02/21/2025
Join us on February 27 at 6pm for our Sarah Hamilton Leathers ’53 and Leone Bowers Hamilton ’26 Art Lecture with Susan Richmond.
Innovative, large-scale fiber works once filled the lobbies and atriums of Atlanta’s most iconic buildings. But you won’t see them today. They aren’t merely gone; they have disappeared, many without a trace, taking the stories of their creation with them. With few exceptions, the fate of these artworks remains unknown, as do their original production circumstances. In this talk, Susan Richmond discusses her work with Jess Jones to map the locations and stories of Atlanta’s public textile history, with particular attention to John Portman’s projects. The intersection of large-scale weavings, architectural site-specificity, and corporate interests is an understudied component of the fiber art movement in the United States.
Susan Richmond is an associate professor of art history and an interim associate dean of the College of the Arts at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on the modern and contemporary era, with a specific emphasis on feminist practices and the social and material histories of US art, craft, and visual culture since 1945. With Jess Jones, associate professor of textiles at GSU, she is working on a digital mapping project entitled Lost Weavings of Atlanta.