Art Against Empire

A queer artist in Boston crochets basketball nets and paints whole courts like quilts. This is what happens next. Maria Molteni makes hand-crocheted basketball nets and paints full-size basketball courts at the kind of scale you can only see from a drone. Their courts have won a National Public Art Award. Their collective, NCAA (New Craft Artists in Action), has collaborators around the world. The...

This is Part 3 of 3 of our documentary. The Freedom Quilting Bee, where sixty Black women in Alabama built a cooperative while fighting for the right to vote. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, forty-four thousand panels on the National Mall. Gilbert Baker's rainbow flag. Palestinian tatreez. Rana Plaza, where the locked door was the same locked door from the Triangle fire a century earlier. And then the tu...

A Queer Legends × Art Against Empire crossover. Ian Danger Capstick sits down with Cleve Jones, the activist who conceived the AIDS Memorial Quilt on a cold November night in 1985 with a stack of posterboard and Harvey Milk's old bullhorn, given to Cleve after Harvey was assassinated.  The two talk about the afternoon Cleve first walked into Castro Camera, the morning Gilbert Baker raised the firs...

Part two of our three-part documentary special picks up where " Who Owns the Cloth " left off and traces textile resistance from the turn of the twentieth century through the end of World War II. From global factory uprisings in Lodz, Rio Blanco, and Bengal, to Clara Lemlich's famous call to strike in 1909, plus the impacts of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, suffragette banners stitched behind priso...

This is Part 1 of a three-episode documentary special tracing seven centuries of the same fight: who owns the cloth? Co-creator Shawn Dearn narrates the history while actors read from primary sources, including Lord Byron's furious defence of the Luddites, Charity Clarke's 1769 letter about "a fighting army of amazones, armed with spinning wheels," and Queen Liliuokalani's memoir from inside her o...

It takes "quite an act of violence" to remove a mosaic from a wall. For twenty-five years, Carrie Reichardt has used that fact as political strategy — cementing memorials for death row inmates across four continents, covering her London home floor-to-roof in mosaic, and building a truck-mounted monument to a man executed by the state of Texas that ended up in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This e...

In 2018, eleven women blacksmiths gathered in Oregon to build together. They didn't plan to start an organization. But the conversation kept going and the Society of Inclusive Blacksmiths was born. Their motto is: "Everyone has something to offer, everyone has something to learn." This episode explores what happens when craft communities decide to take care of each other. From medieval guild statu...

After her partner died, Mary Burgess wove herself a blanket from his clothes and the jacket she wore to his funeral. When she finished, she thought: I could do this for other people. This episode asks a question that haunts empires: whose deaths count? Philosopher Judith Butler argues that to grieve publicly is to insist a life mattered — which is why authoritarian regimes have always tried to sup...

Artists have always responded to their environment, but what happens when it changes?  Art Against Empire's fifth episode goes to Michigan, where an artist embroiders glacier data onto silk and we check in on Minneapolis, where strangers gather in a library basement to make a crazy quilt from surgical bandages and childhood dish towels. This episode explores how artists respond to environmental cr...

Episode 4 of Art Against Empire explores how perfectionism is used as a tool of oppression.  This episode features an interview with Kim Werker who is a weaver, creator of the Mighty Ugly project and a craft entrepreneur; as well as an anecdote from Catherine West of Significant Seams in the United Kingdom.  Both guests use workshops to help people overcome perfectionism that is holding them back....

Welcome to Episode 3 of Art Against Empire ! Stephen Towns paints and quilts the histories that America tried to erase, from Nat Turner's rebellion to forgotten spaces of Black joy. In 2018, Stephen became the first African American artist-in-residence at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Not 1968, 2018! There, he created a portrait of Elsie Henderson, the Black woman who ran that famous house fo...

Welcome to Episode 2 of Art Against Empire ! Quilting as Collective Storytelling weaves together the stories of the AIDS quilt, the Abolition Sewing Bee and features the work of Sara Trail who founded the Social Justice Sewing Academy in Oakland, Californnia. Sara's putting needle and thread into the hands of young people from marginalized communities. They've stitched portraits of police violence...

Quilters, blacksmiths, weavers, embroiderers - 25 artists across four countries using craft to fight systems of power. Welcome to Art Against Empire! This series introduction launches a 16-episode journey featuring over two dozen artists, craftspeople, and theorists across four countries. You'll hear from quilters stitching memorials to police violence victims, blacksmiths forging tools as acts of...

Art Against Empire examines the intersection of creativity and politics through conversations with artists, craftspeople, and activists who use making as a form of resistance. Hosted by recovering political pundit and textile artist Ian Danger Capstick, each episode dives into the radical history of craft traditions, profiles contemporary makers disrupting systems, and shares practical projects th...