Narratives of Revival: Examining Exhibitions on Knitting and Crochet in Canada and the United States

This thesis looks at exhibitions on knitting and crochet of the last twenty years in Canada and the United States in order to reflect on the different ways in which revival can be understood or interpreted through them. The two countries’ tight-knit craft alliance throughout the 20th century is mobilized as a point of departure to examine how practices of knitting and crochet, largely absent from 20th century discourse on craft, started being displayed at the turn of the millennium. The case studies consist of four exhibitions staged by museums and galleries alike: Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting (2007) at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, She Will Always Be Younger Than Us (2009) at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto, À toutes mailles! (2013) at the Centre MATERIA in Quebec City and Maison de la culture Marie-Uguay in Montreal, and SUPER STRING (2006) at the Stride Gallery in Calgary. Considering the recent historical development that are 21st century exhibitions on knitting and crochet, the thesis takes the idea of revival as a common denominator and carefully unpacks how they each engage with it, consciously or not. Furthermore, revival being a common topic in craft discourse, the thesis participates by introducing into it the theory of shaped time as elaborated by art historian George Kubler, specifically the ideas of prime objects and formal sequences, to outline each case study’s role in indexing (or perhaps reviving) knitting and crochet as artistic practices. In doing so, the thesis argues that the specificities of knitting and crochet, in their materiality and as practices embedded in rich and long-standing social histories, can be conducive to a broader understanding of cyclical patterns, thus inspire a new methodology toward the critical re-examination of persistent patterns in canonical art history