At the Marquette Regional History Museum, the fourth biennial Lake Superior Fiber Festival put the spotlight on local fiber artists. Fiber arts, comprising artwork using yarn, fabric or other fibers, has only come into the eye of the art world in recent decades, and yet encompasses art forms that have been practiced for thousands of years, such as weaving and spinning.
Many fiber art forms have traditionally been derided as “women’s work,” because prior to the Industrial Revolution, textile production relied on women in the home and within communities.
Many of these women moved to the factories beginning in the 1840s, when the textile industries in cities like Lowell hired them to work in the mills, and skills like knitting, crochet and quilting developed into “feminine hobbies” distinct from “real art.” Despite this, women used their skill not only to provide an income for themselves, but notably to make banners for the suffragette movement, beginning efforts to bring fiber and textile arts into the public eye.
Today, fiber and textile arts are often still stigmatized as hobbies expected of women, rather than skilled art forms worthy of study and appreciation. The Fiber Festival was full of skilled artists with years’ worth of work on display, many of them working during the event.
A full day of programs in the museum event spaces was in demand and the artwork overflowed from the museum showcase center. All over town, from Moonspun Wool’s weekly Sit’n’Stitch to the Yarnwinders Fiber Guild of Marquette, textile and fiber arts are being kept alive by the very women whose talents have been overlooked for centuries. Even Grammy Phyllis’ Crochet & Knitting Club Meeting on Sunday nights in the Woods is thriving. The tide is turning for fiber and textile in the art world and Marquette is right along with it.
