Kendall Ross Comments Directly on the Craft Vs. Art Debate
ABOVE: “Spatial Awareness”, 54″ x 250″, hand-knit with wool, 2025, photo by Chris Rettman
From her dining room table in Oklahoma City, Kendall Ross knits brightly colored, intricately patterned sweaters and vests—some so large that referring to them as wearables is a bit misleading. Her textile pieces are often emblazoned with diary-like messages that speak of relationships, insecurities, and life’s joys. Sometimes, too, she uses her work to comment directly on the craft versus art debate.“The art-versus-craft thing is an unnecessary binary in my mind because all of it is so connected and important to me,” says Ross. “I think a big goal of my work—and of talking about the art versus craft divide—is to bridge that gap between what we see as fine art because it’s in a fine art space and what we see as craft because a woman is doing it in her house.”
Coming from a family of creative women, Ross learned how to crochet at an early age, thanks to her grandmother. Then in middle school she tried to teach herself to knit via YouTube videos. “It went very badly,” she admits. “If you’ve ever tried that, it never goes well.” That’s when Ross’s mother stepped in and took her to a local yarn store, where the owner taught the young artist the basics of knitting.
Knitting became such a part of Ross’s life that, as a history major in college, she wrote her thesis on women’s knitting groups during World War I. “In a lot of ways, that’s something that’s always in the back of my head, that knowledge that this is a process that’s so rooted in tradition and history and groups of women getting together and sharing those things, but also talking and gossiping and having community with one another,” she says.
Despite her passion for knitting, Ross says that it took her some time to bring her work into the art sphere. “I talk a big game now about art, and knitting as art, but that was a slow journey because, for so long, I didn’t know that what I was making was art or that I could call myself an artist,” she says.
“Locally, in Oklahoma City, I was making friends and wanting to be a part of art opportunities here,” Ross explains. “So I shoved down the imposter syndrome a little bit and made a choice to call myself an artist and to call the work that I was making art and I started applying to local things and it just picked up from there.”
EVEN IF YOU’RE DOING IT BY YOURSELF, THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THE ROOM WITH YOU.”
At the time of this interview, Ross was working on pieces for two forthcoming shows. In September of 2025, she’s set to exhibit several large-scale knitted works. One, which she surmises will be the largest she’s ever made, will consist of sixty-three vests seamed together, with the front and back textiles measuring at about two hundred fifty square feet (or ten feet by twelve feet when it’s hanging). She’s also slated to have one large-scale piece in a group show at Oklahoma Contemporary.
These large pieces, Ross says, help bridge the divide between craft and art. “It’s a lot easier for someone walking into a gallery or a museum and see a seven-foot sweater that is in the context that you understand that it’s art,” she says. “They look at it and they see the name plate and the title and they know that that’s art, versus you see someone knitting at their house or on the subway or the bus. Those things for so many people feel so disjointed, but they are essentially the same and they can’t exist without each other.”
Ross says that she’s hopeful that, as textile pieces hold space in galleries and museums, it will prompt people to consider the work that their own loved ones have put into handmade gifts, like knitted and crocheted items. She suspects that much of the argument that knitting and crocheting are crafts is because they often rely on patterns that weren’t created by the maker of the item. “Then you think about all of the emotion and feeling and intensity that goes into sitting there, thinking of someone for hours at a time, making something for them and how the concept of that feels so artistic to me,” she says.
There’s also an inherently political quality to Ross’s art because it is rooted in work traditionally made by women. “I wouldn’t say that my work is necessarily explicitly political the way that a lot of people’s work is,” she says, “but I think you can’t separate it from the larger context that it exists in within gender.”
Particularly in the large-scale works, like one that reads, “I remember thinking things would change once I didn’t take up so much space,” Ross is commenting on women’s roles in the more conservative environments where she was raised. “To make these really large pieces that take up so much physical space and so much emotional space is really a product of growing up in those environments, both in Oklahoma and in religious contexts,” says Ross.
That these large pieces are not made to be worn is also commenting on the gendered nature of knitting, Ross adds, “especially when we connect women’s usefulness to what they can produce or do for other people.”
Ultimately, all this personal and social history is knitted in Ross’s work. “You can’t remove it from the context of both women’s history and, for me, my family history,” she says. “Even if you’re doing it by yourself, there are people in the room with you.” *
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 74, which is available in print here.
I SHOVED DOWN THE IMPOSTER SYNDROME A LITTLE BIT AND MADE A CHOICE TO CALL MYSELF AN ARTIST AND TO CALL THE WORK THAT I WAS MAKING ART.”
