26 creation of textile samples and began to integrate other strategies and materials, which distinguished her as a creative force to Strengell and her peers. 3 After she returned to Colombia, she constructed her own looms and further developed her visual language through inventive plaiting, wrapping, coiling, and warp manipulation that would define her creative contributions to the field of craft. Amaral’s discovery of the loom at Cranbrook was neither a mindful assessment of skill nor a preternatural foretelling of genius; rather, weaving was simply considered a woman’s domain in the mid-twentieth century. Elsewhere too, even within the progressive avant-garde strata of the Bauhaus, female students were often assigned the loom as their creative tool. 4 As a result, Amaral and many other women artists who were oriented in craft were not given critical consideration in art discourse due to medium-based hierarchies. The work of the Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa, a peer of Amaral’s, was consistently accused of being “too uncomfortably close to craft” during her lifetime because its construction was sourced from a weaving tradition. 5 Amaral and Asawa both used the tenets of woven fabrication as a point of departure for sculptural explorations that evolved from a mastery of skill, as illustrated in Asawa’s Untitled (S. 562, Hanging Sphere with Two Cones that Penetrate the Sphere from Top and Bottom) (c. 1954, fig. 1). Their shared interest in geometry and spatial relationships was developed through handmade processes, as opposed to the industrial fabrication preferred by the lauded Minimalist artists of the same era. However, the radical gesture of artists like Amaral and Asawa was not a disavowal of craft but rather the self-permission to create whatever their minds commanded of their dexterous and knowledgeable hands—divisions be damned. MATERIAL IMAGINATION Amaral’s early trials at Cranbrook foreshadowed her more experimental work that began in earnest during the late 1960s, when she started to expand her practice to include new approaches to form, process, and material. Amaral’s respect for materials is in part due to the conditions in her native Colombia, a place that, particularly in the twentieth century, was defined by unstable politics and material scarcity. “Maybe because my country has been so disorganized, I discovered early on a necessity to organize myself,” she says. “In Colombia, nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is precious. Nearly all artist sup- plies, for example, must be imported. Even something as small as a tube of acrylic paint is almost impossible to find.” 6 Amaral’s reverence is complemented by the primary focus on materiality within the academic dialogue of craft, unlike in contemporary art, where concept often dominates the discourse. However, her material decisions can be a conduit for both: a path to her process-oriented thinking and a framework for conceptual interpretation. Amaral’s material imagination reveals a broad arc of interests, ranging from gnarly organic matter to the sleek synthetics of human invention. In the late 1960s, she experimented