1
Seated on a massive spiral textile, artist Evelyn Roth crochets, a wooden hook in one hand and fabric strips looped around the other. Collaborators lounge nearby, immersed in cutting garments into strips to be incorporated into the growing structure. Roth’s half-smile, caught by the camera, invites viewers into this world of collaborative making, rupturing the stillness of the photograph with the liveliness of shared conversation and rhythms of crochet. This scene represents Roth’s first public educational initiative to involve the people of Vancouver in a collaborative process of creative recycling through crochet. Unfolding during the Rainbow Activist Festival held at the University of British Columbia in 1971, Roth’s informal workshop guided participants through the process of crocheting recycled fabrics into a monumental sculpture (The Vancouver Province, 1971, p. 27). The process-oriented workshop allowed Roth to share her technical knowledge and support participants as they practiced the techniques of stripping fabrics and looping them together in the formation of the massive spiral textile (see Figure 14.1). The Rainbow Activist Festival focused on the potential for artists to engage communities in the creative process around social justice issues. This event provided a practical and conceptual foundation for Roth to establish this multidimensional practice of technical skill-sharing, environmentalist consciousness-raising, and alternative artistic activity that challenged conventional divisions of “art” and “everyday life”.
Evelyn Roth, Environment for Reading Recycled from 110 Sweaters, 1974. Installation view. Collection of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Photograph: Sharon Mollerus. In this monumental work, Roth transforms the yarn of 110 unraveled sweaters into an immersive, spiraling sanctuary. The crocheted structure and its recycled material composition echo her earlier “ARTicle,” created for the Rainbow Activist Festival, transforming the domestic act of knitting into a grand, participatory statement. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Roth began using discarded textiles to sew her own clothes as a teenager and continued to develop practices of reuse when she became involved in the Vancouver arts scene in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, she adopted the critical framework of recycling to situate her artmaking explicitly in relation to the growing environmentalist movement (Murray, 1977). The community-oriented educational direction that she developed asserted the critical potential of alternative artistic practice in activism, raised public consciousness around issues of environmental degradation, and shared strategies that people could apply in their daily lives to counter the rhythms of mass consumption. This chapter examines the effects of this discursive shift as Roth connected activism and artmaking through the framework of alternative art education. I ask, how did she approach art education differently to engage the public in art and activism? What strategies did she develop to intertwine her textile-based artistic practice, the environmentalist movement and creative knowledge-sharing? Focusing on the initial years of Roth’s ongoing artistic career from 1967 to 1975, I will illuminate the ways that Roth challenged conventional boundaries of “art” and “everyday life” to generate community engagement in art and activism.
2 Participation and Collectivity in Social Activism and the Arts
In 1961, Evelyn Roth moved from Edmonton to Vancouver and began working as a librarian in the Fine Arts library at the University of British Columbia (“The Tapes of Roth,” 1976). Through her community connections, she became involved in a local network of artists, educators, and culture workers experimenting with unconventional approaches to artmaking. Many participated in social movements, establishing a distinct connection between artistic activity and political action driven by progressive social values (Watson, 2005). Artist Iain Baxter& describes their utopic vision, writing, “we thought that art could change life, change the environment, change Vancouver” (Baxter&, 1983, as cited in Pinney, 1983, p. 180).1 Galleries throughout the city, the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) and the University of British Columbia acted as institutional bases for artists, art students, educators and curators to stage experimental exhibitions, events, and boundary-crossing art practices. In 1961, Fine Arts Department Head B.C. Binning and Fine Arts secretary June Binkert organized a contemporary arts festival at the University of British Columbia that would become an annual event. Talks, workshops and exhibitions involving artists and theorists from cities across North America exposed Vancouver’s art community to an international network of practices that rejected conventional approaches to media, engaged with the political concerns of social movements, and critiqued the alienating structures of dominant social order.2 These events played a crucial role in overcoming regional isolation and developing art and activism in tandem through methods of collaboration, participation, and cross-disciplinary approaches to multiple media forms (Bancroft, n.d.).
