Ann Hamilton: habitus

Ann Hamilton: habitus
Produced by: Michael O’Reilly

Ann Hamilton has been making installations and site-specific work for decades. Her latest installation, habitus, is located at three sites: The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Municipal Pier 9, and on social media. habitus weaves text, textile, and image together as mediums for an imaginative and tactile exchange between artist and audience.

The museum’s galleries display Hamilton’s selection of historical objects—including literary commonplace books, textile sample books, dolls, and needlework portfolios—borrowed from Philadelphia museums and public collections. Printed passages from published writings referencing the social and material life of textiles, and collected through an open call to the public at a blog on tumblr called cloth-a-commonplace.tumblr.com, will be available free to museum visitors.

In the vast space of Municipal Pier 9 on the Delaware River, visitors can propel a field of gigantic cylindrical curtains to billow to atmospheric proportion. Cloth covers us in sleep, and a folded blanket can tell a story of trade, and a flag can be the symbol of a nation. Cloth is the first thing that touches us at birth, in swaddling clothes, and, in our funeral best, the last thing that touches us at death. Hamilton’s multi-venue exhibition habitus invites us to touch and be touched by the fabric of human experience.

Susan Stewart and Ann Hamilton Poetry Reading
Edited by: Nick Gandolfo-Lucia
In this piece, Susan Stewart and Ann Hamilton read Stewart’s poem C​hannel as part of Hamilton’s Philadelphia-based art installation,​ habitus. The reading takes place at Municipal Pier 9 on the bank of the Delaware River.