Devotion to Thread
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E Locust Street, Milwaukee
(414) 263-5001
Through June 14, 2008.
Review by Debra Brehmer
June 9, 2008. The do-it-yourself (DIY) movement is spearheaded in Milwaukee
by Paper Boat Gallery’s Faythe Levine, who curated the current show of stitched art
at Woodland Pattern. Having seen the American Design Museum’s embroidery
show, “Pricked,” in February, I was particularly interested in this homespun
version. I had also conducted my own experiment with the genre a few months
ago, giving art history students needles, thread and embroidery hoops and
instructing them to sew their Rococo assignment. When I asked the students to
comment on the assignment, they unanimously mentioned how time-consuming it
was. There was no way to complete it the night before deadline. And that’s the
central beauty of stitched art: We are intimately connected to the artist’s hand in
time. Each stitch is a literal translation of a second, a breath or a heart beat.
Only one artist in this Milwaukee show also was included in New York’s version
and that was Orly Cogan. Cogan studied at the Baltimore Institute of Art where
there seems to be a powerful fabrics department. Her work tends to contain sexual
imagery that pushes the proprieties in which stitching is rooted. As an avocation,
women who historically embroidered pillow cases and dish cloths were basically
“good girls,” doing their lap work while the children slept. They tenaciously
shaped the house into a home, with their knitting or stitching providing a
metaphorical commitment to the whole domestic package. Cogan inverts that
equation with bawdy imagery. One piece at Woodland Pattern offers rather
eloquently stitched cocaine snorters and another shows a throw-the-hoop game
with a penis as the target. If only turn-of-the-century women really had stitched
records of their dreams and sexual encounters on pillow cases, just think of the
rich historical record. But instead we get graceful flowers and twined vines, which
Cogan also weaves into her wall pieces, uniting tradition with transgression.
Many of the works in this show stay closely aligned to a craft orientation and the
traditional decorative aspects of the media. Xader Marro of Rhode Island adapts
a crazy quilt format for this collaged cloth with silk screened images. It’s a rather
tactile, robust version of a quilt, but with only one work in the show, it’s impossible
to understand the impetus of Marro’s work and the same could be said for the
busy, gold satin wall piece by Steve MacDonald of San Francisco. Kristin Loffer
Theiss of Washington offers small, machine-stitched “Thread Head” portraits. They
are rather nicely executed but don’t speak beyond the technique. Sewing is used
purely as line here and could easily be substituted for a pen or pencil without
shifting the notion of the piece significantly.
A few of the artists appropriate found table runners or work in conversation with
traditional domestic forms like hot pads or, like Marro, quilting to create a sense
of the new from the old. Ohio artist Melissa Woods takes the “Sunbonnet Sue”
character often found as a wooden garden decoration and pushes it toward
abstraction while overlaying it with drawn images of a fox, a gun, or a bird, each
one on a hot-pad shaped square. Using Sunbonnet Sue to create a loose narrative
provided a somewhat effective visual frame. Chicago artist Rebecca Schoeneker
works on found bits of embroidery, simply stitching a small image on top. Her
three works feature mythological characters: Sirens, a centaur and Cerberus.
Shchoeneker sews together very different histories, linking the tenderly domestic
West to the giant narratives of Greek mythology. Staying close to a traditional
mode of “lap work” Schoeneker’s compositions are delicately direct.
Sewn art, since the 1970s when it was revived by feminist artists, has always
straddled the line between fine art and craft. Some of the artists in this show
consciously stay loyal to a craft sensibility, which could be translated into a belief
in the humble, personal and intimate sphere of art in the home rather than art in the
commercial world. Others strive to align their practices with a fine art sensibility,
where they drift much further in concept and form from the vernacular history. The
artists here who address the broader fine art realm seem to have the most
interesting work in the show. Kate Bingaman-Burt’s two handmade dresses with
embroidered numbers or prices all over them take the medium into a sculptural
realm. One dress is titled “What I spend” and the other is “What I Owe,” a
perfectly succinct and ironic statement about consumerism. Here, the medium of
the hand-wrought, fully supports the spirit and idea behind the piece. Brooklyn
artist Emily Eibel takes personalities from her neighborhood, like the butcher, and
makes piece-meal portraits of sorts. She cuts shapes out of cloth to form mini-
stories that unravel along with the unfinished edges of the fabric. She packs a
lively amount of pattern and overlapping or intersecting shapes into these dense,
lively works and she also visually tells the story with a sophisticated, illustrative
designer’s eye.
The other artist whose work stood out was the only Milwaukee native, Chris Niver.
