Tag Archives: Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Embroidery Deep Dive

I fell down an interesting embroidery-related rabbit hole while reading the book Fabric of a Nation (recommended in my last post). It reminded me how interconnected a practice can become over time. While most of the works included in the book are quilts, one is an embroidered bedcover made by Marguerite Zorach as a commission in 1925-28. I still can’t get over how contemporary her stitched patterns and marks appear.

Bedcover detail, ©Marguerite Zorach, 1925-28, wool embroidered on linen

If you aren’t familiar with her, Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968) was a painter and textile artist who was married to the sculptor/painter/printmaker William Zorach. I’ve been aware of her for what seems like forever because she was a Maine artist, but I’m embarrassed to say I never took the time to learn about her work. Rather, I was much more tuned-in to her artist/illustrator daughter, Dahlov Ipcar, who created vividly colorful images of animals within lushly stylized flora. They were, as you might imagine, very appealing to a young person.

October ©Dahlov Ipcar, 32 x 43 in., oil on linen

However, seeing Zorach’s embroidered bedcover and finding other examples of her work on the web all these years later, I’m only now realizing just how much I’ve missed by not learning about her sooner. In hindsight, I’m devastated to see that I missed the Farnsworth Museum’s 2017-18 exhibit “Marguerite Zorach — An Art-Filled Life”. C’est la vie.

Family Supper ©Marguerite Zorach, 1922?, Embroidery

Trained as a painter at the turn of the 20th century, like many of us, Zorach turned to the needle in order to maintain and balance a creative practice alongside motherhood. She was prolific, with her resulting textile pieces similar to her fauvist paintings in both color and imagery. These modernist textiles were very well-received, earning her wide recognition and a crucial means toward supporting their family financially. Yet, while her work helped to break down barriers between art and craft, critics still considered embroidery “lesser”, so in time her work fell out of favor in an early instance of the seemingly immortal Art vs Craft divide rearing its head.

I’ve been playing around with embroidery since I was 10-ish or so, continuing through high school and only moving away from it in college when formal art studies took center stage. After our first child was born though, I gravitated to making art quilts as a more child-friendly medium than the pastels and paint I had been working with pre-pregnancy. From the very beginning, embroidery was an important enhancement to each quilted piece.

Celebrating the Stitch

Unfortunately, at that time I was ignorant of the richly stitched legacy that artists like Zorach had laid out more than a half century earlier. There were, however, plenty of contemporary artists to learn from and to follow. Barbara Lee Smith’s seminal book Celebrating the Stitch, Contemporary Embroidery of North America was a benchmark for me as I forged a path forward with stitch.

At the end of January I showed you the beginning of my invitational eclipse piece. Many hours and stitches later it’s finished. I can’t get enough of the embroidery’s texture as it catches the light.

All these years later I consider embroidery a versatile mainstay of my work. Given time, it’s no surprise that any artist’s practice circles back over itself, re-incorporating much of what was picked up along the way. My current pieces include embroidery on cloth, as well as stitching paired with painting on paper. You can see examples of both in two shows opening this month:

Up & Down, In & Out: Embroidery and its Kin
Studio Place Arts
March 13 – April 20, 2024
Artist Social: Saturday, March 16 4:30-6pm

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Solar Eclipse
The Highland Center for the Arts
March 23 – April 21, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 23 5:30-7pm

One last note: when we visited the MFA, Boston in January, I was beyond thrilled to come across a piece by Renie Breskin Adams, whose densely embroidered work initially caught my eye in Smith’s book. It was the first time I’d seen her art in the flesh.

Being able to study this piece up close was like finally meeting an old friend/mentor in person. And now that I know about Zorach’s history and her pieces in the MFA’s collection, I can look forward to seeking them out too, to learn and to pay homage on a future visit.

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My three pieces in this show: Left: Poseidon’s Garden ©2016, Dye, discharge and embroidery on silk, 26″H x 22″W Upper Right: Mussel Memory ©2022, Stitched-resist dye and embroidery on silk, 12″H x 16″W Lower Right: Caught Red-Handed ©2019, Stitched-resist dye and embroidery on silk, 18″H x 24″W

If you can get beyond the mud on your road, there’s no better way to brighten up a drizzly, gray March day than with a healthy dose of color and the warm tactile beauty of this fiber art exhibition. There are only 10 days left for “Trichromancy”, which closes on March 16th.
Chandler Center for the Arts Gallery, Randolph, VT

Small Bites

In the spirit of working with what is available, there’s a lot to be said for short bursts of time — the long haul isn’t necessarily always better. I’ve learned that regular, quick drawings and paintings in my sketchbooks are one way to keep the wheels greased when working around the edges of busy days. And that goes for reading too.

This, and the image below, are an example of just a couple of sketches from the last week. Short and sweet, a half hour of drawing during the day helps to balance the long hours of stitching I’ve been devoting to my eclipse piece (more on that work in my next post). Even a short sketch helps to keep the drawing muscles in shape.

When our kids were little and there just wasn’t time to read more than a couple of novels a year, I developed an appreciation for short-form writing. At that time the interruptions came faster than the length of the shortest chapter, so I really appreciated the luxury of being able to finish what I was reading in one brief sitting. Short stories and magazine articles became a mainstay.

