The Craft of Anne Ryan's Collages

Between 1948 and 1954, Anne Ryan produced over 400 small‐scale collages out of worn fabrics and handmade paper. Although this work earned her a fruitful affiliation with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, its ‘feminine’ delicacy distinguished it from the bold styles generally associated with the artist's expressionist peers. Revisiting the presupposition of a ‘feminine’ touch, this essay assesses the collages in light of Ryan's expertise as a sewer. Drawing from feminist theories on the significance of everyday embodied knowledge, it is argued that the artist defined the limits of her practice through careful material and tactile choices, demonstrating what is proposed to be a craft expertise engrained over a lifetime of handling threads and fabrics. Such claims, in turn, have broader bearing on how we continue to write about the relationship between modernist art and the structures, skills, and habits of the domestic everyday.