The Subversive Stitch

Posted by Dorothy Lander

 

Needles and Thread Rebellions for a Broken World, a story by Karin Schimke in the Maverick Citizen (South Africa) also traces the subversive history of crafts, specifically women’s crafts. “To know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women,” says Rozsika Parker, author of The Subversive Stitch.   Crafts have come out of the closet in the 21st century.

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-12-06-needle-and-thread-rebellions-for-a-broken-world/?fbclid=IwAR3_cHX-bOJwZ5tnauKQLjHqJVQo4x7n979DNEAkQ7HFLpm_4fP-uBJYov0

 

de Villiers is drawn to pictures from old medical texts. Her embroidery is saturated with this kind of imagery, and the reproductive parts of plants and humans are almost always in evidence in some form or another, blurring the boundaries between species and pointing to the interconnectedness of all life. (Photo: Willemien de Villiers)

The research on the potential of knitting for healing and forming social bonds is included in this story.

The British Journal of Occupational Therapy reported in 2013 that “knitting has significant psychological and social benefits, which can contribute to well-being and quality of life”. The results of a study showed “a significant relationship between knitting frequency and feeling calm and happy”. This, no doubt, was discovered by the political prisoners on Robben Island who learnt to knit from the MK cadre JJ Maake, who in turn learned the skill from an old woman who gave him sanctuary from the apartheid police. Maake’s contribution to life on the prison island is documented in a book called The Lighter Side of Robben Island. The journal article reported that “knitting in a group impacted significantly on perceived happiness, improved social contact and communication with others”.

The story includes a Canadian exemplar of borough mayor Sue Montgomery from Montreal.  First reported in the Montreal Gazette in May 2019:

Sue Montgomery, mayor of the Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough, this week announced she is knitting during council meetings to help her concentrate and to demonstrate that men speak more than women at the meetings.

Montgomery knits in red when men speak and in green when women do. So far, she has 15 inches of scarf, 80 per cent of it red.

“It was exhausting to try to listen for hours on end to these guys droning on,” Montgomery told reporters, adding she can better follow debates while knitting.

“My experience is that men tend to use up all the time allotted to them. They repeat everything several ways even though they’ve made their point. They like the sound of their own voices. Women tend to stand up, make their point and sit down.”

 

Her story has caught the attention of international media and can be found on the BBC, CNN as well as Canadian outlets.

The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Women’s Art in the U.S

Posted by Dorothy Lander

Cultural Comment in The New Yorker by Jia Tolentino, staff writer.

Jia Tolentino re-writes Ovid’s Metamorphoses through the lens of Me Too.

As Alpheus caught up to her, Arethusa prayed to Diana. “Cold sweat / Poured over my limbs,” she tells Ceres, and then, suddenly, “wherever I moved / There seemed to be a pool.” She became a deep spring, plunging beneath the earth. “But even so, he knew me,” she says. “He laid aside his human shape, became / A river again, a watery shape, to join me.” I

The Shiva Gallery at John Jay College is currently home to an exhibition called “The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Women’s Art in the U.S.,” in which the male depiction of rape as a triumphant act of conquest is wholly absent.

 

Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant: The Famous Women Dinner Service 1932-34

Posted by Dorothy Lander

We can celebrate that a long-lost, groundbreaking work of feminist art by British artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, members of the famously bohemian Bloomsbury Group, is being shown publicly for the first time at Piano Nobile gallery in London.

However, it diminishes the lifework of Vanessa Bell and her proto-feminist masterpiece that she must be identified, including in the headline of this article, as “Virginia Woolf’s Sister.”  Perhaps this exhibition will change all that and also clarify that the Dinner Set featured 49 Historic Women and one Man, Duncan Grant.   The women they chose to depict on the plates all did something powerful, often breaking cultural norms.  So also ahead of the curve to portray Duncan “in the service in quite a feminine, sensitive way, making reference, perhaps, to his sexuality,” Travers said. “In ’30s Britain, this was a radical and brave way to depict one’s self.”

Excerpted from

Decades Before Judy Chicago’s ‘The Dinner Party,’ Virginia Woolf’s Sister Made a Set of Dinner Plates Celebrating 50 Historic Women

Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s proto-feminist masterpiece is on public view for the first time.

Sarah Cascone, March 29, 2018

Grant and Bell created a bold feminist statement, featuring 12 dancers and actresses, 12 writers, 12 beauties, and 12 queens, each surrounded by bold patterned borders.  The artists, who were each responsible for creating half of the set, also painted a portrait of one another, putting the number at an even 50.

“Craftivists” – Provocative Fibre Art

Posted by Dorothy Lander

Excerpted from:

Some of the Most Provocative Political Art is Made With Fibers

By LESLIE CAMHI    MARCH 14, 2018

 

The Greeks knew something that artists, along with a new generation of “craftivists” (people combining craft with activism), are rediscovering — that fiber (woven, knitted, braided, quilted, crocheted, embroidered) can be an expressive medium, one more powerful, perhaps, for its ubiquity.

A version of this article appears in print on March 25, 2018, on Page M2130 of T Magazine with the headline: A Single Thread. 