The university hosted several individuals who were considering the cultural and sensory effects of “new media” in art and theory. The participation of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan and several artists who engaged with media theory through interdisciplinary artistic practices especially impacted the direction of the arts in Vancouver, introducing the concept of “intermedia” to describe artistic explorations of multiple media forms (Watson, 2005; Lowndes, 1983). Intermedia artists shared the
Collective creativity is a growing need in our society. People are coming together for communal living purposes, in neighborhood interest groups, in special interest groups, and in groups struggling for personal growth and participation in the life/art experience […] The desire to participate extends to all art, to education, to theater and dance, to politics, to the women’s movement […] But the desire to participate must be matched by a framework to allow it to happen. (Halprin & Burns, 1974, p. 2)
Roth’s engagement with this project coalesced with her involvement in Intermedia and related networks of community organizing. Roth used the visibility afforded by her experiments with wearables to bridge her creative endeavors and participation in local activism.4 Roth and her then-partner Donald Gutstein were central organizers of the West Broadway Citizens Community, a group that advocated for the community members of the Kitsilano neighborhood (Murray, 1977). In the 1960s and 1970s, the neighborhood was threatened by the rapid expansion of urban redevelopment projects in Vancouver. Protesting evictions, destruction of the landscape, and the expansion of high-rise and freeway building projects, the organization allowed Roth to bring her art into the realm of community activism. She states, “art could not be done for art’s sake. There are important issues to be dealt with in the neighborhood and one way I could help was through my art” (Roth, 1977, as cited in Murray, 1977, p. 33). Roth viewed wearables as a tool to draw attention to protest actions, using the visibility generated by her unconventional approach to dress to support community initiatives. The growing public awareness of the interconnected issues of ecological degradation, urban redevelopment, social alienation, and the power structures behind them fostered an environment where diverse social movements overlapped. This convergence blurred the boundaries between different social justice causes, creating opportunities for collaboration across various activist initiatives. Roth’s participation in community organizing against urban redevelopment projects in Vancouver deeply connected her to this network of activism.
Recycling was very new in 1970–1971 and the media, unfortunately has an important role to play as to what emphasis is put on things. I was recycling before then but then I really developed as a “recycling workshop” specialist because there was a demand for a display at the Contemporary
Crafts Festival at UBC which was all on recycling. (Roth, 1977, as cited in Murray, 1977, p. 35)
As Roth identifies, while recycling emerged in the early 1970s to describe the intentional use of discarded materials in response to ecological concerns, practices of reuse existed long before this term emerged in the context of social activism (Coates, 2016). Roth’s practice is part of a far-reaching history of women’s creative reuse of “unusable” objects, taking the resources at their disposal to create new things (Lippard, 1978). The rhetoric of recycling situated Roth’s existing strategies within the discursive framework of environmentalism, making the political investments of her practice explicit and opening avenues for public visibility and engagement. Recycling allowed her to engage with social issues through her artistic practice after Intermedia’s dissolution in 1971. Transitioning from Intermedia to the broader context of international alternative art practice and incorporating the relatively new framework of the environmentalist movement, Roth expanded her network while continuing to engage with the practical and conceptual themes that had defined her work in the 1960s.
3 (Re)Making Things in the Museum: Community Involvement in Creative Activity
Roth began to cultivate participatory “recycling workshops” in the early 1970s, intertwining her independent explorations of “wearable art” and textile sculptures with concepts and practices of collective activity in Intermedia, “Experiments in Environment” and community organizing. In 1971, Roth was invited to participate in the exhibition series ACTS held at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in New York City.5 Established in 1956, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Arts and Design) was connected to the School of the American Craftsman and the American Crafts Council through their founder, philanthropist Aileen Osborn Webb, and several programming initiatives (Museum of Arts and Design, MAD, n.d.). A graduate of the School of the American Craftsman, Paul J. Smith, acted as the museum’s director from 1963 to 1987. Expanding upon his earlier work developing travelling educational exhibitions and programming at the museum, Smith’s directorial work emphasized craft education, public participation, and experimental approaches to curating and programming (American Crafts Council, ACC, n.d.). ACTS was among the initiatives that he set in motion to redefine the museum as a space for community, public education, participation and unconventional approaches to institutional practices.