Trench Sketch

I may have plenty of time to read now, but I do still value finding something that I can pick up and put down without disrupting the continuity of either the writing or my train of thought. With that in mind, let me recommend the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston publication Fabric of a Nation, American Quilt Stories. As a companion to their 2021/22 exhibition of the same name (which I did not see), the book includes 58 stunning quilts with numerous detail images. Accompanying each quilt is a bite-sized essay that delves into the provenance of the piece, framed within the historic and political context of the time in which it was made.

Fabric of a Nation

For one who isn’t drawn to scholarly history tomes, I am so enjoying this book! It’s a richly informative and fascinating look at American history, told through the narrative of each creator’s needle. Plus, it has the added benefit of being written so that it can fit into anyone’s schedule…win/win.

Drawing Connections

I know it’s a crazy time of year to suggest it, but if there’s any way you can get to the MFA in Boston before December 10th, do it!

Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh, 1632, oil on panel It’s hard to connect with many centuries-old portraits because they give such a stern and removed impression, making it hard to imagine the subject expressing any emotion beyond stiff disapproval. Yet Rembrandt’s painting of Aeltje Uylenburgh, despite its dark and limited palette, presents an image so approachable that one can feel the warmth of her humanity. I find the blush in her cheeks and the kindliness in her eyes quite endearing.

My main reason for visiting was that I was anxious to see the newly acquired collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings, a grouping that will serve to further distinguish this museum from other major art institutions in the country. Including an assortment of Golden Age still lifes, landscapes, marine paintings, portraits, genre scenes, historical and architectural paintings, the MFA is rightfully proud of this exceptional gift that offers something for virtually every taste.

Yokokawa Takejiro, Fashionable Firefly Hunting, 1860 Kunisada and Kuniyoshi’s woodcuts are spectacular images of detail, pattern, and color. There is so much to be seen in each image that making my way through the 100 prints was almost overwhelming. I am struck by a few basic similarities between this portrait (of a male actor in character for a female role), and Rembrandt’s portrait of Aeltje Uylenburgh above. Both images are relatively dark, yet despite their obvious differences, they share an accessibility that is expressed in both their faces and their clothes (the crisp white cap and collar, and the fur around the neck soften the austerity of Uylenburgh’s environment, while the patterns and colors of the kimono bring life to the stark and minimally defined face in the portrait of the actor Sawaura Tanosuke III).

It was just blind luck that there are several other equally exciting exhibitions simultaneously on view – among them a remarkable collection of one hundred Japanese woodblock prints by rival masters Utagawa Kuniyoshi and Utagawa Kunisada, a series of Rothko paintings, a selection of Inuit art prints, and an eclectic pairing of contemporary painter Takashi Murakami’s bold, cartoon-like works alongside classics of Japanese mastery, handpicked by Murakami and Japanese art historian Professor Nobuo Tsuji from the museum’s permanent collection.

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Stoneware Jug, Wine Glass, Herring, and Bread, 1642, Oil on panel Pieter Claesz was celebrated for his “breakfast pieces” that present the viewer with an almost literal taste of foods, both local and exotic, during the 17th century. His artfully arranged still lifes have surfaces and textures so articulately described that one can almost smell the display and feel the smooth, cool surface of the glass. Whenever we’re on the road, the one time I can usually count on squeezing in a quick sketch is during breakfast. While the only safe comparison I can make between my sketches and Claesz’ masterpieces is our shared penchant for making images of the first meal of the day, seeing his paintings gives me an enjoyable sense of camaraderie.

As diverse as these exhibitions are, connections between them can’t seem to help but bubble to the surface in hindsight as I’ve let the experience simmer this past week. Perhaps it’s just human nature to try to make sense of what we see by attempting to braid together assorted impressions into a whole, but the sub-conscious must definitely play its own part as well.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Shimosuwa: Yaegaki-hime, No. 30 from the series Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido Road, 1852 Images of animals are very hard for me to resist. These sacred foxes act as protectors for this mythic princess, running ahead of her over the ice to show where she can safely walk.

Kuniyoshi, Hayakawa Ayunosuke from the series Eight Hundred Heroes of the Japanese Shuihuzhuan, about 1830 Although the subject of this piece is the legendary warrior Hayakawa Ayunosuke, it’s the tiger that caught my eye.

Pudlo Pudlat, Proud Hunter, 1987, Stonecut I am always fascinated by pattern. The graphic quality of the marks in this piece create a sense of pattern that is just as striking as the intricate depictions of printed cloth within the Japanese prints.

For years, when traveling I used to try to go to locally owned fabric shops to refresh my “palette”. It became amusingly uncanny that, more often than not, despite choosing fabrics at random with only an eye to diversifying my stash as much as possible, once I had a chance to go over my spoils later, the fabrics seemed to work together in perhaps a deeper and more meaningful way than if I had purposely intended it.

Gerrit Dou, Dog at Rest, 1650, Oil on panel I love this little painting for obvious reasons. But I was also struck by the differing means of convincingly portraying fur in this piece, as well as on Kuniyoshi’s tiger and in the sealskin coat and wild prey in Pudlat’s print, both above.

Much of the fun of experiencing something new is the fact that it is just that: a novel occurrence. But the unexpected connections that arise later enrich and personalize the experience, making it all the more enjoyable while lending an undeniable staying power to any lasting impressions. I don’t doubt that you can think of examples when this has been true for you as well.

Eventually everything connects – people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se. ~ Charles Eames

Elizabeth Fram

Eye of the Needle

Tag Archives: Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Embroidery Deep Dive

Small Bites

Drawing Connections