Niver’s work seemed to be of an entirely different spirit. He doesn’t take the
sewing process anywhere far from its most basic needle, thread and cloth
orientation, yet Niver’s work feels more nuanced than many of the others. On
four 15 by 15 inch white handkerchiefs, he offers landscape scenes of waterfalls
and rocky plateaus. He uses only black thread on a white cotton ground, with the
imagery delicately compressed into the center. One immediately senses there’s
more to the scenes than their pretty surface appeal. They feel thoughtful and
carefully rendered as if each tiny, perfect stitch has been contemplated. Niver
strives to present as full a scene as possible with the least amount of fuss. His style
feels closer to etching than decorative sewing as he alters the directions of his
stitches to imply texture and even mimics a cross-hatching pattern. Then, as you
look at his remote nature scenes, a certain anatomical sensuality emerges out of
the moist, protected places. They make me think of the old Fantastic Voyage film
that takes us into some kind of interior spaces that are both psychological and
physical.
The Woodland Pattern gallery space challenges any curatorial endeavor. I’m not
sure why it’s such a formidable space, but it’s very difficult for a show to look
good in here. It’s a square shape, with clunky lighting that imposes an
uncomfortable evenness upon the work. Perhaps the warmth of the Paper Boat
Gallery would have set off this work in a more meaningful way, allowing it to
speak of craft, rather than framing it so firmly in a fine art context. In general, the
show left me wanting more from the media. Ironically, I happened to see Judy
Chicago’s 1979 Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum last week as well. Judy
Chicago was an important feminist artist who helped elevate female craft
endeavors to the level of fine arts. I assumed that her work would look dated, but it
still packed a punch. Each table setting came on a stitched runner dedicated to the
woman being honored. The design quality and continuous ingenuity of technique
and presentation felt fully informed and inspired, even 20 years later. The work in
Devotion to Thread is Judy Chicago’s legacy. With the fire of feminist revisionism
having long waned, Devotion to Thread offers a glimpse of where “art” sewing
has traveled, free from its initial ideology and spirit. It seems to have teetered back
toward a safe and homey craft ethic, but brought a new-found relaxed self-
confidence with it. Perhaps it no longer has much to prove, allowing the stitching
to languish somewhere between the ornamental and artful without the weight of a
social mission.
Debra Brehmer is co-publisher of Susceptible to Images and gallery director of
Portrait Society Gallery.
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E Locust Street, Milwaukee
(414) 263-5001
Through June 14, 2008.
Review by Debra Brehmer
June 9, 2008. The do-it-yourself (DIY) movement is spearheaded in Milwaukee
by Paper Boat Gallery’s Faythe Levine, who curated the current show of stitched art
at Woodland Pattern. Having seen the American Design Museum’s embroidery
show, “Pricked,” in February, I was particularly interested in this homespun
version. I had also conducted my own experiment with the genre a few months
ago, giving art history students needles, thread and embroidery hoops and
instructing them to sew their Rococo assignment. When I asked the students to
comment on the assignment, they unanimously mentioned how time-consuming it
was. There was no way to complete it the night before deadline. And that’s the
central beauty of stitched art: We are intimately connected to the artist’s hand in
time. Each stitch is a literal translation of a second, a breath or a heart beat.
Only one artist in this Milwaukee show also was included in New York’s version
and that was Orly Cogan. Cogan studied at the Baltimore Institute of Art where
there seems to be a powerful fabrics department. Her work tends to contain sexual
imagery that pushes the proprieties in which stitching is rooted. As an avocation,
women who historically embroidered pillow cases and dish cloths were basically
“good girls,” doing their lap work while the children slept. They tenaciously
shaped the house into a home, with their knitting or stitching providing a
metaphorical commitment to the whole domestic package. Cogan inverts that
equation with bawdy imagery. One piece at Woodland Pattern offers rather
eloquently stitched cocaine snorters and another shows a throw-the-hoop game
with a penis as the target. If only turn-of-the-century women really had stitched
records of their dreams and sexual encounters on pillow cases, just think of the
rich historical record. But instead we get graceful flowers and twined vines, which
Cogan also weaves into her wall pieces, uniting tradition with transgression.
Many of the works in this show stay closely aligned to a craft orientation and the
traditional decorative aspects of the media. Xader Marro of Rhode Island adapts
a crazy quilt format for this collaged cloth with silk screened images. It’s a rather
tactile, robust version of a quilt, but with only one work in the show, it’s impossible
to understand the impetus of Marro’s work and the same could be said for the
busy, gold satin wall piece by Steve MacDonald of San Francisco. Kristin Loffer
Theiss of Washington offers small, machine-stitched “Thread Head” portraits. They
are rather nicely executed but don’t speak beyond the technique. Sewing is used
purely as line here and could easily be substituted for a pen or pencil without
shifting the notion of the piece significantly.
