#TBT to T&T faculty member @melstanfill.bsky.social's 2024 book, Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture nyupress.org/978147982496...
nyupress.org
Fandom Is Ugly
Winner, 2025 Diamond Anniversary Book Award, given by the National Communication AssociationHighlights the importance of considering contemporary public cult...
![Conference program showing presentation ‘“Swagga Like Us:” Clothing, Culture, and Rhetoric in the Fiber Portraits of Kandy G. Lopez’ Popularized by the European genre of grand manner painting, swagger portraiture proliferated in the United States as a complex, and often formulaic, visual statement. Historically, artists and their subjects constructed visual spaces where confidence, wealth, and individuality were expressed through the trappings of material possessions. The rendering of clothing, specifically its tactility, was a key signifier in these visual dialogues, setting an influential standard for performative luxury, identity, and consumption. Although the history of swagger portraiture is rooted in Enlightenment Era displays of colonial power and perceived social superiority, the contemporary work of Afro Caribbean artist Kandy G. Lopez reconfigures these associations by positioning the Black body as a literal and figurative canvas for new narratives. Within Black diasporic communities, to possess “swag” or to “turn your swag on” is to express, through self-fashioning and attire, confidence and agency—qualities Lopez espouses through the use of yarn as a primary medium. Trained as a painter, Lopez’s experimental approach to the layering of color and the integration of fiber materials imbue her monumental subjects with spatial and conceptual depth. The dimensionality of oversized coats, the vibrancy of patterned trousers, and the rendering of protective accessories such as durags and head wraps, are achieved through the purposeful entanglement of color and line against transparent mesh. I argue that by painting garments, as well as skin and hair, with yarn and embroidered floss, Lopez transforms the invisible/anonymous labor often associated with craft (and marginalized peoples) into a visible, enmeshed, and unapologetic declaration. [truncated]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mlcrzt2hnyczigjhiemd5oco/bafkreidlcnvspj6lt5h2pldfqym7hpqsu5fzwjtunvphy5e4hgng2qeypy)
