Jenni Sorkin: Deviant Scale: Cloth at the Body's Margins

This talk gives an early glimpse into Jenni Sorkin’s in-process book project, Deviant Scale: Cloth at the Body’s Margins, which argues for a reevaluation of textile-based art production in the United States during the period of 1985–2000, an era when identity politics collided with a new materiality in artistic production. Intense, raw, and immersive, the immediacy of cloth is its evocation of the body. Sorkin will argue that cloth became the most important and influential medium through which to deconstruct race, gender, sexuality, mobility, and disability, rather than the lens-based media of photography and video, which came to dominate identity-driven artistic representation in American group art exhibitions.

Jenni Sorkin is Professor of History of Art & Architecture at University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media. Her books include: Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community (University of Chicago, 2016), Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women Artists, 1947-2016 (Skira, 2016) and Art in California (Thames & Hudson, 2021), as well as numerous essays in journals and exhibition catalogs. She received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Craft. From 2021-22, she was Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. She also serves as the Co-Executive Editor of Panorama: the Association of Historians of American Art.