Yarn Bombing L.A. challenges ideas of street art

Featured on latimes.com

The 'guerrilla knitters' use yarn 'graffiti' to make statements about craft, street art and sexism, including wrapping a museum in granny squares. Plans include workshops, an exhibit and more yarn bombings.

The idea seemed crazy at first: More than 500 knitters from 25 countries, hunkered down in their far-flung corners of the world, feverishly crafting granny squares — 14,000 of them altogether. Then, on a bright morning last May, knitters here affixed metal grids of these cushy yarn squares to the exterior of the Craft & Folk Art Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, turning the building into a giant, multicolored tea cozy.

The 2013 project, "CAFAM Granny Squared," was an urban installation from the knit graffiti collective Yarn Bombing Los Angeles. It elevated the art group, which officially formed in June 2011 and has 20 to 30 members, from relative obscurity to local renown.

Now the yarn bombers have a new "head poncho." The group's founder, Arzu Arda Kosar, has moved on, and artist Carol Zou, a master of fine arts student who was instrumental in executing the CAFAM project, has taken her place. Under Zou's leadership, the group will continue to forgo spray paint for knitting needles and bushels of yarn to blur the lines between contemporary art, graffiti and craft.

"Street art has traditionally been a masculine undertaking," Zou says. "You see these sexist images — posters of topless girls or girls with their heads blown off — and it creates a sense of who gets to belong in a public space.

"Craft is something men practice, but it's traditionally associated with being feminine and activities that keep women inside the home. By putting craft out in the public, we're challenging the history of craft as well as the culture of street art that has a lot of embedded sexism."

Smothering CAFAM in knit squares was actually an attempt to question artistic and institutional identities. The craft museum is dwarfed by its behemoth neighbors across the street, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. Yarn Bombing L.A.'s brightly colored facade elevated the building's profile and subtly drew attention to how craft can be overshadowed by fine art.

"They're artists," says Suzanne Isken, executive director of the craft museum. "But their art isn't to paint, it's to organize people, to create human connection, to take craft into their hands and make a statement. That statement may not always be filled with meaning, but it's about putting something out into the world and being recognized."

Click here to read the full article.