The Textile Society of America is excited to announce the recipients of the 2021 Research Travel Grants. Established through the generosity of Elena Phipps (TSA President 2012-2014) and Alan Finkel, these grants enable individual TSA members to research textiles through travel—local, regional, and international of any type that is specifically for the study of actual textiles. The grants may be used to travel to conduct research in a museum, to meet with artists and craftspeople in their local home environments, to see a special textile exhibition, etc. It is not intended for travel to the TSA Symposia and is made available every other year, between the TSA Symposia, for any amount up to $1,000.
We hope others will feel inspired to contribute to this fund to support the work of TSA members and our extended textile communities.
Eniola Dawodu
Eniola Dawodu is a British-born Nigerian-American artist and costume designer based between Brooklyn, NY and Dakar, Senegal. With reverence for those who wove and wore before, she engages West African narrow-strip woven cloth as a conduit for knowledge, memory, gesture, and identity. In fellowship with indigenous weavers and textile collectors, she creates large-scale sculptures and specialty garments utilizing ancestral artisanal methodologies. Privileging traditional cloth highly charged with cultural philosophy and ritual, her works serve as archives of experience and portals for cross-generational communication.
In 2019 she was a University at Buffalo CIA Artist-in-residence and awarded a grant for the creation of the new artwork generation to generation · iran si iran (2019). The expansive sculpture was featured in the group exhibition Punctures: Textiles in Digital and Material Time at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center, Buffalo, NY (September 20, 2019 – February 7, 2020) and SPACE Gallery, Portland, Maine, USA (May 20, 2021 – July 3, 2021).
In 2019 her collection of uniquely designed cloaks created from vintage Yoruba cloth was commissioned for ALÁRA LAGOS, a contemporary African concept store based in Lagos, Nigeria.
For the past decade, she has worked internationally, creating costumes for award-winning and culturally stimulating feature films with a focus on celebrating the narratives of Africa and the diaspora. Such films include Guava Island (2019), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2017), Queen of Katwe (2016), and Pariah (2011).
“A TSA Research Travel Grant of $1,000 will support my journey to Nigeria this winter to research the cloth collections and document the oral histories of a collective of Yoruba textile tradeswomen in Lagos. For multiple generations through the matrilineal line, these women have sourced and traded in the cloth of times past. My research focuses on two types of mid to late 20th century loom-woven Yoruba cloth; the narrow-strip aso-oke worn by women as celebratory garments on occasions from new life to burial, and the wide-width oja worn by women to support the carrying of babies on their back. I seek to understand and preserve the intimate and communal memories and gestures these women and mothers share with the textiles as both wearers and collectors, activators and archivists. I will also learn the personal and wider essence of getting dressed in aso-oke and oja; the philosophies, techniques, and nuances of wrapping and tying the cloth to the body. I view these tradeswomen as custodians of the cloth and culture, holding space for material seeped with sweat and spirit as it passes from one body to another linking past and present for posterity. With each transfer, the cloth becomes a repository of residue, its time with the tradeswomen a rest between dances. As a first-generation Nigerian-American, I was raised far removed from the soil and senses of my mother’s land. This research opportunity for a deeper exploration within the context of Yorubalands socio-cultural and aesthetic sphere will allow me to understand and present more authentic and nuanced reflections on elder Yoruba women’s moments and movements understood through their personal stories of wear and exchange.”
“The knowledge gathered will form the foundation of a new body of work, a soundscape and immersive textile sculptural installation. The oral history audio of interviews with the textile tradeswomen will shape the soundscape of Yoruba women’s power and agency. These sonic utterances will be anchored by large-scale sculptural forms created from a multitude of vintage aso-oke and oja cloths sourced directly from the tradeswomen. In my creation of the sculptural forms, I will apply the Yoruba dress techniques passed down to me of knotting, wrapping, draping, and tying. This installation, permeated with the layered lineages of Yoruba cloth practice, will invite the audience to pass through and engage within Nigerian women’s cultivations and continuities, re-activating the cloth and its histories. The forms will be in conversation with each other as mother (aso-oke) and child (oja), curled into a distanced embrace allowing for a passageway space in between for the viewer as witness and wearer to traverse. I envision this passageway as a threshold between generations, a womb space to engage the past whilst still in the present, a liminal moment between what has been and all that is becoming.”
ARTIST WEBSITE: http://www.enioladawodu.com/
Matthew Raj Webb
Matthew Raj Webb is a filmmaker and Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology at New York University (Program in Culture and Media). His research explores the politics surrounding the transmission and ownership of craft knowledge between artisans and design professionals in the Indian fashion industry. Forthcoming publications include, “Henna’s New Medium: Dilemmas in Translating Color and Culture from Skin to Cloth,” in the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles, Vol. 4: Color, co-authored with Nikita Shah.
“My Ph.D. dissertation project is an ethnographic exploration of fashion education in Mumbai, India. By examining the practices, aspirations, and experiences of an emerging generation of Indian fashion workers, I investigate India’s repositioning of textile and clothing work from “craft” to “fashion”—a movement across fields of cultural production. An important element of my project involves archival research into the history of Indian textile artisans’ interactions and exchanges with Western fashion designers and industry institutions. Drawing on the rich archives of export houses in Mumbai, I collaborate with artisanal workers (e.g., tailors, embroiderers, weavers, dyers) to examine collections of material swatches, patterns, visual references, financial documents, and other historical traces accrued in their creative exchanges with European and American fashion companies.”
“I request support from a TSA Research Travel Grant to extend my fieldwork in Mumbai by one month to conduct one particularly important case study—centered on a large collection of textile objects and documents associated with a celebrated European luxury fashion house. While the garments of this firm have been exhibited around the world in museums and are the subject of numerous biographical and art historical publications, little is known about their co-production in India. I want to follow up the suggestion of preliminary research that Indian artisans, designers, and other textile-centered workers made significant creative inputs.”
“With TSA support, I plan to film interviews with five people who, together with their family members, worked on these clothing items, and with their assistance, to photograph their textile samples, paper patterns, and associated financial documents to examine forms of creative authority throughout the production processes. This case study will form an important background for my dissertation, and I aim to write it as a stand-alone chapter for publication. I plan to edit the video interviews into a short film which can be circulated online.”
Learn more about previous TSA Research Travel Grant Recipients here.
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