I recently completed my first ever cross-stitch: a bookmark with a Stephen King quote surrounded by moths and floral elements. It was a stunning red thread design on black cloth. I was immediately ready to take on a new project and headed into the book stacks at Central Library for inspiration.
I scanned the shelves until a book called The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine by Rozsika Parker caught my eye. Culturally, needlework—which encompasses everything from embroidery to cross-stitch to crewel—has been considered "women's work," a "craft" (as opposed to "Art") and limited to the "domestic" sphere of place. Parker explores that history and traces how needlecraft was used to both define femininity and likewise be defined as a feminine craft. Widely respected as a seminal history of predominantly European needlecraft (Parker was a British art historian & critic), The Subversive Stitch was originally published in 1984 during cultural backlash to the second wave feminism of the 1970s. It was reprinted in 2010 with a new introduction from the author that addresses the shifting, yet again, of cultural consideration of needlecraft. Parker died that same year, but not before witnessing the emergence of the craftivism movement of the early 2000s and the launch of the London Craftivist Collective in 2009.
The lightening rod moment of change for my relationship with needlecraft came near the beginning of the #MeToo movement, when I witnessed a simple cross-stitch project go viral. Created by Shannon Downey of @badasscrosstitch in 2016 as a response to audio of the President Elect bragging about being able to grab women wherever he wanted, American culture at large was seemingly caught off-guard by the rage evident in a craft that was culturally still relegated to the realm of sweet grandmas in rocking chairs. Once again, needlecrafts catapulted to the forefront of a major social movement (according to Parker, embroidery played a major role in the Suffragist movement on both continents as well as in the Russian Revolution). It was being used and more importantly seen as an outlet for women's anger and rage, giving rise to popular books of patterns that feature very un-grandma-like sentiments in traditionally floral, feminine arrangements, such as Super Subversive Cross-Stitch: 50 Fresh as F*ck Designs and Maybe Swearing Will Help. There are also several explicitly feminist pattern books, like Feminist Cross-stitch and Feminist Icon Cross-stitch. This, I thought, is my kind of cross-stitch.
But is it Art? The bumbling cross-stitch bookmark I'd just made certainly didn't seem like it. Yet, when considering the art of Gio Swaby, Chloe Giordano, or Gilda Baron's stunning floral embroidery paintings, there can be no question that needlecraft is art with a capital A. Also worth considering are Helen Stevens' gorgeous book The Timeless Art of Embroidery and Donna Cardwell's treatise on the history of American Silk Art Embroidery, an art form that afforded American women in the Victorian era a means to earn their own living—a highly subversive enterprise at the time. Parker's ultimate conclusion—that the relationship between needlecraft and art, gender, identity, and culture is ever evolving—is evidenced by the multitude of voices found in books like This Long Thread and Queer Threads. No matter who you are, whether you're making protest art or digging into that cottagecore aesthetic, needlecraft is for you. Grab your needles and thread and start making art.
~posted by V.
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