Textiles and the Making of Israeli Modernism: From the Zionist Bauhuas to Feminist Art

ended

"The development of Israeli visual culture in the twentieth century was underscored by artists’ search for local roots, counterbalanced with their desire to dialogue with an international artistic arena. As in other settler societies such as the United States and Australia, the attempt to produce a distinguished idiom of Israeli modernism oscillated between ""nativism"" and ""universalism""––two seemingly opposed tendencies that were actually interrelated. Indeed, the historiography of Israeli visual culture has emphasized the ongoing tension between local versus global/universal influences. Nevertheless, scholars continue to debate which sources shaped Israeli modernism, and what political implications followed the incorporation of Middle Eastern traditions, European Jewish heritage, or international avant-garde movements into an Israeli national style. The proposed study would contribute to such debates by investigating a medium that has received little scholarly attention––textiles. Textiles and the Making of Israeli Modernism: From the Zionist Bauhaus to Feminist Art (TMIM) will focus on textiles produced in Israel during the 1940s–1970s within three separate yet overlapping fields of practice: an art and craft academy, a government-owned fashion brand, and the fine art establishment. TMIM will draw and expand on recent scholarship that addressed the marginalization of textiles within art history due to its association with ""low,"" commercial, or ""feminine"" work, as well as the innovative field of object-oriented anthropology that considers ""things"" as agents of cultural and social meaning. TMIM aims to establish the significance of a group of highly prolific artists-designers, all female, whose work has been entirely overlooked. It is precisely its position at the crossroads of art, craft, and commerce that makes the field of textiles fertile ground for examining the construction of modernist perceptions during this formative period of Israeli nation-building."