Looms and Algorithms (1946-Present)
Art Against Empire
This is Part 3 of 3 of our documentary. The Freedom Quilting Bee, where sixty Black women in Alabama built a cooperative while fighting for the right to vote. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, forty-four thousand panels on the National Mall. Gilbert Baker's rainbow flag. Palestinian tatreez. Rana Plaza, where the locked door was the same locked door from the Triangle fire a century earlier. And then the turn: Potemkin AI, the Cricut Revolt, farmers jailbreaking their own tractors, and what happens when the Empire stops coming for the fabric and starts coming for the software. Featuring Cleve Jones,...
info_outline
Cleave Jones: Creator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt
Art Against Empire
A Queer Legends × Art Against Empire crossover. Ian Danger Capstick sits down with Cleve Jones, the activist who conceived the AIDS Memorial Quilt on a cold November night in 1985 with a stack of posterboard and Harvey Milk's old bullhorn, given to Cleve after Harvey was assassinated. The two talk about the afternoon Cleve first walked into Castro Camera, the morning Gilbert Baker raised the first rainbow flag, the grandmothers who could not find the words, and Seven Days in June, the mobilization Cleve is building to mark forty-five years of HIV and AIDS. Close to an hour, close to...
info_outline
Live Working or Die Fighting (1901-1945)
Art Against Empire
Part two of our three-part documentary special picks up where "Who Owns the Cloth" left off and traces textile resistance from the turn of the twentieth century through the end of World War II. From global factory uprisings in Lodz, Rio Blanco, and Bengal, to Clara Lemlich's famous call to strike in 1909, plus the impacts of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, suffragette banners stitched behind prison walls, Mother Jones and the March of the Mill Children, the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, and Gandhi's spinning wheel taking on the British Empire. Featuring archival recordings from the U.S....
info_outline
The Loom and the Empire (1600-1900)
Art Against Empire
This is Part 1 of a three-episode documentary special tracing seven centuries of the same fight: who owns the cloth? Co-creator Shawn Dearn narrates the history while actors read from primary sources, including Lord Byron's furious defence of the Luddites, Charity Clarke's 1769 letter about "a fighting army of amazones, armed with spinning wheels," and Queen Liliuokalani's memoir from inside her occupied palace. From medieval Flanders to the Jacquard loom's punch cards to a deposed Hawaiian queen stitching the dates of her overthrow into a quilt. Featuring: Zak Foster, Stephen Towns, Sara...
info_outline
Carrie Reichardt: Politics of Permanence
Art Against Empire
It takes "quite an act of violence" to remove a mosaic from a wall. For twenty-five years, Carrie Reichardt has used that fact as political strategy — cementing memorials for death row inmates across four continents, covering her London home floor-to-roof in mosaic, and building a truck-mounted monument to a man executed by the state of Texas that ended up in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This episode is an audio monograph — a critical argument about an artist's work and its place in history. From Marshall McLuhan to William Morris, from a pen pal letter that changed everything to a...
info_outline
Community Care with The Society of Inclusive Blacksmiths
Art Against Empire
In 2018, eleven women blacksmiths gathered in Oregon to build together. They didn't plan to start an organization. But the conversation kept going and the Society of Inclusive Blacksmiths was born. Their motto is: "Everyone has something to offer, everyone has something to learn." This episode explores what happens when craft communities decide to take care of each other. From medieval guild statutes that paid sick members "whether lasting or only temporary" to a Kansas City Instagram call for quilt blocks that went from one twin quilt to three, we trace the long history of mutual aid through...
info_outline
Memory, Grief and the Politics of Remembering
Art Against Empire
After her partner died, Mary Burgess wove herself a blanket from his clothes and the jacket she wore to his funeral. When she finished, she thought: I could do this for other people. This episode asks a question that haunts empires: whose deaths count? Philosopher Judith Butler argues that to grieve publicly is to insist a life mattered — which is why authoritarian regimes have always tried to suppress mourning. Stalin forbade families from grieving. The Tiananmen Mothers are placed under surveillance before each anniversary. Franco's government exhumed 33,000 bodies and reburied them...
info_outline
Art as Witness to Climate Crimes
Art Against Empire
Artists have always responded to their environment, but what happens when it changes? Art Against Empire's fifth episode goes to Michigan, where an artist embroiders glacier data onto silk and we check in on Minneapolis, where strangers gather in a library basement to make a crazy quilt from surgical bandages and childhood dish towels. This episode explores how artists respond to environmental crisis — from creating Dust Bowl quilts to the first Earth Day, we track the history of environmental activism and art. This episode features Bonnie Peterson who works with glaciologists to...
info_outline
Perfect Is Boring: Failure As Resistance
Art Against Empire
Episode 4 of Art Against Empire explores how perfectionism is used as a tool of oppression. This episode features an interview with Kim Werker who is a weaver, creator of the Mighty Ugly project and a craft entrepreneur; as well as an anecdote from Catherine West of Significant Seams in the United Kingdom. Both guests use workshops to help people overcome perfectionism that is holding them back. They both discovered that the fear of making something "ugly" or “imperfect” reveals deeper fears about using our voices and taking creative risks. This episode explores how you...
info_outline
Stephen Towns: Uncovering the Invisible
Art Against Empire
Welcome to Episode 3 of Art Against Empire! Stephen Towns paints and quilts the histories that America tried to erase, from Nat Turner's rebellion to forgotten spaces of Black joy. In 2018, Stephen became the first African American artist-in-residence at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Not 1968, 2018! There, he created a portrait of Elsie Henderson, the Black woman who ran that famous house for decades yet whose story had been reduced to footnotes. Stephen's journey began with a quilt inspired by his sister's words: "How can you disrespect me when my grandmother literally fed your...
info_outlinePart two of our three-part documentary special picks up where "Who Owns the Cloth" left off and traces textile resistance from the turn of the twentieth century through the end of World War II. From global factory uprisings in Lodz, Rio Blanco, and Bengal, to Clara Lemlich's famous call to strike in 1909, plus the impacts of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, suffragette banners stitched behind prison walls, Mother Jones and the March of the Mill Children, the Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, and Gandhi's spinning wheel taking on the British Empire.
Featuring archival recordings from the U.S. Library of Congress, Frances Perkins at Cornell, Christabel Pankhurst, and Alice Paul, alongside interviews with Sunny, Gavin Mueller, Kimmie Dearest, AJ Young, and Stephen Towns.
Written and hosted by Ian Capstick. Historical narration and technical production by Shawn Dearn. Produced by Secret Agents. Learn more at artagainstempire.net. Signup for the Art Against Empire newsletter and remember: Our hands know how to build the world we want.