Craft as Resistance: A Guide to Art Against Empire
For as long as people have made things by hand, they've used that making to push back against the people in charge. Textiles, in particular, sit at the centre of nearly every major story about empire and resistance — because cloth is both the commodity that built colonial economies and the medium through which colonized people fought back.
Art Against Empire explores these stories one episode at a time. This page collects them by theme.
The History
Textile production and political power have been inseparable for centuries. The British Empire's cotton trade depended on enslaved labour and the deliberate destruction of India's weaving industry. When Mahatma Gandhi picked up a spinning wheel, he was rebuilding an economy that colonialism had taken apart. When Flemish weavers took up arms against the French cavalry in 1302, they were fighting for control of the cloth trade that defined their cities.
Episodes:
Ep 1: Our Hands Know How to Build the World We Want — the series introduction, covering why textiles are the material history of empire
Ep 9: The Loom and the Empire — a documentary special tracing seven centuries of textile resistance, from medieval guild revolts to the Luddites to modern sweatshop labour
Quilting as Resistance
Quilts carry stories. They record births, deaths, marriages, migrations. They've been used to fundraise for abolition, to memorialize the dead during the AIDS crisis, and to teach young people to speak about justice in fabric. The Social Justice Sewing Academy, founded by Sara Trail, puts needle and thread in the hands of teenagers and lets them say what they need to say.
Episodes:
Ep 2: Quilting as Collective Storytelling — Sara Trail and the Social Justice Sewing Academy
Ep 3: Stephen Towns: Uncovering the Invisible — recovering erased Black histories through painting and quilting
Art and Climate
How do you make people care about data? Some artists are answering that question with thread. Bonnie Peterson embroiders climate measurements onto silk. Shug Munich invites strangers to process ecological grief through collaborative quilting. Paul Yore turns consumer waste into maximalist textile installations.
Episodes:
Ep 5: Art as Witness to Climate Crimes — Bonnie Peterson, Shug Munich, and Paul Yore on making the invisible visible
Grief, Memory, and Making
When grief goes public — when it gets stitched into fabric and carried into the street — it becomes something different. The AIDS Quilt did this at a national scale. Individual artists do it in their studios every day, turning loss into something you can hold.
Episodes:
Ep 6: Memory, Grief and the Politics of Remembering — Mary Burgess, Michael Sylvan Robinson, and what happens when grief becomes material
Community Care in Craft
Craft spaces aren't automatically inclusive. Who feels welcome at a quilt guild? Who gets to stand at a forge? Some makers are building new structures — collectives, academies, online communities — that start from the assumption that the old ways of organizing didn't work for everyone.
Episodes:
Ep 7: Community Care with The Society of Inclusive Blacksmiths — Joy Fire, Lisa Geertsen, and what it takes to build a craft community from scratch
Ep 4: Perfect Is Boring: Failure As Resistance — Kim Werker on the liberating power of making things badly
Permanent Art, Permanent Resistance
Some art can be taken down. Some can't. Mosaic artist Carrie Reichardt has spent twenty years covering her house and garden in political mosaic that's designed to outlast the institutions it criticizes.
Episodes:
Ep 8: Carrie Reichardt: Politics of Permanence — the Mosaic House and why permanence is political
Listen to the Show
New episodes every two weeks. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or subscribe via RSS.