Aleia Brown

“Disrupting the Loop of Recovery: Black Women, Textile Art, and Political Thought” argues that Black women in the Alabama Black Belt and Mississippi Delta regions used their creative outputs to shape the solidarity economy from 1930 to 1980. Scholars, curators, and gallerists have long participated in a method of recovery that obscures how textile art became a modality for living outside the hegemonic order--how, for example, Black women textile artists flooded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) headquarters with handwritten notes requesting cooperative training in order to create a system that supported their penchant towards self-determination and creative practice. Situated in Southern Studies, this project departs from the dominant methodologies in material culture and art history that rely on narrow modalities to recover Black women’s textile art. Since the 1980s, increased efforts to collect, exhibit, and consume these materials have created a false sense of familiarity and obfuscates the subversive and complicated nature of the works. This process is the loop in “Disrupting the Loop,” or the endless enclosure that invites Black women artists into mainstream settings without an analysis of race, class, gender, and power. This manuscript is preoccupied with disrupting the loop, or following lines of inquiry that identify the structures that mute the liberatory dimensions of Black textile traditions.

This narrative history project unfolds across three sections, excavating the work of the Delta Leather Workshop, Freedom Quilting Bee, Madison County Sewing Firm, Liberty House, and the Poor People’s Corporation. Section one places the 1930s conditions that created the need for an alternative formation alongside records of Black women quilting and making dresses for pleasure outside of domestic work. Section two details the different textile cooperatives, their relationship to each other, and the work they produced. Section three connects the decline of the cooperatives to engagement with institutions outside of their ethos. This final section introduces collectives comprised of the Great Migration’s second generation and, while acknowledging those who came before them, considers their unique identity in the 1980s socio-political landscape.