“I was so bored in my hermetically sealed world that I couldn’t stand it,” says Karen Keane, describing her suburban childhood in Chicago Heights. So after graduating from the School of the Art Institute in 1982, she took off. “For most of the last 13 years I’ve been traveling. My life is going to study other cultures on extended stays.” She’s been to France, Slovakia, India, Thailand, Korea, and Nepal, but her longest stays have been in Japan.
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When she first thought about going to Japan she wanted to become a woodworker. “I loved Japanese joinery. You could build these huge buildings without any nails or glue.” But one of her professors, Anne Wilson, said, “You really don’t know much about Japanese culture, do you?” Woodworking was strictly a male occupation in Japan. Wilson suggested that she think about being a weaver. She showed Keane her small collection of Japanese folk textiles. Keane says, “I was immediately drawn to them.”
She says weavers are more modest. “Artisans are generally of the lower class, and they weren’t allowed to speak for themselves. But at the same time they learned to value the craft, what their parents did. You become proud of it, and subsequently you say, It’s not about doing the best I can do. It’s about doing the best that can be done, because this is our family, our craft, and our name.”
–Fred Camper
