Erica Warren, PhD

Image courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago.

Art historian, curator, decorative art and design devotee, textilian.

Erica Warren is a curator and scholar with over ten years’ experience working with collections, in museums, and teaching. She is currently an assistant instructional professor in the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the co-founder of The Craft Chronicle, an interactive digital humanities project that further elucidates and visualizes the interconnectedness of craft practice across the United States throughout the twentieth century and beyond. In 2025, Erica will be a Lenore G. Tawney Foundation Fellow.

Erica’s area of specialization within decorative arts and design histories centers on the nineteenth century through the present day with a focus on alternative modernisms. Within this broad expanse, her research pursuits include the human and ecological costs that attended industrial innovations in modern textile production; color theory, synthetic dyes and modernists with intermedial art practices; the American designer, entrepreneur, and weaver Dorothy Liebes; the historiographies of modern craft and design; and the unbounded, yet materially specific, practices of contemporary artists.

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.

Prior to her tenure at the Art Institute, Erica was a curatorial fellow in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture and a research assistant in the Department of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she curated the exhibition The Main Dish.

Erica has taught courses at the University of Chicago, Drexel University, and the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She earned her PhD in Art History from the University of Minnesota and has participated in the Attingham Summer School.

Select publications and presentations

2024

Exhibition Catalog: Editor and contributor Beyond: Tapestry Expanded (American Tapestry Alliance).

Conference Paper: “Finding an Independent Vision: Lenore Tawney, Claire Zeisler, and the Intangible Impact of Alexander Archipenko” for the session Alexander Archipenko in Chicago: New Research, College Art Association Conference (Chicago).

2023

Keynote Conversation: “Weaving Literacy at Black Mountain College” with Brenda Danilowitz for the 14th Annual ReViewing Black Mountain College Conference, Thematic Focus: Material + Structure (Asheville, NC).

Exhibition Catalog Essay: “Following the Thread: Black Mountain College and Weaving Education in the United States, 1934-1956” for the exhibition catalog Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students, edited by Michael Beggs and Julie J. Thomson (Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center). [forthcoming in September]

Exhibition Catalog Essay: “Fission: Design and Mentorship in the Dorothy Liebes Studio” for the exhibition catalog A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes, edited by Susan Brown and Alexa Griffith Winton (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and Yale University Press).

Article: “Circulating: Migration and Art Education in Twentieth-Century America.” Craft Quarterly (Winter 2023): 4-5.

2022

Conference Session Chair: Textiles: Modern Entanglements, Midwest Art History Society Conference (Houston).

Conference Paper: “Marguerite Thompson Zorach’s Nude and Flowers (1922)” for the session Recent Acquisitions in the Midwest, Midwest Art History Society Conference (Houston).

2021

Peer-Reviewed Article: “Beyond Weaving: Transdisciplinarity and the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop.” Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture (Oct 4).

Book Review: Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry between Paris and New York, by K. L. H. Wells, 2019. Caa.reviews (16 June).

Digital Interactive: “Piecing Together History: Allie Pettway’s Pinwheel Quilt”

Virtual Program: “Textiles Close Up: Bisa Butler Portraits” for the Textile Society of America.

Virtual Program: “Virtual Member Lecture: Textiles and Contemporary Art” with Jordan Carter hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago (Accessible online).

Book Review: Overshot: The Political Aesthetics of Woven Textiles from the Antebellum South and Beyond, by Susan Falls and Jessica R. Smith, 2020. Design and Culture: The Journal of the Design Studies Forum (28 January).

2020

Exhibition Catalog: Editor and contributor, Bisa Butler: Portraits (Yale University Press).

Virtual Program: Moderator for "Virtual Artist Talk: Bisa Butler and Tonika Johnson” hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago (Accessible online).

Book Review: Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe, edited by Karen Patterson, 2019. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences. (Accessible online, https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55301).

Exhibition Catalog Essay: “Intersecting Threads: Scandinavian Weaving Influences in the United States” for the exhibition catalog Scandinavian Design and the United States 1880-1980, edited by Monica Obniski and Bobbye Tigerman (Prestel).

Conference Paper: “Reexamining Material Hierarchies: Bisa Butler’s Portrait Quilts” for the session African American Quilts in the Wake of Gee’s Bend, College Art Association Conference (Chicago).

Program: Co-organizer and participant for “The Bauhaus Revisited: A Round Table” hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago.

2019

Article: “Building Connections and Fostering Experimentation: The Bauhaus Weaving Workshop’s Legacy.” Chicago Art Deco Society Magazine (Fall/Winter 2019): 10-12.

Program: Panelist for “In Conversation: The Bauhaus, 100 Years Later” hosted by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Object Entry: “Lydia’s Textile Travels,” Object of the Day for New York Textile Month, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Exhibition Catalog Essay: “Making the Timeless: Anni Albers, Mesoamerican Sculpture, and the ‘Thing Itself’” for the exhibition catalog In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury, edited by Zoë Ryan (Yale University Press).

Program: Coordinated and presented the workshop “Textiles Close Up: Andean Meets Anni in Chicago” for the Textile Society of America.

Conference Session Chair: Nineteenth-Century Narratives: Questions of Identity and Representation, Midwest Art History Society Conference, (Cincinnati).

2018

Conference Paper: “Modern Designer-Craftswomen: Dorothy Liebes and Bonnie Cashin” for Costume Colloquium VI: Textiles in Fashion, Creativity in Context.

Object Entry: “Shine Bright, Like a Liebes,” Object of the Day for New York Textile Month, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Keynote Address: “Narrative and Practice: Historic Textiles and British Arts and Crafts Embroidery” for the Embroiderers’ Guild of America’s International Embroidery Conference (Chicago).

Conference Session Chair: Mid Twentieth-Century Art, Midwest Art History Society Conference (Indianapolis).

2017

Lecture: “Fostering Artistic Enterprise: Hewnoaks Artist Colony” for the Textile Society of the Art Institute of Chicago.

2016

Encyclopedia Entries:The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc). Entries include: 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.

2015

Program: Conversation “Scandinavian Home Sense and Sensibilities” with Judith Gura hosted by the Bard Graduate Center.

2014

Article: “Shipwreck and Metaphor: Examining US History through an English Transferware Pitcher,” Ceramics: Art and Perception 24.3 (September 2014): 104-107.

2011

Exhibition Catalog Essay: “Japonisme and Scandinavia” for The Orient Expressed: Japan’s Influence on Western Art 1854-1918, edited by Gabriel P. Weisberg. Seattle: University of Washington Press.