Mulberries and Dew

GOOD WORK April 29-June 12

Textile Arts Center gallery, Brooklyn, NY

May Day is a celebration of spring, rejuvenation, fertility and life—a day to dance and weave the Maypole. And it is a day to honor laborers, to mark the social and economic achievements of the labor movement in the US, and for workers around the world to celebrate their ties to an international community.

This May Day the Textile Arts Center and Oak Knit Studio are celebrating the textile workers, artists, designers, and activists who make our world more beautiful and just—all makers tied together by the products of our labor—all makers whose work aspires to do good in a multitude of ways. For this juried show, artists and designers were invited to submit works for the inaugural exhibit in the Oak Knit Studio Gallery with their own broad interpretation of “good work.” What has emerged is a meaningful body of work that touches on labor, justice, gender, care, fair trade, the hand, immigration, community, skill and craftsmanship.

Catalogue Essay for GOOD WORK

Textiles and social justice have always been intertwined. During the industrial revolution the oft-misremembered Luddites smashed mechanized looms, not out of hatred of technology, but to save their labor from deskilling and commodification.[1] In the early twentieth century Mahatma Gandhi promoted Khadi (homespun cloth) in his efforts to unify India and wrestle back economic power from the British who were then flooding India with cheap cloth.[2] In the US, garment workers organized into the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), the United Garment Workers, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), fighting for and winning minimum wages, safer working conditions and the right to organize.[3]

Today, in the context of economic liberalization, privatization and the feminization of labor, capitalists still elude the rights of workers by scouring the globe to hire those most vulnerable and marginalized.[4] The anti-sweatshop movement has organized against these types of moves, but they must still contend with our purported consumer society. Private sector marketing and our governments encourage us to understand consumption as economic responsibility and national duty. In shaping our identities as first world consumers, we are told that consumption is a form of democratic, free, creative expression. This has even carried over to recent activism that advocates shopping our way to a better world. But the idea that we are consumers and not producers—that we consume our way to social change rather than produce social change—should not be taken at face value.[5]

The artists in this show use their and our textile labor to oppose the deskilling of labor, and to reject the imagined spilt between producing bodies and consuming bodies that is foisted upon us. The pieces included in GOOD WORK demonstrate the multiplicity of ways fiber art and textile craft engage the politics of labor, from the domestic sphere to global trade. Yet in their diversity, two themes run consistently throughout these works: valuing the skill of handwork/the hands that work, and a connection to labor/laborers otherwise imagined as distant in space or time.

In these themes, the meaning and purpose of May Day emerges. Without romanticizing handwork, the artists/makers featured here forge connections and reclaim our abilities as producers—of material goods and of a more just world.

Several artists in the show draw direct ties to garment workers in their families, sharing personal fragments of labor history and mirroring the stitches of relatives with their own. Michele Pred created In Memory to honor her great great aunt who was killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. In her 35 hours of hand embroidery, Michele found herself drawn closer to her relative in unexpected ways. Charlene Lam’s great aunt was also a textile worker, a Chinese immigrant to New York she connects to through her own stitching in I am a Sewing Worker. Susan Weltman’s grandmother was a seamstress and member of the ILGWU, a link expressed through her piece, Fetish Shirt: Look for the Union Label. The prevalence of this direct familial tie to garment workers past in the submissions both surprised me and made me hopeful. As fashion and labor scholar Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu states, “An aesthetic and architecture of intimacy might reorient our imaginations and allow us to see how social connections can happen and where coalitions might survive… The very medium that seduces and traps us, that exploits our labors and drives our consumption, can also be the site were we re-imagine the lines that divide us.”[6]

Artists in the show express an intimacy and relation to garment workers in other ways as well, again, moving us to see ourselves as producers as much as consumers. Maya Valladares has created a participatory workshop and installation in which we are all invited to screen print or stitch the image of a garment worker onto an article of clothing. Maya takes advantage of the intimacy of garments, the fact that they touch our skin, to literally bring these workers closer to us. It strikes me that this goes far beyond the option of buying a tee-shirt that says stop sweatshops or a tee-shirt that claims to be sweat free. For in this case it is our own labor of stitching and printing—our own acts of production—that will bring these workers closer to us. Jill Magi shares part of her book, Labor: a Fiction, at the end of this catalogue, an intimate look at how a growing number of us experience our labor as precarious or alienated. In her writing, she elucidates how the conditions of the sweatshop laborers we think of as distant color our own lives as we are now affected by the same gendered and neoliberal ideologies and geographies of production under global capitalism that affect women factory workers—albeit in uneven ways.[7]

In this context, Erin Considine’s jewelry can be seen as much more than an ornamental consumer good. Here again, she steps beyond the bounds of consumer society as she uses her practice in an effort to change the way things are made and what they are made from. In her career as a designer, Erin experienced a disconnect designing pieces for other hands to make out of materials that were destructive to people and planet. In establishing her own line, she returns to the jewelry bench as a skilled artisan attempting to be mindful of the resources used to create each piece, be they carefully sourced natural dyes or recycled metal and fiber.

May day is a time for workers around the world to celebrate their ties to an international community, and GOOD WORK has attracted a global community of makers. Iranian artist Atefeh Khas shares documentation from installations that make intimate our connections to the earth and each other. Australian artist Belinda Smith, through her stitched collection of used dishtowels, brings together many women whose domestic labor still goes unacknowledged. And The Women of El Hombre Sobre la Tierra share with us the new ways they are adapting indigenous Mayan embroidery techniques in collaboration with designers in the US. This sense of connection to a global community of makers also comes through in the collages of Erica Harris, made from images and fabrics she has gathered throughout her travels, as she quite literally brings together globally dispersed elements to create a new whole. She collects these bits and pieces during artist residencies, using her time abroad to teach and share her art practice as she learns from others. Finally, skilled artist and craftsperson Hillary Steel has studied complex textile techniques from Africa to South America. She now incorporates intricately executed shibori and ikat into her own works, with a respect and honor and explicit connection to the makers who have come before her, be they New York garment workers or skilled artisans in the global south.

As GOOD WORK celebrates the process of making as much as what has been made, it exists beyond the pieces on the gallery walls. Ours is a community of makers –both professional and amateur—that all have the potential to make our world more beautiful and just. With that in mind, the show extends downstairs into TAC’s own studio for a May Day celebration of hands-on workshops, and then back into the gallery with your contributions to the maypole we will create together. We hope you will join us as we celebrate and contribute to the good work that is happening in our midst.

Tali Weinberg, curator