Yarnbombing Los Angeles
Joining in the international graffiti knitting movement but also putting their own spin on its practices, YBLA is a deeply collaborative group that aims to blur boundaries between craft, high art, street art, artists, and people on the street. They come together in monthly stitch n bitch meetings at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, where newcomers can learn how to knit, crochet, or collage together recycled sweaters into yarnbombs. YBLA also regularly reaches out for contributions to their projects, from phrases submitted via Tumblr that the group can knit and place in LA to granny squares submitted via the mail to cover their museum home.
YBLA is a loosely knit organization that flows with its members and their interests as well as events proposed by collaborators and important moments in Los Angeles. That being said, some key themes emerge from their projects and public statements.
One of YBLA’s core tactics is bringing the two halves of cultural binaries together.They combine knitting, a traditionally wholesome indoor activity of elderly women, together with graffiti, a contemporary edgy outdoor activity of young men. For example, by encouraging members and contributors to re-use existing material and re-purposing installations that have been removed, YBLA brings together ideas about both sustainability and ephemerality. They perform and bring together high art style interventions that activate metaphor to transform public space with craft style community workshops and outreach that encourage people to get involved with their city and their culture. Just as important in contemporary times, YBLA combines both online and offline tactics in their activities. The fiber art is physically created and installed in relevant public spaces, often at key times like the MOCA Art in the Streets exhibition. Collective members come together in the same physical space to conduct workshops, prepare and install yarn bombs, and share each other’s ideas and company. At the same time, the digital has been key to both creating and spreading their work. The physical installations are ephemeral, but the photographs and video of them can enjoy a lengthy digital afterlife. YBLA activates and involves larger, non-crafting, non-local publics through websites. For YBLA, the digital and the physical interrelate and mutually support each other rather than competing, for example their calls for materials and participation spread internationally over the web, leading to physical donations of time and material for their work from all over the United States and the world.
Key Projects
YBLA put a call out online in October 2012 for 5 inch granny squares in various colors to use in covering their local meeting place, the three story Craft and Folk Art Museum on Museum Row in Los Angeles. From over 500 crafters in 49 states and 25 countries, YBLA received 14,000 squares by March 2013, twice what was needed for the project. YBLA members coordinated logistics, putting the squares together into larger pieces, and installation on the museum facade as well as de-installation and recycling the granny squares into blankets distributed to Skid Row residents by the Downtown Women’s Center.
Conceptually, the project demonstrates YBLA’s characteristic joining together of cultural binaries, in this case notably high art/folk art, represented by architecture/crochet, as well as museum artist/folk crafter. Collective members documented the extraordinary range of contributors, many of whom sent postcards expressing their feelings about the project or crochet. YBLA and the Downtown Women’s Center expanded on the collaboration begun here, creating the ongoing Community Threads project and knitting curriculum.
YBLA’s Urban Letters project asks web users what they’d like to say to certain areas of Los Angeles. All submissions are displayed on the Urban Letters Tumblr, both the phrases and the locations contributors are addressing, along with photographs of phrases the collective chose to create out of knitted letters and install in situ.
Urban Letters most explicitly brings civic speech and artistic visuals together. YBLA acts as a conduit and megaphone, amplifying the messages of those without the time, materials, or skills to reach a broad audience.
This project is currently ongoing, accepting contributions from February to May 2014. YBLA put out a call for people to think about what they value, put a fiber “engagement ring” on it, and send photographs to the collective for inclusion in an art gallery exhibition. Aside from coordinating submissions and gallery space, YBLA put together a library of ring patterns in multiple fiber media and styles to give contributors something to work from.YBLA here builds off Beyoncé’s popular song “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” and the vast participatory content world of covers, re-mixes, and appropriations the song sparked. It also plays with ideas of masculinity/femininity and the institution of marriage by re-purposing the childhood taunt, “if you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?” in a way that speaks to civic virtue and engagement with your surroundings, not just romantic love.
Contributed by Samantha Close
