Materials that make a difference: 'Non -art' media and the hierarchy of art and craft in American art of the 1960s and 1970

This dissertation is an analysis of a select group of artists whose work exposed the logic of the hierarchy of art and craft through the innovative use of fiber. Recent studies, art historical or otherwise, about the use of non-traditional media or aesthetic hierarchies, all elide analysis of the separation of art from craft and their changing relationship to one another in the 1960s and 70s. Not surprisingly, such a lacuna in the scholarship of American art of this period has resulted in a history that is blind to the changing boundaries separating art from non-art as well as the formal innovations and radical intentions of artists utilizing media traditional to craft (and sometimes associated with industry) as "fine art" media for the first time. In contrast, this study comprehensively examines the construction and maintenance of the conceptual and institutional boundaries between the "fine" arts and "crafts" in the US after 1945, and the ways in which "non-art" media functioned as a medium of critique of the hierarchy of art and craft in the work of postminimalist, "fiber," and feminist artists active in the 1960s and 70s.