“Queen Elizabeth I often embroidered with other female rulers, much the way male leaders might play golf today,” says Barbara Paris Gifford, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York. “It was a favorite activity because it inspired concentration, conversation, and competition.”
Many of our modern associations with embroidery, like needlepoint samplers or cheeky cross-stitch pillows, seem quaint, but the medium is used in diverse and complex ways. In fact, needlework has a long relationship to politics, power, and resistance.
In 17th-century Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire), embroidery offered symbolic protection for the most precious things, including religious objects and babies. More recently, in the 1970s and ’80s in Chile, women created bright embroideries called arpilleras, as an act of resistance against Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The arpilleras, which memorialized family members “disappeared” by the regime, were so threatening to the government that it became a crime to own one.
In the 1970s, feminist artists including Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and Faith Ringgold used embroidery and other handcrafts to tell powerful and disruptive stories. They mined craft techniques to explore the construction of gender roles and challenge the hierarchy that valued painting and sculpture above the art and craft forms traditionally considered women’s work.
Today, fiber arts like embroidery are a growing presence in museums and galleries, and artists use their needles to investigate a dizzying variety of concerns, exploring gender, sexual and ethnic identity, cultural history, memory, and pop culture, among other themes. Below, we talk to 11 artists who are continuing to expand this potent medium.
Sophia Narrett
Sophia Narrett, So Many Hopes, 2016-17. Photo by Stan Narten. Courtesy of the artist.
Narrett creates dazzling, embroidered scenes of love, heartbreak, and unabashed fantasy. Her approach is expansive and painterly, with meticulous gradations of color, and she has a knack for rendering suburban architecture, blooming gardens, and the human body in thread.
“While Narrett’s subject matter is intimate, the scale of her scenes feels akin to history painting with their abundance of symbols and multiple action-packed vignettes,” Samantha De Tillio, another curator at the MAD, tells me. “She’s in communication with the traditionally feminine aspects of the medium, but not restricted by them.”
“From the first time I tried it, I was completely excited and absorbed,” Narrett says of her conversion from painting to embroidery. “It forced me to slow down and think about each mark.” However, her biggest influences are still painters. “I have always been most inspired by 19th-century French figure painting and by contemporary painters like Lisa Yuskavage, Hernan Bas, Angela Dufresne, and Allison Schulnik.”
Saja uses embroidery to turn familiar toile patterns into scenes of whimsy and, occasionally, mayhem. His colorful stitches form a secondary layer over the toile, constructing a new narrative inhabited by imaginary animals, wild hairstyles, and a lit cigarette here or there. Saja’s light touch updates and enlivens the tired prints of Rococo lovers cavorting on swings or lounging at picnics.
Although he’s been working this way for over a decade, he first learned embroidery out of necessity, not inspiration. “I launched a cushion company and from the moment of its debut, the embroidered toile concept garnered a lot of attention. I had hired someone to embroider for me but had to teach myself to stitch just to keep up with production.”
Since then he’s been tapped for various fashion industry collaborations, creating custom Keds for Opening Ceremony in 2010, and an autumn/winter collection of embroidered jackets and dresses with Mother of Pearl in 2014. Yet no matter the demand, he continues to make all the work himself and by hand. “No matter how advanced machine embroidery becomes, it will never be able to mimic the gestural aspects a human imbues into stitching,” Saja says.
In the early aughts, Henricksen took a break from painting and walked around Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Indonesia, and India for a year. During that trip, textiles and thread began to pique his interest. “I wanted to make art with something unmacho and unart-like,” he says. “I realized I could use embroidery and my art would still have a bite.”
Now Henricksen often layers his paintings with embroidery, silk-screen printing, and gold leaf. These paintings have a sinister air, as hooded figures wield torches and guns or act out biblical scenes. Henricksen is often influenced by the embellished garments worn for ceremonial or religious purposes. “I have aprons that were worn by members of the Freemasons,” he explains. “The fronts have the typical logos of the fraternity, but the side that touches the body is covered with mystical embroideries such as third eyes, skulls, and bones.” He’s also fascinated by the clothing of Catholic priests. “They have wonderful embroideries of burning hearts, rotting flesh, and other gruesome details,” Henricksen adds.
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