Other artists of that era [60s and 70s] put textiles at the center of an explicitly feminist program, using conventionally “dainty” handicrafts — knitting, crocheting, embroidery — to express ambivalence about childbearing, or rage at women’s domestic oppression. For “Womanhouse,” a fabled group installation organized by Judy Chicago  and Miriam Schapiro in an abandoned Hollywood mansion in 1972, the artist Faith Wilding created a room-size net of crochet work that recalled spider webs, Gothic horror films and human tissue, including uterine lining.

… Can we really fight patriarchy with weapons borrowed from the history of upper-and-middle-class women’s confinement? But then one remembers the one million knit “pussy hats” that appeared at last year’s Women’s March in Washington. Pussy hat co-creator Jayna Zweiman learned to knit while in architecture school. 

 

Sylvia Pankhurst and the Art of Suffrage

Excerpted from Sylvia Pankhurst and the Art of Suffrage by Hester Reeve in Apollo Magazine.

“Also produced during this time were objects only available within the union [Women’s Suffrage Political Union – WSPU founded by Sylvia’s mother Emma Pankhurst in 1903)], designed not to promote but to cohere the movement. The ‘Holloway brooch’, the suffragette equivalent of a medal of honour, was awarded to suffragettes who had undergone hunger strike in prison. The Portcullis symbol of Parliament is rendered in silver, overlaid with a broad arrow enamelled in the suffragette colours of purple, white and green. here we see Pankhurst’s creative skill used to celebrate and inspire, art and politics merged together. ”

apollo-magazine.com/sylvia-pankhurst-and-the-art-of-suffrage

Posted by Dorothy Lander

The writer of this article, Hester Reeve, founded The Emily Davison Lodge, along with Olivia Pender.  This conceptual institution brought the Sylvia Pankhurst display to Tate Britain in 2013-14, as a way to bring national attention to the significant contribution of Sylvia Pankhurst to British art history.

 

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Pénélope Bagieu

Posted by Dorothy Lander

Annette Kellerman advocated for practical female bathing suits and got arrested for it

Brazen is a forthcoming graphic novel by Pénélope Bagieu highlighting women throughout history.

Stay tuned to this site as Brazen shares excerpts in the lead up to International Women’s Day.   Click on the link below to learn about Annette Kellerman, this week’s excerpt.  She was one of the first women to wear a one-piece bathing suit.

Space pioneers, queens, doctors and athletes will appear in illustrations in the weeks to come.

 

https://thelily.com/annette-kellerman-advocated-for-practical-female-bathing-suits-and-got-arrested-for-it-1a4d7bbc19b8

Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting opens at MOMA

Posted by Dorothy Lander

Excerpted from Joyce Beckenstein’s interview with Carolee Schneemann in Hyperallergenic.   

This interview is a striking exemplar of the role of the female body in speaking truth to power.

Schneemann spoke with Joyce Beckenstein about her early struggles for recognition, the sensuous connections between the beautiful and the grotesque, and her enduring kinship with cats.

Carolee Schneemann received the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion Award. She is also the subject of a major retrospective, Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting, which will travel from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg to open at MoMA PS1 on October 22 — a level of recognition for which she has waited five decades.

A suspension from Bard College for painting herself nude (despite permission to pose nude for male students) seeded her sense of female empowerment. She went on to use her body as a medium to spring the female form from its frame, and to pursue explicit expressions of female sexuality. If her physical body was central to her project, it also often eclipsed her larger body of work.

A Witch on a Broomstick

https://hyperallergic.com/332222/first-known-depiction-witch-broomstick/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Go%20Behind%20the%20Scenes%20of%209%20Museums%20With%20These%20Great%20Online%20Web%20Series&utm_content=Go%20Behind%20the%20Scenes%20of%209%20Museums%20With%20These%20Great%20Online%20Web%20Series+CID_7cb19a88810cdfa28f

Posted by Dorothy Lander

Extensive coverage of offensive costumes for Hallowe’en does not mention witch costumes.  Perhaps the witch on a broomstick is the original offensive costume.

Excerpt from Allison Meier

The First Known Depiction of a Witch on a Broomstick

In the 15th century, the image of the witch flying on a broomstick first appeared, its meaning laden with sexual and spiritual depravity.

Dylan Thuras at Atlas Obscura wrote that the “broom was a symbol of female domesticity, yet the broom was also phallic, so riding on one was a symbol of female sexuality, thus femininity and domesticity gone wild.”

Allison Meier October 24, 2016

Art has Shaped Ideals of Woman’sBeauty throughout History

Posted by Dorothy Lander

Ideals of Woman’s Beauty have changed throughout history, from Aphrodite of Knidos to Pamela Anderson to Serena Williams.  A telling reminder of the instability of representations within and across cultures.

An excerpt from:

What Art History Can Tell Us about Female Beauty Ideals

ARTSY EDITORIAL

BY DANIEL KUNITZ

 

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-how-art-has-shaped-female-beauty-ideals-history?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sm-editorial-evergreen&utm_content=fb-5-how-art-has-affected-female-physical-ideals

Girl Gaze#girlgaze: How girls see the world

Posted by Dorothy Lander

https://thelily.com/girlgaze-how-girls-see-the-world-8f3e2ae1ef09

#girlgaze: How girls see the world

This new book by Amanda De Cadenet showcases photography from women around the globe.

De Cadenet created @girlgazeproject on Instagram as a way to create awareness of the imbalance. Female-identifying photographers could submit work with the hashtag “#girlgaze.” They would gain exposure and get a chance to shoot an editorial for Teen Vogue.