In the 19th century, as the discipline of the history of art was beginning to take form, a debate arose as to the origins of this art. The act of transforming plant or animal matter into fibre and then into fabric had long been considered a fundamental moment in cultural production, but textile practices were also attributed to a feminine, domestic sphere, and thus excluded from the theorisation of art. Certain high-quality textiles – created by men – were recognised as having influenced artistic development, but on the whole, textile work was left out of the modern canon. This reflects the discourse surrounding art’s supposed autonomy and the applied arts as set in opposition to the fine arts, underlining the subordinance of ‘tactile’ textile art to the optical art of painting.

From the first stirrings of the avant-garde to the turn of the 20th century, women artists were exploring the techniques and materials of textile art. Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) designed and sewed costumes for several ballets, their patchwork motifs coming to life on the bodies they adorned. Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) conceived embroidered and woven compositions for carpets or cushion covers, as well as beaded objects. But the idea of textiles as one of the mediums of modern art is seen as beginning with the Bauhaus, when the practice was first theorised. In the school’s weaving workshops, Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983), Otti Berger (1898–1944) and Anni Albers (1899–1994), amongst others, would combine their formal artistic research with industrial experimentation. Though their early works took a pictorial approach, weaving ‘paintings’ in wool, this would evolve into a methodology more specific to the medium, that recognised the particular quality of textiles as an interface between the haptic and optic worlds.

In the 1960s, the Fiber Art movement continued to develop an individual approach to the textile, in line with contemporary theories of aesthetics. Claire Zeisler (1903–1991), Lenore Tawney (1907–2007), Olga de Amaral (1932–) and Sheila Hicks (1934–) liberated artworks from their looms and transformed them into sculptures. It was considered a moment of emancipation, the medium breaking free from its utilitarian function and establishing itself as an object in the contemporary art world.

Within the feminist art movement of the 1970s, artists like Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015), Faith Ringgold (1930–2024) and Annette Messager (b. 1943) turned to textile practices previously considered ‘minor’ in order to explore their particular qualities, shining light on the long-neglected lives, labours and creativity of women. The opposition between art and crafts was shown to rest on social hierarchies drawn along racial and gender lines, while at the same time serving to reinforce these hierarchies, as the allegedly intuitive manual skills of women became a basis to deny them any creative faculty.

Today, numerous artists, such as Ntombephi Ntobela (b. 1966), Marie Watt (b. 1967) and Yee I-Lann (b. 1971), continue to explore the materials and techniques of textile art, drawing on the transmission of knowledge from different cultures throughout the world. They continue to question, revitalise and perhaps even further develop these practices. In this way, they contribute to an ongoing revaluation of textiles in the art world, and an examination of the supposed separation between the creation of art works and the production of ethnological objects.