Craft and War

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.

Jennifer Way is Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas, USA, specializing in modern and contemporary art, emphasizing social meanings and uses that people make of art, fabrication activities, craft, design and exhibitions. Her current work examines craft objects and fabrication in contexts of war-related coping and healing since the 19th century. She is the author of The Politics of Vietnamese Craft (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Heather Smith has 30 years of experience working in art and history museums and art galleries in Canada. She organized numerous travelling exhibitions such as Quilting for a Cause: Red Cross Quilts for the Great War (2019); Vaughan Grayson an Artist in the Canadian Rockies (2006); Keepsakes of Conflict: Trench Art and Other Canadian War-Related Craft (2006); and Fred Strickland's War Sketches (2002). In 2013, she won the publisher of the year award from the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Hansen Ross Pottery: Pioneering Fine Craft on the Canadian Prairies (2012).
Alida Jekabson is Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, USA where she has contributed to numerous exhibitions, including Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle (2022), Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art (2022), Craft Front & Center (2021), Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times (2021) and MAD Collects: The Future of Craft Part 1 and Part 2 (2018). Jekabson's scholarship focuses on cultural heritage, identity and craft, and she has published in Miradas 5: Bodies/Fashions in the Américas (2021), and presented at The Craft History Workshop, College Art Association, USA and Association for Art History, UK, among other conferences.