Craft and War

Makers, Users, and Craft Practices since the 19th Century

Jennifer Way, Heather Smith, Alida R. Jekabson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350345492
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design History & Criticism

Examining the diverse ways in which craft has participated in wars from the mid-19th century to the present day, this book brings together a wealth of scholarship to redress an understudied area of modern craft history. Craft and War explores issues of fabrication, makers, objects, uses and users throughout conflicts across the world to provide a critical understanding of the relationship between craft and contexts of war.

Chapters look at the impact of colonization on making practices and acts of preserving cultural heritage in times of dislocation and migration. Authors provide insights into repurposing tools of oppression and the appropriation of material culture as a device of warfare, in addition to embroidery and tactics of resistance, and the role of craft and folk art in international feminist peace activism. Organized into four thematic sections, this book reveals how craft developed in different regions during and after armed conflicts, including research on trench art and objects, quilts and rugs commissioned in wartime, and ceramics and the art of commemoration. Craft and War also provides a breadth of analysis on crafting as a rehabilitative activity and traces government initiatives across different countries for postwar healing involving crafts.

This important contribution to modern craft history addresses multiple facets of a rich and complex subject to provide cross-national, cultural and chronological comparisons of craft's participation in situations of conflict and stages of war.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Craft and War
• Part One Reviving Presence
• 1 Eco-critical entanglements: San pottery, genocide, historical archaeology, and Indigenous knowledge
• 2 Material recovery through hand-built talismans and other sensing objects
• Part Two Making Do
• 3 Crafting war, handling conflict: trench art, from object to embodied world
• 4 Textile handicrafts as tactics of resistance in and after Auschwitz: the example of Lisa Pinhas in context
• 5 An aesthetic ecosystem in Adrian Pepe’s untitled braided shearlings: art and resilience in Lebanon
• Part Three Craft in Displacement
• 6 Passing the thread: craft and Latvian national dress in post-war displaced communities
• 7 Memory, mediation, and affordances in Colombia’s Mampuján quilts
• Part Four Organizing Women
• 8 Intermediaries of craft in twentieth-century Morocco and Algeria
• 9 Quilting for a cause: forgetting and remembering First World War signature fundraising quilts in Canada
• 10 Another history of Indian handicraft: Partition of India, rehabilitation, and women’s work
• Part Five Craft and Healing
• 11 Modern craft in the aftermath of war: the case of the Disabled Soldiers’ Embroidery Industry, 1918–1971
• 12 Craft therapy, imperialism, and the Second World War: from Cairo military hospitals to MoMA, New York
• 13 Clay and combat: exploring the embodied experience of war through ceramic practice
• Part Six Politics of Friendship
• 14 A rose-colored reunion: craft in white Civil War veteran reconciliation
• 15 The Women’s Caravan of Peace, 1958: craft, folk art, and sisterhood fighting the Cold War divide
• 16 Exhibiting diplomacy in Cold War North Korea: the roles of craft and Juche in North Korea’s International Friendship Exhibition
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright