Overshot: Textiles and Political Aesthetics

Jessica Smith and Susan Falls criss-crossed Georgia. (Here, en route to Athens, GA.)

 Susan Falls, Professor of Anthropology, Savannah College of Art and Design

Jessica Smith, Professor of Fibers, Savannah College of Art and Design

We are an interdisciplinary team of scholar/artists working to reveal hidden political and economic stories behind material culture. In researching the history of Khmer nationalism embodied in ikat silk sold in Siem Reap, home of the tourist site of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, we were surprised to find the guiding hands of French imperialism, elite Thai consumption, and transnational artisan partnerships. Our current project on overshot coverlets in the southern United States posed a similar mystery: who was behind the staging of plantations, slave-quarters and house museums, and why? We started in Savannah and toured the state of Georgia to look at exhibitions of history, but ended up in white-box museums seen through the lens of contemporary theory.

Bulloch Hall, Kids Bed - Geometric woven coverlets are often used to stage historical homes at popular tourist sites in South Carolina and Georgia. Coverlet weaving has a deep history in American folk practices; it was used to signify political, economic, and cultural identities tied up with notions of race, class, gender, and nationalism. And it still does.

Cover of Overshot: The Political Aesthetics of Woven Textiles from the Antebellum (University of Georgia Press, 2020). This book is a Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

In our new book Overshot, we outline the political aesthetic history and present of southern material culture through a case study on woven coverlets. We were especially interested in plantations, slave quarters, and piedmont house museums associated with the yeomanry. Our book explores coverlets as art-political objects that both reflect and produce contemporary ideas about southerners and southern history.

To do this work we consulted historical archives and museums, but we also interviewed docents, tourists, weavers, collectors, and curators.

We also viewed personal collections and visited plantation sites and house museums such as the Telfair’s The Owens–Thomas House & Slave Quarters, Middleton Place National Historic Landmark, the Drayton Hall Home, the Madison Morgan Cultural Center, and the Warren Wilson Boyhood Home (among many other places).

We took tours and talked with everyone we could at places like the Church-Waddel-Brumby House in Athens, Ga.

The Callaway Plantation near Washington, Ga (here, flying several flags).

To augment our research, we designed Fold-Unfold, an installation and performance at the Lyndon House Arts center in Athens (a contemporary museum and house museum, built circa 1840). Here, we not only (re)created some well-known overshot weaving patterns, but folded historic coverlets into a pillar in the house museum not only to echo what we saw in our research, but also to connote the rising cotton powered global economy and to highlight the role southern women played in the aesthetic narrative of their landscape.

“Fold Unfold” (June 24 – August 19, 2017), installation view at Lyndon House Arts Center, Athens, G

We also invited skilled makers to weave objects the size of typical 19th century coverlets (80” x 88”). Weavers considered 19th and 20th century patterning but were asked to use a black and white color scheme; we did this to undermine the way we found color being used to signify class and race in our research and to draw viewers’ attention to the hands of makers and to the formal qualities of weaving work. These new coverlets were also folded into pillars in the Lyndon House Arts Lukasiewicz Gallery. The reiteration of the pillar united the historic set with contemporary work and got us thinking about the cultural narratives and political economies united in these textiles.

Smith House coverlet sequestered in the closet

Coverlets in plantation and yeoman sites are often folded up in armoires, stuffed in drawers, or placed on children’s beds or on the beds of enslaved workers. The association of coverlets with slaves is what first piqued our interest, but once we started looking at them within the larger contexts of history and making, many other questions appeared. Why do people use coverlets to stage spaces for the enslaved? How were coverlets used by the yeoman families who made up the majority of the population? Why were overshot patterns taken up by craft revivalists? How do we see this work reconfigured in contemporary art?

Coverlets, like this one with its makers’ tag still attached, instantiated political, economic, and cultural dynamics.

Woven coverlets were highly valued, and circulated by antebellum Georgian yeoman families up through the 1850’s, when coverlet weaving began to fall out of fashion. But, by the end of the 19th century, a revivalist reimagining had brought overshot back into vogue.

Anna Ernberg of Fireside Industries at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky played an important role in advancing an Appalachian weaving revival in the early 20th century.

Revivalists like Anna Ernberg and Francis Goodrich sought to promote a (disappearing) weaving tradition. Here coverlets were viewed as the folk art of a bygone era, and often offered as a kind of “make-do” craft. Goodrich’s mission at the Presbyterian Home Mission Board in the mountains of North Carolina was to elevate local women’s standard of living, but when a coverlet was given to her, Goodrich was impressed. In 1908, she began selling locally-made coverlets in her Asheville shop.  Goodrich framed mountain weavers as quintessentially American, with geometric overshot serving as a deeply American aesthetic at a time when the public was yearning for tokens of positive nationalism.

The Lincoln bedroom (1917) serving President Wilson and his second wife, Edith, used overshot patterning to evoke a sense of nationalist heritage.

But these coverlets also appealed to a trend-conscious urban eye since they presented as simultaneously primitive and modern with an aesthetic that dovetailed with an artistic move towards abstraction. Enthusiasts debated the “correct” status of these objects, as in a well-known exchange in The Weaver between Mary Atwater and Anni Albers.  Atwater pointed to the pleasure of making and the role handmade textiles played in adding comfort to everyday life. Atwater, a quintessential preservationist, disparaged experimental weaving as “free form” and argued that machine-weave lacked the qualities that made hand-weaving attractive and endearing. 

Study for an unexecuted wallhanging, 1926. Gouache with pencil on photo offset paper. Photograph by Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art

Anni Albers, whose ideas were shaped by her experience at the Bauhaus, looked to the structure of weaving itself as a key to the medium’s aesthetic possibilities. Later she applied an overshot aesthetic to a paper practice, observing that “when the work is made with threads, it’s considered “craft,” but that when it’s on paper, it’s considered “art.” But Albers weaving work was itself artistic, modernist and forward looking.  This discursive lineage raises questions about the easy relegation of coverlets in house museums to children’s rooms and the bottom of closets, and suggests we revisit the conflation of the primitive with craft, folk art, hardscrabble rurality and the yeoman women who made 19th c. coverlets.  

Pattern Migration: Handmade Mass Manufactured (Full Set), 2011. Merino wool and fabric, sewn from coverlets woven by Peggy Hart. Artist: Stephanie Syjuco.

The Atwater-Albers debate goes to core questions our book explores. How does overshot, (and by extension any other expressive practices) explode the art :: craft dichotomy? How do the connotations of categories like art and craft enlighten our understanding of material culture like overshot, and how does an insistence on preserving these categories impede us? In the same way that artists like Paul Rucker, Rowland Ricketts, Christy Matson, Allison Smith, and Stephanie Syjuco have taken up these questions in their visual practice, we argue that overshot coverlets—with their relatively constant optic generated by the structure of loom—have been embedded in a variety of (at times, contradictory) responses to aesthetic, political, economic, and social conditions, but they are neither art nor craft, neither high art nor folk-work, neither primitive nor modern, neither aesthetic nor functional, neither rural nor urban/cosmopolitan – but rather both art and craft, both primitive and modern, both aesthetic and functional, both rural and cosmopolitan. And this makes them powerful “third way” symbols that reflect and produce both conformity and conflict. Thus, we offer overshot weaving as a rich example of material culture for thinking about, teaching through, and exploring our histories as well as our futures.

Double Bow Know, cotton and wool, 2010. Artist/weaver Cassie Dickson.