Boetti, Noland, and the Politics of Artistic Outsourcing

From the 1970s through the 1990s, two well-known male artists, Alighiero Boetti in Italy and Kenneth Noland in the United States, began to design tapestries that were produced by women artists who were both geographically and culturally distant. Boetti’s works, by far the more famous of the two, were made by Afghan women in Afghanistan and later in refugee camps in Pakistan, while Noland’s works were made by Navajo and Hopi women in the American southwest. Both male artists did not communicate directly with their female fabricators, and instead accessed them through intermediaries who exerted their own authorial control over the finished works. In the case of Boetti’s project, we have no knowledge of what the Afghan artists thought about their role, although scholars have sought evidence of their agency in the form of the finished works and, more problematically, in photographic documentation of their labor. In the case of Noland’s project, we have the benefit of letters between Noland’s intermediary, Gloria Ross, and the artists themselves, as well as field work conducted by the anthropologist Ann Hedlund. Based on these sources, I argue in this paper that Navajo and Hopi weavers staged a selective embrace of transcultural artistic practice. The Noland commissions allowed some artists to pursue new markets and modes of production for their work, as well as to intervene into dominant discourses of modernist abstraction through their own symbolism and frames of reference. Comparing the production and reception of the Noland/Navajo tapestries with the more famous Boetti/Afghan works reveals how both parties of these artistic exchanges can exploit practices of outsourcing to further their own artistic and economic goals.