Kathleen Quaintance

Kathleen Quaintance is a historian of culture, technology, and craft. She studies textile processes and pedagogies in the twentieth century, and maintains a practice as a weaver, stitcher, and dyer to balance text-based research with textile-based knowledge. She is interested in how handweaving continued to be practiced, conceptualized, and taught in 20th century America and Britain as an experimental method long after the advent of the power loom, as makers forged alternative relationships to new technologies and imagined their looms as pedagogical instruments.  

Kathleen is also the resident craftsperson at the Yale farm, where she brings students to the indigo patch while facilitating the yearly transition from seed to blue cloth. In teaching such textile techniques as vernacular science, she works to bridge the gap between artisanal and scientific knowledge in her teaching as well as her research, and she welcomes collaboration with anyone interested in learning or teaching material knowledge, regardless of discipline.

She completed a BA in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MA in gender studies with the intent of untangling the gender-essentialized valences of craft labour. She has also worked as a textile art instructor, a cheesemonger, a printmaker, a studio technician, an early-childhood educator, an assistant curator, an archival researcher, and a museum educator. Her research has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Harvard Art Museums Institute for Technical Studies in Art, the Curatorial Practice Program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Ertegun scholarship at the University of Oxford, and the Mellon-Marron research consortium at the Museum of Modern Art.