Current Book Project
Form to Feedback: Women, Craft, and Personal Technology, circa 1965-1980 focuses on three women working at the intersection of craft and information technology. Each offers an alternative history of technology and design: Mary Ann Scherr (1921-2016), a metalsmith who adopted shrinking circuit-boards and liquid crystal displays to create wearable biosensing jewelry in the early 1970s; Janice Lourie (b. 1930), an IBM computer programmer and hobbyist weaver who patented software for the mechanized loom that encouraged iterative feedback between designer and computer; and Sonia Sheridan (b. 1925), who blended photocopiers and fiber in an effort to restructure the relationship between the general population, technological corporations, and tools. The women in my study are not unique in the craft world for working with major corporations, nor are they unique in their eager adoption of emergent technological tools. Rather, they exemplify a complex understanding of making that engages with materiality and information on equal footing. In this way, my project offers a radical alternative history regarding the role of digital tools in creative making and provides contrasting visions of how technology could be integrated into our lives.
Rather than grounding my story in the familiar landscape of Silicon Valley, or in the well-documented interactions between fine arts and technology in the 1960s, I look to a diverse array of female artists, engineers, and craftspeople to tell a complex story of innovation and design. My project leverages a feminist analysis to reassert issues of gender into this history alongside the importance of labor and the material. The case studies in my book project include prototypes that directly relate—often through the genealogy of copyrights and patents—to our contemporary technological world, yet they also suggest different ways of life and relationships to technology. The makers and objects in my cases studies were heralded by museums, corporations, and governmental agencies alike, as faith in the handmade as a refuge for individualistic expression was joined with comforting associations of femininity to create objects that domesticated technology. Yet their projects were not entirely technophilic, and a critique of large technological systems underlies their work, even as they partnered with industry.
Rather than grounding my story in the familiar landscape of Silicon Valley, or in the well-documented interactions between fine arts and technology in the 1960s, I look to a diverse array of female artists, engineers, and craftspeople to tell a complex story of innovation and design. My project leverages a feminist analysis to reassert issues of gender into this history alongside the importance of labor and the material. The case studies in my book project include prototypes that directly relate—often through the genealogy of copyrights and patents—to our contemporary technological world, yet they also suggest different ways of life and relationships to technology. The makers and objects in my cases studies were heralded by museums, corporations, and governmental agencies alike, as faith in the handmade as a refuge for individualistic expression was joined with comforting associations of femininity to create objects that domesticated technology. Yet their projects were not entirely technophilic, and a critique of large technological systems underlies their work, even as they partnered with industry.
Publications
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
“Space Suits and Gas Masks: Mary Ann Scherr and an Alternative View of Personal Technology,” The Journal of Design History. Accepted.
“Recurring Aesthetics, Emergent Traditions: Wendell Castle’s Continued Relevance to Corporate Culture,” The Journal of Modern Craft (Spring 2018):3-15.
COMMISSIONED ESSAYS IN MUSEUM AND EXHIBITION CATALOGS
“Between Knowledge and Comfort – The Crochet Coral Reef and Data Physicalization,” Crochet Coral Reef: Toxic Seas, (Baden-Baden, Germany: The Museum Frieder Burda): forthcoming.
“Of Space Suits and Gas Masks,” 45 Stories in Jewelry, Barbara Gifford ed. (New York: Museum of Art and Design, 2020):46-47.
“Pattern Consciousness: Counterculture Influenced Interior Design,” With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985, Anna Katz, ed. (New Haven and Los Angeles: Yale University Press and MOCA, 2019):214-223.
“Unwoven: Gender Binaries in Cloth and Computing,” Ahree Lee: Pattern Code, (Los Angeles: Women’s Center for Creative Work, 2019):3-6
“Surface Tensions: Craft and the Graphic Albums Collections” eds. David Evans Frantz, Kayleigh Perkov, and Lucas Hilderbrand. Exhibition catalogue. ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. Los Angeles, CA. 2016):116-135.
ESSAYS IN MAGAZINES
“What Quilts Mean Now”, Art in America, October 14, 2021.
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/quilts-mfa-boston-fabric-of-a-nation-1234606821/
“The Making of a (Counterculture) Jeweler”, Book Review of In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture, eds. Susan Cummins, Damian Skinner, Cindi Strauss (Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2021), Art Jewelry Forum, June 28, 2021.
https://artjewelryforum.org/reviews/the-making-of-a-counterculture-jeweler/
“Space Suits and Gas Masks: Mary Ann Scherr and an Alternative View of Personal Technology,” The Journal of Design History. Accepted.
