Reclaiming Women’s Art Forms

Challenging the Boundaries Between Art and Craft

A friend recently sent me photographs from Shanghai’s International Import Export Expo, where embroideries from Suzhou were on display. The images were striking—works so finely detailed and skillfully executed that they appeared three-dimensional, almost photographic in their lifelike quality.

The technical virtuosity was undeniable, the aesthetic achievement profound. Yet I found myself wondering: How would these works be classified in the Western art world? Would they be celebrated as masterpieces, or relegated to the category of “craft”?

Would they hang in art museums or decorative arts galleries? And why should the answer to these questions matter so much?

These questions point to a deeper problem. The traditional division between “art” and “craft” is not a timeless truth but a relatively recent historical construction—one deeply entangled with questions of gender, class, and institutional power.

For centuries, certain creative practices have been elevated as “fine art” while others have been dismissed as mere “craft,” and this hierarchy has consistently tracked along gender lines.

Men’s work in the public sphere—paintings in galleries, sculptures in public squares, monumental architecture—became the standard for “real” art. Women’s creative labor in the domestic sphere—embroidery, quilting, knitting, weaving—was relegated to a lesser status, seen as decorative hobby work rather than serious artistic expression.

But this hierarchy reveals more about power structures than about the inherent nature of creative work. Should we be trying to elevate “women’s crafts” into the category of art, or should we be challenging what that category represents in the first place? What if the goal is not to get quilts into the Museum of Modern Art, but to question why MoMA’s definition of art matters so much?

The Invention of “Fine Art”

The concept of “fine art” as a separate realm distinct from craft or functional making only crystallized in the 18th century. As Larry Shiner argues in The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (2001), the modern system of fine arts emerged from specific European social, economic, and philosophical developments—not from timeless truths about creative work.

In medieval Europe, what we now call “artists” were organized in craft guilds alongside other skilled workers. Painters belonged to the same guild as apothecaries (since both worked with pigments). Sculptors worked alongside stonemasons.

The Latin term ars simply meant skill or technique—it encompassed what we now separate into “art” and “craft” without meaningful distinction. A painter of altarpieces and a maker of decorated chests were both practicing their ars.

The transformation came in the 18th century with the establishment of art academies, the development of aesthetic philosophy (particularly Kant), and the emergence of public museums.

The French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, founded in 1648, explicitly separated “fine arts” from crafts, establishing hierarchies even within painting (history painting at the top, still life at the bottom).

By the time Charles Batteux published Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe (1746), the modern system was in place: five fine arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry) unified by their capacity to produce aesthetic pleasure, distinct from mechanical arts serving merely utilitarian purposes.

As Paul Oskar Kristeller demonstrated in his influential 1951-52 essay “The Modern System of the Arts,” this classification was historically contingent—an active construction, not recognition of natural categories. And it had immediate gendered consequences.

Gender, Class, and Exclusion

The consolidation of “fine art” as a category happened simultaneously with the exclusion of women from professional artistic practice. As academies formalized training and credentialing, they systematically barred women from essential components—particularly life drawing from nude models, considered necessary for history painting, the highest genre.

Women were channeled into “appropriate” forms: miniature painting, botanical illustration, watercolors, and decorative needlework.

This wasn’t accidental. As Parker and Pollock argue in Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981), the art/craft hierarchy mapped onto gender ideology. Fine art emphasized genius, originality, intellectual conception, and transcendence of material constraints—all qualities associated with masculinity.

Craft, by contrast, was associated with repetitive manual labor, following patterns, working with domestic materials, and serving functional needs—all coded as feminine. The very same activity could be classified differently depending on who performed it and in what context.

This gendering was inseparable from class distinctions. As Pierre Bourdieu analyzed in Distinction (1979), aesthetic judgment—the capacity to appreciate art “for its own sake” rather than for functional purposes—became a marker of class status. Working-class people and women were presumed incapable of “pure” aesthetic appreciation; their creative production was necessarily tied to utility and therefore couldn’t be “true” art.

The art/craft divide thus reinforced both gender and class hierarchies, positioning upper-class men as the only legitimate creators and appreciators of autonomous art.

The parallel treatment of non-Western art reveals the same logic. Throughout the 19th century, European colonial powers encountered sophisticated traditions—African masks, Oceanic sculptures, Indigenous textiles—that served religious, cosmological, and social functions simultaneously. Initially categorized as ethnographic specimens rather than art, these objects were displayed in natural history museums alongside bones and tools.

When early 20th-century avant-garde artists “discovered” them and reclassified them as “art,” the elevation depended on stripping away original contexts and meanings. As Sally Price argues in Primitive Art in Civilized Places (1989), a mask made for specific rituals became an “artwork” appreciated for “bold forms,” its knowledge systems and living traditions erased in favor of formal aesthetic appreciation.

The same decontextualization that dismissed women’s quilting as “mere craft” also reduced sacred ritual objects to decorative sculpture.

