Review of Pricked:Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts and Design
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007Pricked: Extreme Embroidery at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, November 8, 2007-March 9, 2008
The average person encounters embroidery in daily life mainly in the form of tea towels and certain types of clothing. Few people think of the craft as a medium to be explored, a medium whose boundaries, capabilities and functions can be stretched. Pricked: Extreme Embroidery lifts the craft out of the realm of royal or religious vestements, out of the everyday table and bed linens and places it firmly in the realm of artists working not just as craftspeople but also as interpreters of contemporary life.
The exhibition is divided into 6 themed categories: NEITHER MORE NOR LESS concentrates on works incorporating text and words.
Judy Chicago, the doyenne of embroidery in contemporary art, is represented with Its Always Darkest Before the Dawn, where embroidery plays its traditional role of adding depth and luminosity with colorful silk threads.
Tilleke Schwartz’s two works are like embroidery sketchbooks, with motifs, words and images overlapping and interplaying on hand dyed fabric. Count Your Blessings, a travelogue of the artist’s visits to Australia and the US, intersperses phrases and sentence fragments with the question: Are craft people making money on the Internet?
Andrea Dezso’s Lessons from My Mother, a wall with dozens of 6”x6” embroidered illustrations of her mother’s adages. Each one begins with “My mother claimed that…” which is followed by some very interesting statement and an illustration of the sentiment.
Every visitor seems to read them all, and once read, the viewer can’t help but feel that she has just spent a few moments with the artist and her mother in the flesh.
