Plenaries

Opening Plenary Panel

“Crosscurrents: The Transnational Flows of Textiles”

Lynne Milgram is Professor of Anthropology at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada. Her research on gender, development, and urbanization in the Philippines analyzes the cultural politics of social change regarding women’s work in crafts, the Hong Kong-Philippine secondhand clothing trade, and street vending. With growing Philippine urbanization, Milgram’s current research investigates transformations of urban public space use and issues of formal/informal, legal/illegal work regarding peoples’ rights to public market trade. Milgram has published this research in journals and edited volumes and has guest edited special issues of Asian Studies Review (2005) and City & Society (2014). Milgram’s selected co-edited volumes include, (with P. Van Esterik) The Transformative Power of Cloth in Southeast Asia (1994); (with K. Grimes) Artisans and Cooperatives: Developing Alternative Trade for the Global Economy (2000); (with R. Hamilton) Material Choices: Refashioning Bast and Leaf Fibers in Asia and the Pacific (2007); and (with K. T. Hansen and W. Little) Street Economies of the Urban Global South (2013).

Giorgio Riello is Professor of Global History and Culture and Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of A Foot in the Past (OUP 2006) and Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (CUP 2013; pb 2015 – recipient of the World History Association Book Prize 2014) and has published extensively on the history of textiles and fashion in early modern Europe and Asia.  He is the co-editor of Shoes (2006; pb 2011); The Spinning World (OUP 2009; pb 2012); and How India Clothed the World (Brill 2009; pb 2012) and Writing Material Culture History (Bloomsbury 2014) and several other volumes. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize. He has also been a visiting fellow at Stanford University, and The National University of Australia, and a visiting professor at The European University Institute and Columbia University. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Iris Foundation Award for his contribution to the Decorative Arts and Material Culture and he published Luxury: A Rich History (OUP, co-authored with Peter McNeil).

Madelyn Shaw is currently the Curator of Textiles at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. Recent work includes the book and traveling exhibition Homefront & Battlefield: Quilts & Context in the Civil War, (2012-2015); the exhibitions Color Revolution: Science Meets Style in the 1960s (ATHM, 2013) and Needle/Work: Art & Industry in New Bedford (NBWM, 2008); and the publications Clothing through American History: The British Colonial Era (with Kathleen Staples, 2013), “Slave Cloth and Clothing Slaves: Craftsmanship, Commerce, and Industry” (JESDA Fall 2012), “”Shipped in Good Order”: Rhode Island’s China Trade Silks” in Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England (2014); “Silk in Georgia, 1732-1840: Sericulture to Status Symbol” in Proceedings- Third Biennial Henry D. Greene Symposium (2008); and “H. R. Mallinson & Company” in American Silk: Entrepreneurs & Artifacts, 1830-1930 (2007), winner of the Millia Davenport Publication Award. She has taught at Boston University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons School of Design Masters Program in American Decorative Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

Closing Plenary

Stephanie Syjuco: From the Global to the Local (and Back Again): The Practice of Cultural Contestation and Reinvention

Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recent projects include a collaboration with the FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists in Belgium on a body of works utilizing 3-D scanning of Belgian and Congolese antiquities to produce hybrid ceramic objects addressing the legacy of colonialism, empire, and trade routes. She is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and is currently developing a two-year project commission for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art under the topic of “Public Knowledge,” excavating and amplifying hidden bodies of knowledge within the city. Born in the Philippines, she received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has shown extensively nationally and internationally, and her work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, Germany; Z33 Space for Contemporary Art, Belgium; the Havana Biennial, The Asian Art Biennial, and The California Biennial, among others. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and Ryan Lee Gallery in New York. She is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley and lives and works in Oakland.