The University of Virginia (UVA) and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) are collaborating on Intertwined Media: A Global History of Photography and Textile Arts, a joint research, publication, and exhibition initiative examining the historical, material, and theoretical entanglements of photography and textiles from a global perspective. Although connections between these media have appeared across periods and regions—from Henry Talbot’s lace photographs to Bauhaus experiments and contemporary artistic practices—no project has treated their relationship as a central analytical framework. This gap reflects art history’s longstanding emphasis on medium autonomy and hierarchies that marginalize practices associated with technology, tactility, women’s agency, and everyday life.

This project offers the first global study of photography and textiles as intertwined media, exploring themes of gender, labor, technology, memory, and decolonization. Through archival research, collaboration with artists, and interdisciplinary scholarship, the project historicizes today’s haptic turn while proposing a new relational framework for understanding media.

The multi-year initiative includes an international convening, two exhibitions, and a co-edited publication featuring artists, curators, conservators, and scholars. The first exhibition, Picturing Fabrics: Textile and the Photographic Image in Africa (UVA, Fall 2028), examines how photography and textiles have coexisted, competed, and merged across the African continent, challenging Western disciplinary frameworks. The second, Tangled Webs: Contemporary Photography and Textiles across the Americas (UMBC, Spring 2029), focuses on works created after 2000, highlighting how artists across North and South America combine photography and textiles to create hybrid works that rethink the relationship between image, materiality, and surface in the digital age