The Pattern of Modernity: Textiles in Art, Fashion, and Cultural Memory in Nigeria since 1960

Abstract

This thesis explores the appropriation of printed and tie-dyed textiles in visual art and culture produced in Nigeria since 1960. By examining the social and political functions of the Yoruba indigo dyed fabric called adire as they evolved over the 20th century, the analyses of artistic appropriations are informed by the perspectives and histories of the cultural production of women in Nigeria's southwest dyeing centers. Questions related to the gendered production of both "traditional crafts" and "modern art" are raised and reformulated for the specific context of textiles. Additionally, the ideology of 'Natural Synthesis' that was a formative force for the post-Independence generation of artists is considered as an influence on the drive to appropriate textiles and their patterns, as well as to conceive of them as "traditional" culture within an artistic paradigm of tradition and modernity. It argues that appropriations of textiles by modernist artists seize and sometimes erase the modernity of female and indigenous cultural production. Since these late modernist movements, artistic appropriations of textiles have continued within the field of visual arts, but underwent significant evolution in terms of media, subject matter, and conceptual underpinnings. Artists no longer undermine the modernity of cultural producers, but use it as a critical tool. These changes represent both a departure from modernist styles that characterized artistic practices in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a renegotiation with the relationship of textiles to the historical and cultural past of a young nation. As artists and designers of the late 20th and 21st centuries explore the textile in new media and on different terms from their predecessors, new themes emerge such as consumerism, memory and history that situate this generation of cultural producers within global artistic genres and spheres that have dominated since the 1980s.