A few of the artists appropriate found table runners or work in conversation with
traditional domestic forms like hot pads or, like Marro, quilting to create a sense
of the new from the old. Ohio artist Melissa Woods takes the “Sunbonnet Sue”
character often found as a wooden garden decoration and pushes it toward
abstraction while overlaying it with drawn images of a fox, a gun, or a bird, each
one on a hot-pad shaped square. Using Sunbonnet Sue to create a loose narrative
provided a somewhat effective visual frame. Chicago artist Rebecca Schoeneker
works on found bits of embroidery, simply stitching a small image on top. Her
three works feature mythological characters: Sirens, a centaur and Cerberus.
Shchoeneker sews together very different histories, linking the tenderly domestic
West to the giant narratives of Greek mythology. Staying close to a traditional
mode of “lap work” Schoeneker’s compositions are delicately direct.
Sewn art, since the 1970s when it was revived by feminist artists, has always
straddled the line between fine art and craft. Some of the artists in this show
consciously stay loyal to a craft sensibility, which could be translated into a belief
in the humble, personal and intimate sphere of art in the home rather than art in the
commercial world. Others strive to align their practices with a fine art sensibility,
where they drift much further in concept and form from the vernacular history. The
artists here who address the broader fine art realm seem to have the most
interesting work in the show. Kate Bingaman-Burt’s two handmade dresses with
embroidered numbers or prices all over them take the medium into a sculptural
realm. One dress is titled “What I spend” and the other is “What I Owe,” a
perfectly succinct and ironic statement about consumerism. Here, the medium of
the hand-wrought, fully supports the spirit and idea behind the piece. Brooklyn
artist Emily Eibel takes personalities from her neighborhood, like the butcher, and
makes piece-meal portraits of sorts. She cuts shapes out of cloth to form mini-
stories that unravel along with the unfinished edges of the fabric. She packs a
lively amount of pattern and overlapping or intersecting shapes into these dense,
lively works and she also visually tells the story with a sophisticated, illustrative
designer’s eye.
The other artist whose work stood out was the only Milwaukee native, Chris Niver.
Niver’s work seemed to be of an entirely different spirit. He doesn’t take the
sewing process anywhere far from its most basic needle, thread and cloth
orientation, yet Niver’s work feels more nuanced than many of the others. On
four 15 by 15 inch white handkerchiefs, he offers landscape scenes of waterfalls
and rocky plateaus. He uses only black thread on a white cotton ground, with the
imagery delicately compressed into the center. One immediately senses there’s
more to the scenes than their pretty surface appeal. They feel thoughtful and
carefully rendered as if each tiny, perfect stitch has been contemplated. Niver
strives to present as full a scene as possible with the least amount of fuss. His style
feels closer to etching than decorative sewing as he alters the directions of his
stitches to imply texture and even mimics a cross-hatching pattern. Then, as you
look at his remote nature scenes, a certain anatomical sensuality emerges out of
the moist, protected places. They make me think of the old Fantastic Voyage film
that takes us into some kind of interior spaces that are both psychological and
physical.
The Woodland Pattern gallery space challenges any curatorial endeavor. I’m not
sure why it’s such a formidable space, but it’s very difficult for a show to look
good in here. It’s a square shape, with clunky lighting that imposes an
uncomfortable evenness upon the work. Perhaps the warmth of the Paper Boat
Gallery would have set off this work in a more meaningful way, allowing it to
speak of craft, rather than framing it so firmly in a fine art context. In general, the
show left me wanting more from the media. Ironically, I happened to see Judy
Chicago’s 1979 Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum last week as well. Judy
Chicago was an important feminist artist who helped elevate female craft
endeavors to the level of fine arts. I assumed that her work would look dated, but it
still packed a punch. Each table setting came on a stitched runner dedicated to the
woman being honored. The design quality and continuous ingenuity of technique
and presentation felt fully informed and inspired, even 20 years later. The work in
Devotion to Thread is Judy Chicago’s legacy. With the fire of feminist revisionism
having long waned, Devotion to Thread offers a glimpse of where “art” sewing
has traveled, free from its initial ideology and spirit. It seems to have teetered back
toward a safe and homey craft ethic, but brought a new-found relaxed self-
confidence with it. Perhaps it no longer has much to prove, allowing the stitching
to languish somewhere between the ornamental and artful without the weight of a
social mission.
Debra Brehmer is co-publisher of Susceptible to Images and gallery director of
Portrait Society Gallery.
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| Copyright 2008 Art History Chicks LLC |
| Orly Cogan, Bittersweet Obsession |
| Kristin Loffer Theiss, Thread Heads |
| Rebecca Schoeneker, Cerberus |
| Kate Bingaman-Burt, What I Spend and What I Owe |
| Chris Niver, Rock and Cloud |
| Emily Eibel, Butcher |