Julia Hamer-Light explains that the term “craft" has ethnographic and imperialist origins, yet the concept of craft is also used by Indigenous artists to categorize their work. Hamer-Light, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History received an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowships for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad from the National Gallery of Art, and she spent spring semester in Mexico traveling between Oaxaca, Chiapas, Morelia (Michoacan) and Mexico City asking, 'how have Indigenous makers and communities mobilized the definition of “craft" to adapt to ongoing conditions of colonization?'
She entered the University of Delaware's Ph.D. program in 2019, and during her five years at UD she has developed a deep dedication to curatorial and research methodologies that creatively question the politics of categories like “art" and “craft."
Hamer-Light's work centers on Native American artists in the United States who navigated this boundary line during the 1960s and 1970s. Her dissertation is on Oglala Lakota artist-educator Arthur Amiotte's fiber wall hangings. The research in Mexico builds on her work with Indigenous artists in the United States and points toward new avenues of inquiry into relations between Indigenous artists across settler borders.
Speaking with Mexican artists in villages and curators in galleries, Hamer-Light learned how artists participate in creating new futures for Indigenous communities in Mexico, along with the specific conditions of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in the country.
Prior to receiving the National Gallery grant, Hamer-Light curated exhibitions for UD's Special Collections & Museums during the 2022-2023 academic year. The first, Seeing Textiles in Painting, Printing, and Papermaking, 1960-Today, drew from the Paul R. Jones Collection to explore how textiles inspired artists working across media. The exhibition was on view in Mechanical Hall from February to May 2023.
In the installation, Hamer-Light asked visitors to consider how textile patterns and practices like weaving, quilting and sewing provided material for experimentation. She particularly enjoyed leading tours for undergraduate courses and community members. “Most people are used to seeing 'fine' art media in museums, like painting and sculpture, although these expectations are shifting. My goal was to help visitors reconsider hierarchies between 'craft' and 'fine art' by showing how artists have always already gained inspiration from textile practices," she said.
Hamer-Light curated the second exhibition, Braided Sweetgrass and Pounded Ash: Contemporary Wabanaki Baskets as an online resource. The exhibition is part of the Museums Collections' Focus series, which helps UD's community learn more about the Museums' holdings.
Unceded Wabanaki homelands stretch from the northern parts of what is now called New England through southeastern Quebec in Canada as well as the Canadian maritime territories, and Special Collections & Museums is lucky to have a collection of contemporary baskets from Wabanaki artists.
Today, there are four federally recognized tribes in the United States who are part of what is now the Wabanaki Alliance: the Penobscot Nation (reservation in Washington County, Maine), the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Sipayik (also known as Pleasant Point) and Indian Township (reservations in Washington County, Maine), the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians (reservation in Aroostook County, Maine), and the Mi'kmaq Nation (reservation in Aroostook County, Maine). Fashioned from brown ash splints and braids of fragrant sweetgrass, the baskets are an important part of the Museums' collections.
Next year, Hamer-Light will be working with staff at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C., as a SAAM Predoctoral Fellow in American Craft. She is excited to become part of a cohort of Ph.D. students from many different programs studying art made in the United States, and she looks forward to learning from Mary Savig, Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft at SAAM, and Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakȟóta), associate curator at NMAI. Hamer-Light also plans to work with the collections at both museums as well as the National Archives and other D.C. institutions to bring her dissertation to completion.​
