Somewhere in the murky pre-holiday crazy train of last November, I got an email. I was minding my own business and deep in the craziness of "the work," but it was the kind of email that you respond to: Olivia McCarthy, the new director of arts programming at Silo City, had somehow in the depth of scroll through the multitude of art voices in our couch of a city, had found ME.
Hi Tami,
I'm reaching out to introduce myself and the organization I work for - Lyceum at Silo City. We're a newly organized nonprofit that works, in part, to explore the intersection of art and ecology on site at Silo City.
Right now we're exploring new ways to welcome the public and expand the understanding of Silo City and its unique positioning as an urban post-industrial site going through ecological regeneration. My interest is how we can explore that through artmaking. I came across your work and there was this instant appreciation for how you've opened up greater accessibility to fiber arts through your studio and then the richness of your work as an artist.
Clearly you have a lot of great programming through your studio but I thought I'd reach out and see if you have any interest in having a conversation about potential off-site collaborations at Silo City.
ummmm....let me think here. YES?
Silo City is a post-industrial site on Buffalo's waterfront, the home of the iconic silos and elevators. In fact, I learned last week that it forms the largest collection of silos in the world. It is a post-industrial urban delight of a wasteland, reclaimed and brought back to life in recent years through ambitious Earthwork art installations, programming, performance arts with Just Buffalo Literary Center, Tornspace and 100,000 Poets & Artists for Change, deliberate plantings and architectural curiosities that reclaim the wild imaginings of the space and showcase its history without trying to hide or cover it up. It's beautiful and more than a little savage. Raw, and gritty and teeming with a riot of invasive knotweed and related "nuisances" working overtime to clean the soil and reclaim the land, helped along by people invested in rehabilitating it.
The site is wild and a little jingle jangle; bright, more than a little untamed and teeming with potential during the day. It is portentous at night with the silos looming overhead; none so powerful as on a midsummer's night at Duende, with its open air courtyard and live music right on the edge of the ruin and the wild green labyrinth of greenery. It is a liminal place, situated on the edge of the old, and hovering on the edge of new. Too vibrant to be a blight, too cumbersome to be easily regenerated. Serious energy is being poured into the site; it breathes shape shifter energy. (Fun Tami Trivia: Duende is my favorite place for birthday cocktails. Out on the bench next to the wild and just after twilight. Bonus points for fireflies.)
To have the opportunity to contribute to something as serious and noble as this was a moment. Many, many, many conversations ensued. Imaginings, and subsequent edits. Grant applications were filed. Grants were rejected. More edits. More imaginings. More applications. and finally, an achievable pilot program of Arts Education Workshops, fully realized, in May.
We went live in June with three pilots that make use of foraging and cooperating with the land and drawing inspiration and grounding from a sense of place: July 25, August 3 and August 18.
While the original scope of our program at Silo City didn't come to plan, it's still there, hovering in the liminal imaginings, and ready for when the time is right. They say, if you build it....
Last Thursday night I foraged specimens from Dara Friedman and Josh Smith's 2022 River Hill pollinators earthwork installation and used them to host the very first Art Workshop at Silo City held under the The Trellis, the large intricate cage of an installation by the UB School of Architecture and Planning to help with the invasive knotweed. After meeting at Duende and a walk through the grounds, we discussed foraging and the oft-unappreciated value of invasive plants in post-industrial landscapes and Silo City's mission of "Art, Ecology, Culture." Then we engaged in a fierce flower pounding session, creating botanical scapes and prints that capture the wild life and invasive specimens that make up the wild maze of life at Silo City. While students were not permitted to forage from within the earthworks site garden in order to preserve the integrity of the installation space, they did forage at large in the grounds and greenery of silos, bringing back plants that caught their imagination, each one creating something personal to their experience; an artifact of the experience.
In many ways, the fiber art world shares parallels with post-industrial sites like Silo City. Prior to the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization that led to mass production of textiles, these skills were not necessarily graceful, joyful or artful. They certainly COULD be, depending of the cultural context and the individual practicing them, of course. But that's not what we're talking about here.