Scholarly Challenges to the Hierarchy

Contemporary scholarship has worked to dismantle these hierarchies by revealing their constructedness. Linda Nochlin’s landmark 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” showed that the absence of women from art history’s canon resulted from systematic exclusion from the conditions that produce recognized “greatness,” not lack of genius.

Rozsika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch (1984) traced how embroidery became coded as feminine and trivial despite its technical sophistication—an association that was historically constructed, since embroidery was once practiced by men in professional guilds.

More recent work in material culture studies has pushed further. Glenn Adamson’s Thinking Through Craft (2007) argues that craft offers alternative values—skill, process, materiality, functionality—that are devalued not because they lack merit but because they threaten the art world’s investment in concepts like genius, originality, and aesthetic autonomy.

Feminist scholars like Elissa Auther (author of String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art) have shown how the denigration of craft is inseparable from the denigration of domestic labor and embodied knowledge.

These scholars don’t just want to add women to art history; they want to transform how we understand creative production itself.

The Democratic Potential—and Its Limits

One compelling argument for revaluing traditionally “women’s” art forms is their potentially democratic character. Unlike oil painting or bronze sculpture, which required expensive materials, specialized training, and institutional sponsorship, practices like quilting, embroidery, and knitting could be learned outside formal institutions.

Knowledge passed from mother to daughter, between neighbors, through communities. Materials were often repurposed—quilts made from fabric scraps, embroidery on household linens.

This is art-making that exists outside gatekeeping structures. The quilts made by descendants of enslaved people on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia are powerful examples. These works served multiple functions simultaneously: practical bed coverings, cultural markers preserving African aesthetic traditions, family heirlooms carrying intergenerational memory, and—in some documented cases—coded messages about Underground Railroad escape routes.

These quilts accomplished what any great art does: they made meaning, preserved memory, built community, and enacted resistance. They did all this without validation from art institutions, without conforming to academic theories about composition or form.

Yet we should be careful not to romanticize these practices. Quilting and fine embroidery required substantial leisure time—not equally distributed. Enslaved women who quilted often did so after exhausting days of forced labor. Working-class women who sewed did so out of economic necessity, not always by choice.

The “privacy” of the domestic sphere could be as much constraint as haven. And transmission of knowledge through informal networks, while bypassing institutional gatekeeping, also meant these practices often went undocumented, unpreserved, and uncompensated.

The democratic potential lies not in romanticizing past conditions but in recognizing that valuable creative work happens outside official channels—and in questioning why we’ve built systems that only recognize certain kinds of creativity as worthy of preservation, study, and economic support.

The Arts and Crafts Movement: Ambiguous Legacy

The late 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement attempted to revalue handcraft and challenge industrialization’s dehumanizing effects. William Morris championed integrating art and craft, arguing that all workers should find beauty and meaning in their labor. He rejected the hierarchy that placed painting and sculpture above furniture-making and textile design.

Yet the movement’s relationship to gender was deeply contradictory. Morris celebrated medieval guild traditions that were exclusively male. While women did much of the Arts and Crafts embroidery and textile work, they were often positioned as assistants implementing (male) designers’ visions rather than as artists in their own right.

Louis Comfort Tiffany’s case is even more revealing. His innovative stained glass achieved recognition as “art” rather than craft—but partly by masculinizing it. His studio employed many women artisans (his “Tiffany Girls”), but Tiffany himself received recognition as an artist and genius. The craft became “art” when associated with a male creator operating in a professional studio, while women who did much of the fabrication remained anonymous craftspeople.

This pattern suggests that the art/craft hierarchy is less about the work’s inherent nature than about who does it and under what conditions. A tapestry woven by a woman at home is “craft”; a tapestry commissioned for a cathedral is “art.” The Arts and Crafts movement made important contributions by insisting on handwork’s value, but often left gender hierarchies intact or even reinforced them by selectively elevating certain practitioners while leaving others in the shadows.

Contemporary Reclamation: Personal and Political

Recent decades have seen powerful efforts to reclaim these art forms as both personally meaningful and politically charged. Rather than seeking validation from traditional art institutions, many contemporary practitioners have embraced craft as a site of resistance, community-building, and alternative value systems.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt, created collectively beginning in 1987, demonstrates craft’s capacity to bear witness, memorialize loss, and mobilize political action. Each panel commemorating someone who died of AIDS challenged the Reagan administration’s silence and society’s stigmatization.

The quilt form—traditionally associated with domestic comfort and intergenerational care—became a vehicle for public mourning and political demand. At its 1996 display on the National Mall, the quilt covered the equivalent of 32 football fields. This was craft operating at the scale and cultural impact of any major public monument.

The 2017 Pussyhat Project showed how a simple knitted item could become a global symbol of solidarity. The humble craft of hat-making, easily learned and executed with basic materials, allowed millions to participate in creating visual representation of political movement. The very “domesticity” and “femininity” once used to dismiss such work was now reclaimed as strength.

