Narratives of Revival: Examining Exhibitions on Knitting and Crochet in Canada and the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis looks at exhibitions on knitting and crochet of the last twenty years in Canada and the United States in order to reflect on the different ways in which revival can be understood or interpreted through them. The two countries’ tight-knit craft alliance throughout the 20th century is mobilized as a point of departure to examine how practices of knitting and crochet, largely absent from 20th century discourse on craft, started being displayed at the turn of the millennium. The case studies consist of four exhibitions staged by museums and galleries alike: Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting (2007) at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, She Will Always Be Younger Than Us (2009) at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto, À toutes mailles! (2013) at the Centre MATERIA in Quebec City and Maison de la culture Marie-Uguay in Montreal, and SUPER STRING (2006) at the Stride Gallery in Calgary. Considering the recent historical development that are 21st century exhibitions on knitting and crochet, the thesis takes the idea of revival as a common denominator and carefully unpacks how they each engage with it, consciously or not. Furthermore, revival being a common topic in craft discourse, the thesis participates by introducing into it the theory of shaped time as elaborated by art historian George Kubler, specifically the ideas of prime objects and formal sequences, to outline each case study’s role in indexing (or perhaps reviving) knitting and crochet as artistic practices. In doing so, the thesis argues that the specificities of knitting and crochet, in their materiality and as practices embedded in rich and long-standing social histories, can be conducive to a broader understanding of cyclical patterns, thus inspire a new methodology toward the critical re-examination of persistent patterns in canonical art history.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".