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Questions (#04)
Mellanee Goodman
During the first residency of MA Craft Studies, the 2021 Cohort worked with Portland-based artist Lisa Jarrett to develop a list of “100 Questions” around practice, research, materials, and our relationships to craft. This exercise was revisited over the next two years, both as a way of developing our methodology through the act of questioning and as a point of reference for our changing orientations to these queries. Many questions on the list remain unanswerable, yet served to shape our research projects during the program.
Further Reading
Battle-Baptiste, Whitney. Black Feminist Archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2011.
Battle-Baptiste examines issues of race, class, and gender within the field of archeology to raise the voices of Black women who have been rendered invisible. Baptiste employs a cross-disciplinary inclusionary framework to illuminate the significance of African American history through material studies.
Amor, Mónica, Okwui Enwezor, Gao Minglu, Oscar Ho, Kobena Mercer, and Irit Rogoff. "Liminalities: Discussions on the Global and the Local." Art Journal 57, no. 4 (1998): 28–49. Accessed February 8, 2020. doi:10.2307/777926.
The contributors to “Liminalities” provide diverse critical perspectives to the question of identity and globalization. Among the contributors, Armor’s “Whose World? A Note on the Paradoxes of Global Aesthetics” offers an examination on the liminalities of nationality. She argues that in order to truly change the artistic canon, the institutional hegemonic structures must be reassessed, and the institution must focus on artistic practices that demonstrate sites of resistance from those hegemonic practices.
Biography
Mellanee Goodman
She/Her/Hers
Written by Amy Meissner
Mellanee Goodman loves glimpsing mountaintops from every window in her North Carolina home. Her love for nature and “uphill and downhill” terrain brought her closer to place-based research studying the history of Black craftswomen in the upper South, including Southern Appalachia, from 1850¬–1910. This investigation reveals craft of the everyday and domestic that is often overlooked or erased due to the violent mobilization of Black bodies as methods of production. Mellanee’s interest lies in the craft work of Black women in particular––mattresses, brooms, spun thread, woven cloth, and knitted and sewn garments––objects made for the master’s plantation homes, but also for families in enslaved quarters. While most of these items no longer exist nor retain attribution to the original maker, her study of ex-slave narratives, newspaper clippings, and the education of the formerly enslaved after emancipation pieces together a more complete picture of craft- and place-based identities of Black craftswomen, some of whom lived in the same mountains Mellanee currently calls home.