Evelyn Roth and participants, Recycled Costumes, 1971. Performance and workshop during the exhibition Costume Statements at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York. © American Craft Council. Courtesy of the American Craft Council Archives
Since the mid-twentieth century, “hobby craft” kits and instruction books proliferated on the mass market, drawing together the seemingly oppositional domains of “do-it-yourself” and mass consumer culture. Writing in 1978, feminist art critic and theorist Lucy Lippard examined the contradictions and cultural meanings of “hobby craft” in relation to class, gender and the conceptual and practical division of public and “domestic” space (Lippard, 1978). She describes how “hobby craft” functions differently for women in diverse class situations, acting as a leisure activity, economic necessity, or unattainable use of scarce free time. Lippard analyzes feminist artists’ intentional references to histories of women’s creative practices of reuse in textiles, collage, and other
Exploring the artistic potential of accessible materials and textile techniques in this moment where “hobby craft” practices were increasingly visible and understood differently across cultural contexts, Roth developed specific methods to overcome categorical constraints, destabilize dominant cultural regimes of value and indicate the critical educational aspects of the workshops. While the exhibition’s conceptual framework amplified familiar materials and public involvement as sites of inquiry into “the environment” and the status of clothing in everyday life, the recycling workshop added layers of nuance to these themes. Cultural anthropologist Igor Kopytoff’s method of “a biography of things” offers ground to understand the cultural meanings of the workshop materials (Kopytoff, 1986). Developed as a method to analyze the cultural forces that shape how objects are valued and circulated in different exchange systems, the “biography of things” follows materials as they travel along or diverge from intended paths of circulation to reveal the nuances of
Roth intentionally created a welcoming and playful atmosphere to undermine the anticipated “seriousness” of artmaking and encourage public engagement in creative activity. Conventional modes of artistic practice emphasize sole authorship, notions of artistic “genius” and formal training structures that alienate the public from direct engagement in creative activity. Costume Statements marked an institutional attempt to diverge from traditional boundaries between “artist,” “art object,” and “audience,” rather embracing experimentation to carve out new pathways for collaboration and engagement in creative processes (ACC, 1971). The bright colors of the textiles and furniture, unusual structure of the central hanging, and casual arrangement of the recycling room drew attention to the space and established a sense of welcome. The chunky crocheted hats, booties, and mittens left in the space recontextualized seemingly mundane objects, subverting assumptions around the types of objects that could be considered “art.” By employing familiar materials and objects as the basis for creative activity, Roth established an accessible visual and tactile foundation to catalyze participation in the recycling workshop space. The pleasure of artmaking, playful spontaneity of creative expression and time spent with others in collaboration replaced conventions of passive observation and quiet contemplation in the experience of the gallery space. Further, the playfulness of this creative environment subverted the idea that activism solely encompasses “serious” practices of protest, structured political organizing and publicized actions. Familiar materials and accessible methods of creation positioned activism and artmaking as cultural practices that could materialize in everyday life. Interweaving arts education, creative experimentation, and environmental activism, the recycling workshop offered ground for the community to reconsider conventional approaches to the material world, learn methods of reuse, and reevaluate everyday creative activities beyond their systematic devaluation as amateur “hobby craft.”
4
With the success of her early iterations of recycling workshops, Roth continued to develop her alternative educational initiatives. Aiming to reach diverse publics with her message and skill-sharing project, Roth cultivated methods to bring visibility to her practice and expand the scope of the workshop events. Roth became interested in using videotape as a medium for the construction of wearables, environments, and other objects during Costume Statements, where she noticed the structural possibilities of the “scratchy plastic material” (Roth, 1977, as cited in Murray, 1977, p. 32). Roth realized that the videotape’s particular tactile qualities and material behaviors rendered it especially useful to conduct participatory workshops, as it allowed for objects to be made quickly using finger-crochet strategies, thus requiring little time and no additional tools to create items such as hats and bags (Murray, 1977, p. 32). In 1972, supported by her first individual Canada Arts Council Grant, Roth embarked on a road trip from Vancouver to St. John’s, Newfoundland, holding workshops and participatory events centered on recycling videotape into hats and canopies across the country (Evelyn Roth Arts, n.d.). Over the course of the trip, Roth collected discarded videotape from news stations and other media sources, using it as material for these workshops and events. The abundance of videotape that could no longer serve its function as a device of new media technology allowed Roth to acquire plenty of material for these workshops. Further, her project brought visibility to this massive quantity of discarded tape, calling attention to the materiality of seemingly dematerialized media forms and their ecological impact in generating plastic waste.
While unconventional and repurposed materials were being explored in weaving and textile departments in art schools and universities, Roth endeavored to reach people who were not pursuing formal art training to situate creative reuse as an activity that could be incorporated into everyday life.6 The videotape recycling workshops deemphasized technical skill, theories of practice, professionalization and the judgement of work based on notions of symbolic value and quality, rather focusing on rethinking everyday engagements with the material world and subverting boundaries between “art” and daily life. The educational dimensions of the recycling workshops formed through this alternative structure as people from different backgrounds were brought into the space of experimental artmaking to engage with the multiple aspects of Roth’s practice as active participants.
In each city that Roth visited on her cross-country tour, news stations were invited to film the events and participate in the creation of videotape objects.
Using mass media as a platform and source of raw material for her recycling practice, she exploited the affordances of the very structures she critiqued—the passive consumption of media and cultural systems sustaining the production of material waste. An expression of power over her self-image and embodiment of her ideological investments, her deliberate self-fashioning produced a persona that allowed her recycling practice to gain public attention. Without the stability of a formal institutional setting and curriculum, these methods of cultivating visibility allowed Roth to share her message and spark community engagement in her public workshop series. Her use of dress to overcome the ongoing systemic marginalization women’s artistic practices, challenging the relegation of “craft” to the domestic sphere and demonstrating the generative potential of an otherwise overlooked site of cultural signification.
