Lisa Vinebaum is a scholar, critical writer, artist, and educator. She is a leading scholar on community building through fiber and textiles, examining participatory and socially engaged projects that mobilize fiber materials and processes as part of grassroots struggles for social, economic, and racial justice.
Published scholarship includes commissioned book chapters and essays in edited anthologies, academic journals and exhibition catalogues, most recently for Through Her Eye at Mana Contemporary Chicago, Makers, Crafters, Educators: Working for Cultural Change, Counter-Signals, The Handbook of Textile Culture, Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm 1930-present, Danica Maier: Grafting Propriety from Stitch to Drawn Line, More Caught in the Act: Performance by Canadian Women, Surface Design Journal, Textile: Cloth and Culture, and The Companion to Textiles (forthcoming). She is co-editor, with Dr. Kirsty Robertson, of “Crafting Community”, a special issue of Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture. Dr. Vinebaum has chaired panels, lectured and presented work at academic conferences internationally, including College Art Association Annual conferences (2013, 2014, 2017, 2018), The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Textile Society of America biennial symposia (2012, 2014, 2016), Performance Studies International, and The Subversive Stitch Revisited: The Politics of Cloth. They lectured as a Visiting Scholar at Temple University (Philadelphia), Indiana University (Bloomington), Tulane University (New Orleans), Concordia University (Montreal), Goldsmiths (London), Nottingham Trent University (Nottingham UK), and Calvin College (Grand Rapids).
Lisa Vinebaum’s art practice incorporates text-based installations, textiles, print, neon, performance, video, photography and protest tactics. Her creative work has been included in exhibitions and festivals internationally*, including Sector 2337, Weinberg Newton Photography, Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival, Performance Studies International Open Engagement: Art & Social Practice, Nuit Blanche, and the European Media Art Festival (Osnabruck, Germany), and in conjunction with Grace Exhibition and Performance Space (Brooklyn), and Articule Gallery (Montreal).
Dr. Vinebaum is an Associate Professor in the department of Fiber and Material Studies and affiliated full-time faculty in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the Associate Editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Textile: Cloth and Culture. Dr. Vinebaum holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK); an MA in Textiles also from Goldsmiths, and a BFA from Concordia University in Montrea
My art practice spans multiple media and forms, and incorporates lens-based and public performances, sited interventions, socially engaged interactions, participatory sewing projects, screen and digital printing, text-based installations, neon signs, and textile banners. My work responds to and seeks to create dialogue about pressing current issues, notably, working conditions and the curtailment of workers’ rights, economic globalization, precarity, and the value of artistic labor. I have also grappled with the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and with the difficulties of speaking out as a progressive Jew against Israeli-state aggression against Palestinians. History, politics, and social relationships often constitute the raw material of my practice, which also draws on archival research, and personal family history. My interest in labor histories connects to cultural histories of Jewish activism in the garment industry, as well as my own family history: both of my parents and three of my grandparents worked in the garment industry in some capacity or another, and my grandmother was a factory worker and seamstress for most of her life.
Since 2011 I have been creating work under the title of New Demands?, an ongoing series of exhibitions and performances connecting the current crisis in timed labor to historical struggles for workers’ rights, particularly in the garment and textile industries. Many of the rights that were fought for and won by workers during the first half of the 20th century — the right to collective bargaining and freedom of association, workplace safety standards, a regulated work day and week, overtime and vacation pay, and health benefits — have been dramatically eroded in recent years, the result of increasingly neoliberal and predatory economic policies. As a result, demands for improved working conditions from 100 years ago remain relevant today. New Demands? mobilizes the slogans and demands of the American labor movement, and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in particular. Using print and neon works, installations and performances, these historical slogans and demands are reinserted into public spaces, calling attention to the ongoing need for better working conditions, and creating spaces for interaction and dialogue.
lisavinebaum.com
- PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK)
- MA in Textiles also from Goldsmiths
- BFA from Concordia University in Montreal
Associate Professor at SAIC Fiber and Material Studies saic.edu
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