webinar in the series was “Africa/ America.”I really wanted to start there because I feel like African textiles have never received the attention they have deserved nor have African artists and artists like Stephen Hamilton, who is not African—he is diasporic, but he studied weaving in Nigeria. With Stephen already committed, I invited Bukola Koiki and Queen Allotey-Pappoe. Both Bukola and Queen had a perspective of growing up on the African continent yet being educated in the West and making the United States their home.
The second webinar was titled, “The Narrative.” I invited Lauren Austen who lives and works in Central Florida and Dawn Williams Boyd from Atlanta. Both of these women presented thoughtful, thought-provoking conversation about the narrative. For the December webinar, I invited Camille Brewer, a brilliant curator and weaver to speak about her contributions to the field of curating Black Art and where and how her art practice has grown.
The concluding conversation focused on “The Ancestors.” I had met Precious Lovell two years earlier in Vancouver, Canada, it’s so hard to believe because our lives and life experience dovetails so well together. I felt like I had just met a soul sister I didn’t know I was missing while I was growing up in California and she was growing up in North Carolina. She had a formal education in textile arts and taught at NC State, and then in 2017, she attended the same artist residency, Sacatar in Bahia, Brazil, that I attended in 2015 and where she also conducted research on traditional lace-making techniques found in Bahia.
I really appreciated how you paced the series and how you ordered the conversations. Did everyone know each other beforehand because each conversation felt so natural and communal?
Isn’t it amazing? I met Stephen at school. Bukola, I had not met before. A friend had recommended that I talk to her. I met Queen here at Lowell, and she had been a student at Mass Art. She has such a contagious smile and personality. I thought that if I had Stephen and Bukola that they would be very interesting but I felt it needed a lighter note. I saw that Queen was the perfect one for that triangle, and she has so much reflection on being a little bit older and having grown up in Ghana with the marketplace, where everything was as if you were to look at a stagnant picture of what it looked like at that period of time.
Turning to your personal artistic work, in your talk at Peters Valley, there were two specific pieces that I wanted to ask you about. One piece is part of your series of tea towels and has the stitched silhouette of your father as a toddler. The other piece, you did not talk about but I was intrigued by the silhouette of someone diving through the tall, skinny vertical orientation with a church at the bottom. Would you like to expand on either of these two pieces for us?
In 2000, I taught weaving at the College of Marin. One of my students brought in a zipper envelope bag and said “I have something that I thought you might be interested in.” She pulled out 7 unfinished flour sack tea towels that all had cross-stitched pickaninny children on them; she had kept them because her mother had made them. I transformed them and changed their narrative. They were very toxic, and their stories took years to develop.
The other piece you mentioned was Transcendence. I made it as a homage piece to my Grand Aunt. She was my primary caregiver as a child and was the most important person in my development. She grew-up in colonial Jamaica and was an avid swimmer, which was something that colonial girls weren’t supposed to be doing. She would go down to the port. She knew all the people that worked in the port, and they would take her out about a mile on their boats, and she would swim back to shore. She became disabled in her 30s and never walked again.
Instead, she became very religious reading her Bible every day. I did everything to help her and she told me stories about her travels and taught me to see and dream the world.
And on that note Karen, one question I have had about your work is the symbolism behind the circles in your work. Many of your pieces have circle motifs worked into them.
Yes, they are about energy. Circles in my artwork represent the spirit/spiritual/human energy. Even though we are sitting in front of our computers in different states, we are still able to send energy to each other, and I just make it visible. Our human form is only part of it.
Yes, and it can be places that you are not physically present.
Yes, exactly.
Additional Links for Karen Hampton:
Moving Forward: Re-defining the American Textile Conversation
Conversation 1: Africa/ America with Bukola Koiki, Stephen Hamilton, and Queen Allotey-Pappoe
Conversation 2: The Narrative with Lauren Austin and Dawn Williams Boyd
Conversation 3: The Road to Self with Camille Brewer
Conversation 4: The Ancestors with Precious Lovell
Stitching Race presented by Karen Hampton at the 2012 Textile Society of America Symposium in Washington D.C.
Artist Talk with Karen Hampton hosted by Peters Valley School of Craft
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