[y]ou’re watching the media […] and one is usually caught by what’s on the television […] dull, stupefying material […] it’s really hard to enter a home where the people are watching a television program […] it’s like a line is connecting people to the TV set. (CBC Special, 1974)
The social and temporal dimensions of the cross-country recycling workshops opposed these dynamics of isolation and passivity, rather mobilizing electronic media’s material refuse to generate new community experiences and counter dominant practices of consumption. The process of crochet triggered subtle shifts in normative experiences of time and social dynamics in the context of the recycling workshops. Traditional patriarchal structures and discursive conventions have used the repetitive nature of crochet to denigrate the practice as a mindless pass-time (Parker, 1984). However, in the context of the recycling workshops, repetition allowed participants to practice the technique while making their hats, establishing a structure of process-based learning and time for community engagement. While dominant capitalist systems emphasize speed and efficiency, the temporal dynamics of crochet invited people to slow down, form connections, and experience the pleasure of making things by hand with others. Women have used “craft” practices including embroidery, quilting, knitting and crochet to form community and participate in public social life in many contexts throughout history.7 Evoking these often-overlooked legacies and asserting the value of “craft” practices in art and activism, the recycling workshops countered dominant cultural practices and beliefs on multiple levels, offering ground to overcome social alienation, passive consumption, and patriarchal regimes of value.
Roth’s Videotape Recycled road trip brought attention to the cultural effects of mass communication and its contribution to the production of waste. The public transmission of her alternative practical and conceptual approach to the material world demonstrated the potential for a broad audience to adopt alternative methods of navigating their material and social realities beyond the constraints of dominant cultural practices.8
5 The Evelyn Roth Recycling Book
By the mid-1970s, Roth was a key figure in a local and international network of artists intertwining art and environmental activism. From the time of her road trip to 1975, she continued to host workshops across North America at art
This is not an art book, although it shows you art objects; it is not in a strict sense a craft book either, although it tells you quite explicitly how to do the crafts involved in making the pieces illustrated. This is a book about how to make things before the notion of ‘art’ and ‘craft’ and ‘use’ became arbitrarily divided, or more particularly, the way Evelyn Roth thinks about making things right now. (Roth, 1975, p. 9)
Countering the division of modes of creation and the dominant cultural framework of “art” and “craft,” Roth positions the book as a space to approach “making things” beyond categorical constraints. Lippard’s analysis of the enduring
6 Conclusion: Transformations in the Material World
Unraveling, unraveling, unraveling (Roth, 1975). Roth begins her description of deconstructing garments into raw material with playful repetition, mirroring the rhythm of the action in writing. In the broader context of her practice, this unraveling spans material and conceptual terrain. Revealing and subverting institutional conventions, categorical hierarchies, and dominant social and material systems, Roth’s alternative educational initiatives illuminated the potential to approach art and everyday life beyond the constraints of existing domains of thought and practice. Despite the challenges of carving out space to cultivate unconventional approaches to art, activism and art education, Roth found ways to assert the cultural and political value of public participation, ordinary materials, and “craft” techniques. Recycling workshops triggered departures from the rhythms of everyday life to actuate different ways of engaging with materials and forming community dynamics. As Roth cultivated strategies to generate participation in artmaking and activism through creative reuse, she demonstrated the instability of categorical boundaries and institutional conventions. Taking apart discarded objects to make them available for reuse paralleled the symbolic undoing of dominant practical and discursive
Notes
The artist’s choice to include “&” at the end of his name reflects the increased interest in understanding artistic practice as an inherently collaborative activity. The artist describes this inclusion as a way to signify a “non-authorial take on art production” (see Anonymous, 2008).
For a list of exhibitions and events, see Gilbert et al. (1983, pp. 190–207). For an interview regarding the context, see Binkert (2005). For information on a specific exhibition, see The Intermedia Catalogue (n.d.-b).
Buckminster Fuller presented at Simon Fraser University in 1967 (Pinney, 1983). Victor Doray describes the influence of McLuhan’s notion of the “global village” as it propelled dialogues among Intermedia artists (Doray et al., 2009).
Intermedia artists organized and participated in several activist initiatives and protest actions as a group. For example, in 1969, Intermedia sponsored and executed a consciousness-raising initiative against the proposed Georgia Viaduct freeway project. The group took a “protest bus” throughout Vancouver, distributing flyers on the effects of the proposed urban redevelopment project on local neighborhoods and the natural landscape of the city, see The Intermedia Catalogue (n.d.-a).
Roth was invited to participate by artist and dancer Marilyn Wood, who she met in 1968 at “Experiments in Environment” (Roth, 2006).
The work of Ed Rosenbach and Debra Rappaport are examples of creative explorations of found objects in the practices and teaching activities of weavers and educators. Rappaport exhibited wearables alongside Roth’s work in Costume Statements and likely introduced Roth to videotape as a material for crocheting (see Constantine & Larsen, 1972).
Feminist art historian Julia Bryan Wilson analyzes several examples of these histories and ongoing collective organizing initiatives that involve craft practices (see Bryan-Wilson, 2017).
E. Roth (personal communication, June 30, 2021).
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