Erica Warren

Biography

Erica Warren is an art consultant, curator, and scholar with over ten years’ experience working with collections, in museums, and teaching. She is currently the editor of the James Renwick Alliance for Craft Craft Quarterly. From 2016-2022, Erica was a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, where her exhibitions included Bisa Butler: Portraits, Weaving beyond the Bauhaus, Super/Natural: Textiles of the Andes, Music and Movement: Rhythm in Textile Design, Making Memories: Quilts as Souvenirs, and Modern Velvet: A Sense of Luxury in the Age of Industry.

Erica’s research interests focus on alternative modernisms and include the human and ecological costs that attended industrial innovations in modern textile production, the American designer, entrepreneur, and weaver Dorothy Liebes, the Good Design exhibitions at the Chicago Merchandise Mart, intermedial and sensorial readings of modern art, and the unbounded material practices of contemporary artists working with textiles. Among her recent publications are the article “Beyond Weaving: Transdisciplinarity and the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop” in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture (2021) and the catalog Bisa Butler: Portraits (2020), which accompanied her exhibition.

Publications

Erica Warren

Bisa Butler: Portraits

Yale University Press

2020

"Intersecting Threads: Scandinavian Weaving Influences in the United States,” for the exhibition catalog Scandinavian Design and the United States, 1890-1980, edited by Bobbye Tigerman and Monica Obniski (Los Angeles: Prestel, 2020)

“Making the Timeless: Anni Albers, Mesoamerican Sculpture, and the ‘Thing Itself;” for the exhibition catalogue In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury, edited by Zoë Ryan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019)

Entries [Aesthetic Movement, Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Century Guild, Collinson and Lock, Cotswolds, Georgian, Georgian Revival, Glasgow Style, Guild of Handicraft, Hukin and Heath, Jeffrey and Co., Liberty and Co., Linthorpe Pottery, Morris and Co., Queen Anne Revival, Regency, and Sanderson and Sons] for The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2016)