Carole Frances Lung


Carole Frances Lung is an American artist and activist based in Long Beach, California. Lung is a member of the Fashion, Fiber and Materials faculty at California State University, Los Angeles. Her work concerns labor in the fashion industry and often comprises long-duration projects of performance art and collaborative art activism.

Early Life and Education

Lung received a Bachelor of Science, Textiles and Clothing degree from North Dakota State University in 1988. She moved to New York City to work in the fashion design industry. Lung studied Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving a BFA in 2005 and a MFA in 2007. During a 2006 semester abroad in Weimar, Germany, she studied Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University. There she engaged in her performance piece "One Size Fits All," sewing out of a storefront.

Career

Lung's project Sewing Rebellion has as its goal to break the mass-production cycle of consumer textiles, and involves teaching participants to make and repair clothing. Her project Made in Haiti was a collaboration with Haitian tailors to create an alternative to the mass globalized textile market.
Lung has also created performance art under the persona "Frau Fiber," an East German garment worker. Frau Fiber was born in Apolda, Germany in 1966 and worked in garment and machine knitting factories until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Frau Fiber takes inspiration from the folk character John Henry; knitting or sewing by hand against faster technology, knowing that ultimately she will fail. Lung's performances as Frau Fiber take different forms: she might do alterations on visitors' clothings, as she did in Santa Monica in 2017, or teach others to knock off fashions produced for H&M, as she did in 2015, or sewing a collaborative quilt, as she did in Greensboro, SC, in 2010.