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African textiles like Kente cloth. Likewise, in Oko-
re’s White Cowries, 2010 draped hessian (burlap)
pulses with white clay dots to suggest the depth
of symbolic, economic, and historical meaning of
the cowrie shell in Nigerian culture.
Prevailing cultural aesthetics are some of beau-
ty’s most potent signifiers. This makes beauty far
from neutral. Throughout history, aesthetic ideals
have been wielded as tools of oppression and dis-
crimination, privileging qualities favored by dom-
inant cultures, races, and classes. Beauty’s darker
effects are especially acute when viewed through
the lens of gender, deployed as a means to subju-
gate women throughout time. In the modern era,
this has, at times, led to a wholesale rejection of
beauty standards by waves of feminist thinking.
However, art critic Eleanor Heartney suggests an
alternative, claiming that beauty can be “as liber-
ating as it has been deemed enslaving.” She con-
tinues, “beauty can be a double-edged sword,
as capable of destabilizing rigid conventions and
restrictive behavioral models as it is of reinforcing
them.”7 In other words, concepts of beauty can
be reclaimed as resistance.
Venus Trapped, 1997 (pp. 72-73) by Norma Min-
kowitz plunges into these depths. The artist’s
signature netting, thorns, and spiky, red-paint-
ed fingernails speak to a search for agency de-
spite subjugation. Over her four-decade career,
pioneering fiber artist Lia Cook has pursued the
possibilities of weaving, so-called women’s work.
Big Susan, Big Richard, Binary Traces: Young Girl
all from 2005 (pp. 26-27). are indeed handwo-
ven and also computer generated using a digital
Jacquard loom. At 14-feet tall, the grainy images
unfurl in space and their monumental scale al-
lows the viewer to experience the pieces many
ways. Close-up is a zoomed-in pixilation where
the digital and the handmade meet. By con-
trast, when taken as a whole, the positive and
negative images create a looming strangeness,
floating like a memory that has begun to fade.
Children take on a very different dimension as
James Bassler’s NRA Approved, 2014 (pp. 24-25)
heartbreakingly demonstrates. From Bassler’s ex-
traordinary skill and knowledge of global textiles,
three small stitched and batik-dyed vests emerge,
a metaphorical offering of protection from the
nation’s school shooting epidemic.
To return to Rachel Carson and the humble road-
side flower, sometimes the beauty that appears
most simple is in fact, the most revolutionary. This
is certainly the case for the duo Eduardo Portillo’s