Meet Chair Richard Elliott

Richard Elliott has been teaching in the Textiles Program since 1999 and has served as program chair since 2008. He offers the distinction of being the first male chair in the program’s expansive history.

Prior to CCA Richard taught at San Francisco State University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and UC Davis. He has been immersed in textile and fiber art since the early 1970s (think macramé). His personal interest lies in creating surface pattern, imagery, and visual and physical depth on layered tracing paper and digitally printed or otherwise manipulated fabric.

The Fabric of Life

Although we generally take for granted the ubiquitous presence of textiles in our everyday lives, we all go from cradle to grave swaddled in them; we sit and sleep on them, decorate with them, dry our hair and bodies with them, and wear them as indicators of gender, status, tribe, community, individual style, and as political statement or satire.

The study of textiles encompasses a range of ancient, anthropological, and technical handwork. The mission of CCA’s Textiles Program is to act as custodian of these historical traditions, while providing students with the opportunity to examine, interpret, and express this sensual materiality in their own contemporary voice.

Ours is one of the few preeminent fiber/textiles programs in the country and also one of the longest running: it was founded on the Oakland campus in 1968.

Notable Alumni

Notable alumni—artists and professors alike—who’ve graduated from the Textiles Program: Jane Lackey (1974), Anne Wilson (1976), Anna Von Mertens (2000), Sasha Duerr (2003), Cristy Matson (2005), Mung Lar Lam (2005), and Lacey Jane Roberts (2007).

Networking

The San Francisco Bay Area was at the heart of the Art Fabric movement of the 1970s, home to ground-breaking, avant-garde fiber art, and such renowned artists and professors as Lia Cook (CCA Textiles faculty), Carole Beadle (CCA Textiles faculty), Nance O’Banion (CCA Printmaking faculty), and Gyongy Laky and Barbara Shawcroft (retired professors at UC Davis).

Bay Area Opportunities

The Bay Area is home to an abundance of textile enthusiasts, collectors, weavers, quilters, surface designers, and do-it-yourself activists (or “craftivists”). It also boasts venues for textile art and artists—such as the Museum of Craft and Design, the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, the de Young Museum and its Textile Art Council, and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

Common Threads

Textile art (material, process, concept) is on the cutting edge of contemporary art and craft practice. Within three areas of curricular concentration (weaving, dyeing and printing, fiber sculpture) students are educated in materiality, technical skills, historical/cultural traditions, conceptual concerns, and critical inquiry and dialogue.

Specialized courses

The following specialized courses are offered on a regular basis:

• “Soil to Studio”—explore making sustainable, natural dyes from campus garden plants
• “Franken Fabrics”—learn a new technology, using low-tech manipulations of the properties, characteristics, and molecular structures of fabrics to create new surfaces and structures
• “Zeros & Ones”—gain access to computerized, digital weaving on our TC-1 Jacquard loom
• “Pixels, Patterns & Prints, and Going Digital”—digital art and design, fabric printing on a 42-in. Epson printer
• Topical seminars: Thinking Textiles, Chromophilia, Pattern Language
• Textile Media History series

At the center of the curriculum is a comprehensive series of courses that address the history of textiles, taught by artist, writer, curator, and director of Fine Arts Deborah Valoma. The study of diverse cultures and periods of world history offers insights into innovation, domesticity, necessity, gender, race, religion, industrialization, and colonization and provides students with an informed perspective from which conceptually strong and thoughtful work emerges.

In addition to its regular course offerings, the CCA Textiles Program sponsors an artist lecture series each semester and a biannual Masters of Tradition series, which has hosted Tongan tapa cloth makers, a Native American basket weaver, a Japanese indigo dyeing master, and a Haitian Vodou priest and sequined flag maker.

A Close-Knit Community

The Textiles Program is inherently interdisciplinary, and the faculty encourages pushing boundaries and mixing media; hybridizing approaches to art making, investigation, and research; and integrating fine art, design, and craft skills with installation, performance, and social practice.

Faculty

Textiles Program faculty members are exhibiting artists, writers, speakers, jurors, curators, visiting artists, musicians, dancers, and more. They are also extraordinarily dedicated, knowledgeable, supportive, and nurturing educators.

Students

Students within the Textiles Program are generally thoughtful, friendly, helpful, hard working, and willing to employ extremely slow, often repetitive (yet calming and meditative) processes to bring their ideas to fruition.

A comradely community emerges among faculty, students, and current studio manager, Stacy Speyer, to form a sharing, caring extended family connected with a tie that binds and thrives.