Queer Craft

with Feather Chiaverini
FIBER 629 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
June 1–14, 2025

This course will consider queer aesthetics and contributions to the development of visual, literary, filmic and philosophical culture with an emphasis on craft. Queer culture is not a separate or parallel function of a larger culture, but is central to and generative for it. We will address how the inclusivity and resistance of the queer movement offers productive models for artistic production now. Demonstrations and assignments will introduce crochet, dyeing, activist performance techniques and anarchist publishing strategies to the group who will also use collaboration, exploring in nature, narrative, upscaling and play as a way to contextualize queer craft, queer activism, making kin, and queer mysticism. Readings will include Larry Mitchell + Ned Asta’s The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, 1977, Audre Lorde Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1978 and Jose Esteban Munoz Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 2010. We will look at the work of Vaginal Davis, Sheila Pepe and Joe Brainard and we will screen Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2004 film Tropical Malady and Jennie Livingston's 1990 film Paris is Burning among others. Assignments will encourage surprise, discovery, and world building. In addition to working on proposed personal projects, artists will work collaboratively on polymorphously perverse drawings, mycelium networks, and historical lesbian structures. The class will culminate in a runway presentation of crafted wearables.

Feather Chiaverini (he/they) explores how queer theory, horror, class, and pop culture shape our identities and how these tools can be used flexibly to shape the self. Inspired by the theater and everyday hustle of their family’s costume shop, they use costumes as material, rather than adornment. They make sculptures out of trash and trash out of sculptures, all mingling in a teeming mass, creating immersive installations, soft sculptures, and digital environments that reimagine our horizons. Feather is a fiber and performance artist from South Florida currently based in Philadelphia. They received a BFA from the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia. They have shown work nationally at Trout Museum of Art, N’namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Temple Contemporary, ROY G BIV Gallery, and more. Feather is currently the Residency Director of the Queer Materials Lab and adjuncts at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Feather Chiaverini, Floated out of my Throat, 2024, neoprene, fringe, and sports mesh, 1 wig, 84 x 10 x 68 in.