“Recurring Aesthetics, Emergent Traditions: Wendell Castle’s Continued Relevance to Corporate Culture,” The Journal of Modern Craft (Spring 2018):3-15.
COMMISSIONED ESSAYS IN MUSEUM AND EXHIBITION CATALOGS
“Between Knowledge and Comfort – The Crochet Coral Reef and Data Physicalization,” Crochet Coral Reef: Toxic Seas, (Baden-Baden, Germany: The Museum Frieder Burda): forthcoming.
“Of Space Suits and Gas Masks,” 45 Stories in Jewelry, Barbara Gifford ed. (New York: Museum of Art and Design, 2020):46-47.
“Pattern Consciousness: Counterculture Influenced Interior Design,” With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985, Anna Katz, ed. (New Haven and Los Angeles: Yale University Press and MOCA, 2019):214-223.
“Unwoven: Gender Binaries in Cloth and Computing,” Ahree Lee: Pattern Code, (Los Angeles: Women’s Center for Creative Work, 2019):3-6
“Surface Tensions: Craft and the Graphic Albums Collections” eds. David Evans Frantz, Kayleigh Perkov, and Lucas Hilderbrand. Exhibition catalogue. ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. Los Angeles, CA. 2016):116-135.
ESSAYS IN MAGAZINES
“What Quilts Mean Now”, Art in America, October 14, 2021.
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/quilts-mfa-boston-fabric-of-a-nation-1234606821/
“The Making of a (Counterculture) Jeweler”, Book Review of In Flux: American Jewelry and the Counterculture, eds. Susan Cummins, Damian Skinner, Cindi Strauss (Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2021), Art Jewelry Forum, June 28, 2021.
https://artjewelryforum.org/reviews/the-making-of-a-counterculture-jeweler/
Curatorial Projects
2020. The Computer Pays Its Debt: Women, Textiles, and Technology, 1965-1985
As a 2020 Center for Craft curatorial fellow I curated the exhibition The Computer Pays Its Debt: Women, Textiles, and Technology, 1965-1985 . This exhibition highlighted women who worked with technology and textiles before the rise of personal computing. Works by Janice Lourie, Sonia Sheridan, Sonya Rapoport, Lia Cook, and Katherine Westphal, illustrate the shared concerns and approaches that unite textiles and technology. The Computer Pays Its Debt tells the missing stories of women’s creative contributions to early computing while scrutinizing how corporations leveraged metaphors of craftwork and domesticity for commercial gain.
You can read more about the exhibition as well as view installation images here.
2016. Cock, Paper, Scissors
This project was co-curated with David Evans Frantz and Lucas Hilderbrand; it opened at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles, CA) and traveled to the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York, NY). "Cock, Paper, Scissors" brought together works by an intergenerational group of fifteen queer artists who explore the collaged page or the scrapbook with diverse, erotically inclined tactics. Drawing from both archival collections and contemporary practices, this exhibition examined how the boom in queer publishing from the era of gay liberation to the present resulted in worldmaking projects in which imagery was remixed and reimagined. This exhibition emphasizes the craft aspect at the heart of collage practice: the pleasure in the tactility of cutting, affixing, and smoothing and links the erotically inclined with handmaking.
As a 2020 Center for Craft curatorial fellow I curated the exhibition The Computer Pays Its Debt: Women, Textiles, and Technology, 1965-1985 . This exhibition highlighted women who worked with technology and textiles before the rise of personal computing. Works by Janice Lourie, Sonia Sheridan, Sonya Rapoport, Lia Cook, and Katherine Westphal, illustrate the shared concerns and approaches that unite textiles and technology. The Computer Pays Its Debt tells the missing stories of women’s creative contributions to early computing while scrutinizing how corporations leveraged metaphors of craftwork and domesticity for commercial gain.
You can read more about the exhibition as well as view installation images here.
2016. Cock, Paper, Scissors
This project was co-curated with David Evans Frantz and Lucas Hilderbrand; it opened at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (Los Angeles, CA) and traveled to the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York, NY). "Cock, Paper, Scissors" brought together works by an intergenerational group of fifteen queer artists who explore the collaged page or the scrapbook with diverse, erotically inclined tactics. Drawing from both archival collections and contemporary practices, this exhibition examined how the boom in queer publishing from the era of gay liberation to the present resulted in worldmaking projects in which imagery was remixed and reimagined. This exhibition emphasizes the craft aspect at the heart of collage practice: the pleasure in the tactility of cutting, affixing, and smoothing and links the erotically inclined with handmaking.
© Kayleigh Perkov, 2021. All images belong to myself or have been taken from Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