Contemporary artists like Judy Chicago (The Dinner Party, 1974-1979) have brought explicitly feminist content into traditionally “feminine” craft forms, creating monumental works that demand to be taken seriously on their own terms. Chicago’s massive installation deliberately employed techniques dismissed as “women’s work” to assert women’s historical significance, refusing to apologize for its craft techniques or translate them into more “acceptable” art world forms.

The Technological Challenge

As technology advances, many techniques traditionally associated with “women’s crafts” have become increasingly automated. Computer-controlled embroidery machines reproduce complex patterns with precision. Digital software generates quilt patterns. 3D knitting machines produce seamless garments without human hand-manipulation.

Technology has democratizing potential: machine knitting makes complex patterns accessible without years of skill development; digital pattern-sharing allows global communities to form; adaptive technologies make crafts accessible to people with disabilities.

But mechanization also threatens to eliminate precisely what makes these practices culturally and politically significant.

When a quilt is digitally designed and machine-assembled, does it still carry the same meaning as one pieced by hand over months or years?

The time invested in handcraft—time allowing for meditation, processing, community-building—is part of the work’s meaning. The slight irregularities, the evidence of the maker’s hand, the embodied knowledge built through repetitive motion—all lost in mechanical reproduction.

Moreover, automation risks completing what industrialization began: transforming craft from creative expression into mere commodity production. The very practices that once allowed women to create outside capitalist markets become absorbed into those systems. Mass-produced “artisanal-style” goods offer handcraft’s aesthetic without the embodied labor, community knowledge, or political potential.

Beyond Reclamation: Reimagining Art Itself

The deeper question is not how to get embroidery, quilting, and weaving recognized as “art” by existing institutions, but whether those institutions and their definitions deserve the authority we’ve granted them.

The art world’s categories—fine art versus craft, high versus low, aesthetic versus utilitarian—serve particular interests and embody particular values. These categories privilege formal training over apprenticeship, individual genius over collaborative creation, gallery sales over gift exchange, and art for art’s sake over art in service of life.

But much of what humans have created throughout history doesn’t fit these categories.

Medieval illuminated manuscripts were devotional objects. Renaissance frescoes served theological functions. Indigenous ceramics and textiles carried cultural knowledge and spiritual significance. African masks mediated between human and spirit worlds.

These objects possess beauty, power, and transcendence—everything we claim to value in “great art”—but they were made for wholly different reasons than what the modern art world imagines.

When we try to rescue women’s crafts by reclassifying them as “art,” we risk accepting the premise that only things classified as art deserve serious attention, preservation, and value.

We might instead ask: Why shouldn’t functional objects be beautiful? Why shouldn’t collaborative creation be valued as highly as individual genius? Why shouldn’t art that serves community needs be considered as important as art that serves markets or museums? Why shouldn’t processes that transmit intergenerational knowledge be treated as seriously as innovation for its own sake?

The reclamation of women’s art forms is valuable not because it wins admission to an exclusive club, but because it exposes that club’s arbitrary rules. It reveals that “art” is not a natural category but a social construct—one that has consistently served to validate certain kinds of power while dismissing others.

Toward Democratic Art-Making

If we take seriously the idea that art-making should be democratized rather than kept as an esoteric and elitist matter, we need to challenge more than just who gets included in art history textbooks. We need to question the entire apparatus that determines what counts as art, who gets to make those determinations, and what purposes art is supposed to serve.

This means valuing creative practices that exist outside markets and institutions. It means recognizing that beauty, meaning-making, and cultural expression happen in everyday life—in the quilt pieced on a kitchen table, in the embroidered message on a protest banner, in the collaborative decoration of a community space. It means understanding that the woman who spends years creating a quilt that will never be exhibited or sold has done something as culturally valuable as the artist whose work hangs in galleries.

It also means being honest about material constraints. True democratization requires not just changing attitudes but changing conditions: ensuring people have time for creative work, access to materials and knowledge, and economic security that doesn’t force them to monetize every skill.

The future of art depends not on expanding the definition to include more practices within existing hierarchies, but on questioning why we need those hierarchies at all. It depends on building systems that value creativity in all its forms—functional and decorative, individual and collaborative, traditional and innovative, amateur and professional. It depends on recognizing that the human need to make meaning and beauty is universal, not the province of a talented elite.

Women’s art forms—embroidery, quilting, knitting, weaving—were marginalized not because they lacked artistic merit but because they were associated with women, with domestic labor, with utility, with tradition, with collaborative rather than individualistic creation.

Reclaiming them means not just adding them to the canon but using them to explode the canon entirely. It means insisting that art belongs to everyone, that it happens everywhere, and that the measures we’ve used to judge it have told us more about power than about beauty, more about exclusion than about excellence.

The question is not whether quilts deserve to be in museums alongside paintings. The question is whether we can build a culture that values creative expression wherever it occurs, that preserves and transmits diverse forms of making, that allows people to create not for markets or institutions but for meaning, memory, community, and joy. That would be true democratization—not of art as currently defined, but of the human capacity for creative expression itself.