Project 2
Stage one- Research six artists or designers
Mary Walker Phillips
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| Mary Walker Phillips in 1985 |
I have
only recently become aware of Mary Walker Phillips and have never seen any of
her work in exhibition but I admire what I have seen on the internet and hope
someday to know much more about her work. The following (edited) obituary was
published in the New York Times on November 20th 2007. It was written by Margalit Fox.
Mary Walker Phillips,
a prominent textile artist who took the utilitarian craft of knitting and gave
it bold new life as a modern art form to be displayed on the walls of museums
around the world, died on Nov. 3 at her home in Fresno, Calif. She was 83. A long-time
resident of Greenwich Village, Miss Phillips had lived Fresno in recent years.
For centuries, knitting was a homey pastime, ideal
for making sweaters, socks and hats. It was less a creative art than a
re-creative one: women — for it was nearly always a woman who wielded the
needles — typically worked from printed patterns, following a set of
instructions to produce a finished garment of predetermined design and
dimensions.
By the mid-20th
century, other textile traditions, like weaving, had crept into the realm of
fine art, hung in galleries and reviewed seriously by critics. But knitting,
consigned to the hearth, lagged far behind.
What Miss Phillips
did, starting in the early 1960s, was to liberate knitting from the yoke of the
sweater. Where traditional knitters were classical artists, faithfully
reproducing a score, Miss Phillips knit jazz. In her hands, knitting became a
free-form, improvisational art, with no rules, no patterns and no utilitarian
end in sight.
Traditional materials
also went out the window: where garment knitting generally involves wool or
cotton, Miss Phillips’s huge, abstract, diaphanous hangings might also use
linen, silk, paper tape or fine metal wire. They sometimes incorporated
materials like bells, seeds and bits of mica.
Considered one of the
two or three most influential knitters of the second half of the 20th century,
Miss Phillips was a fellow of the American Craft Council, an honor bestowed on
only the most distinguished artisans. Exhibited worldwide, her work (which also
includes avant-garde macramé) is in the permanent collections of major museums
including the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mary Walker Phillips
was born in Fresno on Nov. 23, 1923, to a prominent family descended from
California pioneers. A traditional knitter in childhood, Miss Phillips — to the
end of her life, she preferred “Miss” — began her artistic career as a weaver.
After studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, she worked in San
Francisco and Switzerland, weaving fabric for clothing, upholstery and table
linens. She later opened her own studio in Fresno.
Just how accomplished
Miss Phillips was at the loom can been judged from a telegram she received in
April 1948:
kindly bring cotton
material for weaving thirty five yards drapes natural deep rose lavender and
dark brown. also gold metallics.
It was signed
“Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright.” Miss Phillips spent three weeks at Taliesin
West, the Wrights’ home in Scottsdale, Ariz., weaving the family’s drapes and
tablecloths.
In 1960, Miss
Phillips returned to Cranbrook, completing her bachelor’s degree and, in 1963,
earning a master of fine arts, concentrating in experimental textiles. Around
this time, a friend, the noted fabric designer Jack Lenor Larsen, suggested she
experiment with knitting as a medium for contemporary art.
Miss Phillips, who
settled in New York in a yarn-filled apartment on Horatio Street, took up her
needles once more. But what sprang from them was like no knitting ever seen.
Using techniques that went beyond traditional knit and purl stitches, she
created pieces that looked like delicate tapestries or vast expanses of lace,
with transparent latticework, open areas and whorled textural patterns. Hung
away from the wall and lighted well, her work threw off a dramatic counterpoint
of shadows.
Miss Phillips, who
was also widely known as a writer and teacher, taught for many years the New
School for Social Research. Her books include “Creative Knitting: A New Art
Form” (Van Nostrand Reinhold), considered groundbreaking when it was published
in 1971; “Knitting Counterpanes: Traditional Coverlet Patterns for Contemporary
Knitters” (Taunton Press, 1989); and “Step-by-Step Macramé,” (Golden Press,
1970), regarded as rehabilitating a much-maligned art form.
Despite decades of
acclaim as a maker of high art, Miss Phillips was known to have knit the
occasional wearable object. She made fine argyle socks for her brother, for
instance, as he recalled in a telephone interview last week. She had made him a
pair, Mr. Phillips said, as recently as the 1950s. (Fox, 2007)
I just love the idea
of “knitting jazz”.
 |
Could this be knitted jazz? I think so.
(Straker, 2011) |
I found a very scholarly article by Jennifer L. Lindsay under the auspices of the University of Nebraska- Lincoln. It is based on her Master’s thesis (Lindsay, 2012) . Her work is called “Mary Walker Phillips:Creative Knitting and the Cranbrook Experience” and was completed in 2012. She says it is:
The first scholarly examination of
Mary Walker Phillips and her work (Lindsay, 2012)
Obviously the emphasis of the work is on the influence of her
time at Cranbrook:
From 1946-47 and again from 1960-63
Phillips attended Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan to
study contemporary weaving and textiles. Phillips education in contemporary
weaving and textile design at ....the Academy shaped her vision and her work
throughout her life. (Lindsay, 2012)
Cranbrook lay emphasis on the individual approach and
experiential and experimental learning. (Lindsay, 2012) This suited Phillips
learning style and gave her licence to try out her avant garde ideas without
fear of censure.
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Knitted Wall Hanging, 1965
(Photograph courtesy of Patricia Abrahamian) .
|
Phillips was one of Cranbrook’s first students to work
off loom; in autumn 1962 at a time when little had been done in experimental
knitting. She used experimental materials as well; linen, silk as well as other
things. Phillips had little time for
machine knitting. She found that hand
knitting
was most
appealing because its irregularities could never be duplicated by machine. (Lindsay, 2012)
In her conclusion Lindsay says
In a wonderful, direct and unpretentious
and informal style Mary Walker Phillips taught twentieth century knitters how
to make knitted fabrics with or without patterns. (Lindsay, 2012)
Bibliography
Fox, M., 20.11.2007. http://www.nytimes.com/.
Lindsay, J. :., 2012. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/.
Lindsay, J. L., 2012. Mary
Walker Phillips and the Knit Revolution of the 1960's. Washington DC
Straker, C., 2011. http://clairestraker.wordpress.com/.
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