Feature Story in Chicago Art Magazine

Feature by Dee Clements in Chicago Art Magazine.

Steven Frost appropriates the combination of male stereotypes and theatricality that defines professional wrestling and boxing using a boastful elocution of craft and textile. His medium and subject matter create a visual tension that teeters on playful kitsch and gender identity. He is part of a generation of male artists working in the realm of Fiber Arts that are bringing the medium to the forefront of scholarship and critique. With the resurgence of DIY culture, rhetoric applied to craft is moving up the ladder of significant prominence in the art world. Artists like Mark Newport who hand knits oversized super hero costumes challenges notions of masculinity and vulnerability. Do Ho Suh creates site-specific environments, like his sewn apartment The Perfect Home, 2002, bringing into question the boundaries of identity. Other prominent contemporary male fiber artists like Ai Weiwei, El Anatsui are also incorporating traditional handicrafts in their practice to reconfigure notions of identity through medium. –Read the full article.

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