Who gets to be called an artist? Turns out the reason you've always thought of quilts as 'just craft' and oil paintings as 'real art' has less to do with skill, and more to do with who was allowed to hold a brush. This week, Breallyn unpacks the gender and race politics behind art history — what gets called Art with a capital A, and what gets called 'a nice hobby' and why women artists so rarely made it into the first category.
Along the way: Persian rug weavers who sing the pattern into existence, the Black American women who stitched Underground Railroad escape routes into quilts and hung them in plain sight, and what it means that those codes were invisible to the very people trying to stop them.
Also: a birthday getaway that turned out to be the coldest day of the year in rural Victoria, Australia, a magnificent antique emporium that's sadly been closed for a decade, and the quiet return of a sound around the house that Breallyn had noticed was gone.
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