History in the remaking: continuing its artistic engagement with a complex local past, the 2002 Spoleto Festival once again featured a controversial brand of community-based work - Report From Charleston

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Eleanor Heartney

The project that worked best was Cottage Industry by New York-based textile artist/designer J. Morgan Puett. Her project was located on a vacant lot in an area long known as the Borough, whose history was an integral part of the piece. The same lot served as a site for several other works. The Borough clearly embodies the idea of "conflicted history." Originally inhabited by a low-income and largely African-American population, the Borough contained a housing project built in the '40s known as the Ansonborough Homes. In 1989, the city condemned the area, claiming the soil was toxic, and began moving people out. By 1993, all but two of the homes had been demolished and the land was sold to the state. Since then, thanks to its prime downtown location and proximity to the port of Charleston, much of the Borough has been gentrified and redeveloped. The lot chosen by Puett and the other artists is the last undeveloped parcel in an area surrounded by hotels, modern office buildings and tourist amenities. Proposals for the future use of this site, which now serves primarily as a huge 10-acre playing field, include housing, a park or a museum of slavery.

Puett created Cottage Industry in one of two original houses that remain on the lot. Both have been empty since 1998, when the last resident, the uncle of the two current owners, died. The houses, standing side by side in the otherwise empty lot, present a remarkable contrast to their bleak surroundings. Narrow, two-story clapboard structures with Southern-style porches and peeling paint, they are relics of an otherwise obliterated neighborhood and speak of anachronistic domestic comforts and vanished community.

Puett tracked down the owners, sisters Catherine Braxton and Rebecca Campbell, who now live in the country, and secured permission to use one of the houses for her project. Their grandfather had moved to the Borough from one of the local plantations after Emancipation. Puett's Cottage Industry was just that, a small clothing factory that employed local weavers, seamstresses and dyers to create a line of textiles and garments designed by the artist. For the duration of the exhibition, approximately 11 artisans took over the house, setting up conference rooms, a design studio, a sewing parlor, a weaving area and a shop where visitors could place orders for garments or buy the patterns ($45 unsigned, or $75 if signed by Puett). In order to evoke the building's history and create a homier atmosphere, tore' Puett prevailed upon Braxton and Campbell to open up the storehouse where they had stashed the original furnishings. Thus, Cottage Industry's workers plied their trades in rooms filled with period furniture, family photos, handmade quilts, paintings and vintage clothing.

The fabricated clothes were amalgams of period clothing that deliberately mixed elements of under and outer garments from outfits worn by slaves and masters. The workshop also produced quilts and coverlets incorporating ornamental details that echoed architectural elements of the house. The factory was open to the public during the fixed hours of the exhibition, and visitors could wander through the rooms and among the workstations while listening to dreamy, ambient music commissioned for Cottage Industry from New York composer David Lang.