What we're talking about is necessity. Utility. and Yes, Misogyny. Expectation; in short, domestic servitude. Before mechanization and large scale woolen mills broke the mold of handicraft processes that the Arts & Crafts movement holds sacred, clothing the humans in their care took up an enormous amount of mental, physical and emotional resource for a woman in charge of a household. Those not yet in charge of households were conditioned for that role through a cultivation of needlepoint, crochet, knitting, etc and etc and so forth as acceptable recreational pursuits. The women of lower classes were especially bound to this role, vastly limiting what one could hope to accomplish outside of their place in the home.
When these processes became mechanized and mass production and efficiencies made wearable ready goods more available, this set in motion what would prove to a profound break in the reality of women. Within the space of a generation, it was less important to know how to weave your own cloth. Then, to know which plants to use dye with, and then to sew, so on and so forth, until we found a cultural shift - by the forties it had become declasse to make your own clothes. By the 1950s post-war boom of capitalism, this shift had hardened into a bonafide exercise in classism that had reached down into all levels of society, in varying degrees.
This shifting of identities meant that the seeds planted in the Industrial Revolution found riot of bloom in the Women's Rights and liberation movements of the 1960s. Now we have fierce women using fiber to innovate, to challenge, to create dialogue. Fiber has transcended utility and become a tool of the artist: to provoke and to tell stories in new ways. It has evolved. We have fiber in MOMA. We have massive fiber installations at the Venice Biennel and in major institutions across the world. There is still a huge barrier and sexism, of course, abounds. But art canon includes the names Sheila Hicks, Eva Hesse, Lenore Tawney. We have Marina Abramović. We have Ruth Asawa, utilizing fiber based skills in new ways to express her complexities and pain through anthropomorphism. Don't get me started on Albers and Black Mountain. We have the gleeful perversity in fiber meets sculpture from the hands of Louise Bourgeois. We have Vanessa Barragão using fiber hand skills to highlight climate change and man made devastation of oceanic ecosystems. Tammy White of Wing and a Prayer worked with Cecilia Vicuna to put sheep and handdyed textiles in the Guggenheim in 2022. And we have the @tinypricks project, a personal source of irreverent "nasty woman" delight. We have truly taken these threads in hand and used them to weave something new.
My point? Women can now approach these skills voluntarily, with curiosity, and without the burden of accomplishment. We can create irredeemably "useless" things. We are untethered. We have evolved past the constraint buried in these art forms, and we continue to evolve and challenge the paradigms with every new young artist who embraces these skills and creates something unusual in defiance of "but what is it FOR?"
But in this evolution, much like the vast industrial scapes like Silo City, we have loss. There is a ruin and a vacuum that fiber teachers and those with feet on the ground in the world of cottage wool and sheep are keenly aware of. These skills are in steady decline, and have been, since this break. It's a double edged sword. As these skill sets become optional, and rightfully so, the speed of their loss has been exponential. Without massive interest, it is conceivable that the functional grasp on a society level will reach such low levels that they will be lost.
And that, my friends, is a big part of why I teach. I can safely say that the number of people I have taught since 2017 is in the thousands. And it's still not really enough. Much like the efforts to revitalize places like Silo City, it never feels like it's enough. We here working on the edges of ruin need friends equally invested and inspired to help us along.
So, what do we do? We collaborate!
I am so proud that my experience over the past eight years has been of value and humbled to be put to good use. I'm especially gratified that these little flower pound sessions of mine, have found a use that has merit to something that matters. To help put together a workshop program and to be able to say that I am the first artist to hold a workshop at Silo City is super strange and wonderful, and I am so proud to have helped create that framework. Regardless of what my involvement looks like in the years to come, the foundation has been laid, and with someone like Olivia McCarthy at the helm, it can't help but grow.
We are back for two more sessions this summer: August 3 for more Pigments from Petals, and August 18 for a very special Learn to Weave under the silos. The silos are a magical place, and I hope you join us...and tell your friends. Every student who shows up for these betas contributes not only to the culture and to helping revitalize the ecology of this forgotten site, but will prove to the lofty powers that be who hold the pursestrings of ArT BaSed FUndIng that allocating some of those funds into this space is a good investment, which benefits all of us here in the 716.
And maybe those grant applications might bear fruit in the years to come, and we come back again and again to engage in Art, Ecology and Create some Culture.
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