Continuing this year’s Women Pulling at the Threads of Social Discourse interview series, running alongside our gallery exhibition for the next two months. We asked the eighty (yes, eighty) artists participating in the sixth-annual edition of our textile exhibition, We Got the Power, to reflect on the themes present in our main source material (Aristophanes' Lysistrata), as well as their own relationships with the medium.
Our fifth Q&A roundup features CAMP artist Manju Shandler who is joined by artists Janine Brown, Breanna Cee Martins and Kathy Nida.
Why is fiber your medium of choice?
Manju Shandler: I simply enjoy fabrics, including canvas
Janine Brown: I grew up in rural Iowa where I learned to sew, knit, and crochet through my local 4-H club. In high school, I worked in a fabric store and began to create my own designs. I intended to major in fashion design in college, but ended up changing majors to fine arts with an emphasis on craft design. These experiences led to a career in the fashion industry. After I left the fashion industry, I returned to fine arts and fiber techniques were a natural fit.
Breanna Cee Martins: In my watercolor process, I mount the paper to canvas and use linen bleach, fabric dyes, and homemade pigments to dye, stretch, and manipulate the paper's texture. I grew up surrounded by Venezuelan fiber arts, where little shapes arranged like pieces of stained glass come together to form brightly colored, kaleidoscopic works of art. Only recently have I begun to blend the two in my practice, exploring my cultural history and a family past untaught and forgotten.
Kathy Nida: I've always sewn. I was working as a printmaker and realized I wouldn't be able to continue when I was pregnant, because the chemicals were toxic. I had been making quilts and thought I could translate the images I printed into fabric. I found that I appreciated the color palette and the tactile quality of the fabrics, plus they were more portable.
Women are the mothers of society. We create change by nurturing the next generation — Manju Shandler
What was your introduction to fiber art?
MS: I literally learned to sew on my mother's lap. I remember sitting on her lap, both mesmerized and terrified of the needle in the sewing machine flying up and down, gobbling up the fabric and spitting out a finished seam on the other side.
JB: In college at Iowa State University, I majored in craft design. The courses I took included screen printing on fabric, stitching techniques, and independent study using photographic processes on fabric. At the time, I was fascinated with the idea of wearable art.
BCM: As a young child, my introduction to fiber art sat beneath my abuela's chair as she knitted and made her Venezuelan fabric art while I drew in my sketchbook. When her hands were free, she would play with the top of my hair, and I felt at home in the arts. Years later, it changed to taking her granddaughters to a swamp or pier and having us draw for an hour uninterrupted, then making us line up our sketchbooks. She would look them over wordlessly and only comment on the best work, ignoring the rest of us. She was a highly complex woman, but she instilled in me a relentless curiosity and enthusiasm for learning every art technique I could find and a driving sense of competitiveness. She made me believe in myself because she was wrong; I was cut out to be an artist. As I begin to integrate fiber arts into my practice, I am reconciling with that past and sense of history.
KN: My mom taught me to sew my clothing when I was a kid, so I had a fabric addiction when I was young. When I lived in the UK for a year in college, I took a few fiber classes down at the local arts center, and then continued looking for classes like that in San Diego. Somewhere in there, I went to a quilt art exhibit and was fascinated. I joined a local quilt guild and started taking classes and trying to find my voice.
Who inspires you?
MS: I feel so fortunate to be a part of a vibrant community of artists in New York City. Attending my peer's exhibitions is endlessly inspiring.
JB: I am inspired by the Connecticut artist, Norma Minkowitz. I am also inspired by the work of Ruth Asawa, Issey Miyake (wearable art), and Iris van Herpen. Outside of art and fashion, I am inspired by the many women of the Home Economics Movement who in the early 1900s where instrumental in developing nutritional guidelines, clean water initiatives, and other household safety and efficiency endeavors. Many also worked in the U.S. government in the Bureau of Home Economics, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
BCM: I am inspired by my daughter, a fourth-generation artist who is fearless in a modern world that sometimes I don't understand. She moves through the world with confidence and power and is bravely herself every day.
KN: LOTS of people...famous artists, not-so-famous artists, other quilt artists, ceramicists, printmakers. I was lucky to have supportive parents growing up, so they put me in art classes and exposed me to more types of art.
Strong women are needed to advocate for themselves at home, work and in the community.
— Janine Brown
What was your reaction to this year’s call for submissions? Can you elaborate on why?
MS: The exhibition proposal for We Got the Power had a lot of depth and addresses some very complicated issues. My reaction was to create a more abstract piece that subtly addresses the tension between masculine and feline, war and peace, chaos and order through the two complimentary sides of my composition.
JB: I was interested in the idea of female empowerment. Women working together to achieve a goal. I had already been working on an idea related to women birthing hope for the future, so the call was the perfect opportunity to work through this idea for a completed piece.
BCM: My reaction was jolting excitement but also trepidation, as I hadn't exhibited these watercolor and fiber pieces in public before. I applied without knowing their possible reception, and I'm so glad I did.
KN: An online acquaintance had sent me the link, saying she thought my work would fit in with the ideas. It was the end of the school year and I was busy, but I wasn't ready to commit. I wasn't sure about it at first...I read through the play and had some ideas. And then I watched the Spike Lee movie and was sold. I had done some recent work on wars and was still in the mindset of How do we stop these? And the image popped into my head.
Tell us about your piece for We Got the Power, and what it means to you.
MS: On the left hand side of the image I have composed black printed texture with painted highlights.
On the right hand side I have painted a cloudy background primary in whites adorned with circles and black lines in a tight grid.
JB: The piece honors Ellen Swallow Richards, the first female to go to MIT and one of the founders of the Home Economics movement. She felt that teaching women to improve the home using science would improve the world. So for the piece, I embrace cooking, sustainable materials, and sewing to suggest that the three virgin goddesses, Athena, Artemis, and Hestia, will birth hope for a new world.
The materials for the piece are all-natural bioplastic cooked using food-grade ingredients. The bioplastic is then embedded with flower petals referencing the Victorian Floriography (the language of flowers). The first vulva contains pink rose petals symbolizing femininity, the middle vulva contains red rose petals symbolizing love, and the third vulva contains yellow rose petals symbolizing friendship. Streaming from the vulvas is a "river" made from bioplastic embedded with cornflower petals symbolizing hope. The statue drawings inside each of the vulva represent the three virgins, Hestia, Athena, and Artemis. The white background is created with bioplastic embedded with white rose petals suggesting purity with a border of bioplastic embedded with red rose petals suggesting love. Honoring women's work, the bioplastic material is hand-stitched together using a 1.4mm crochet hook. The piece is surprisingly heavy, which suggests the heavy burden women bear through reproductive, productive and community managing roles.
BCM: I created a piece based on my proposal. It shows a girl focused on the danger she imagines from stories, but in the viewer's eye, how she is both in and of the landscape. Like the true endings of a Grimm fairy tale, she is stalked by danger. This girl is stripped of her strength, not by her loneliness but by her aloneness, separated from the strength of sisterhood like a modern red riding hood. She is lost in the wilderness, feeling small.
KN: I've been making a series of war quilts since the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, mixing in work about school shootings. I'm a teacher; those are close to my heart. In reading the play and watching the movie, I realized what I really want in both wars and community shootings is to protect the children. We shouldn't be doing anything that puts them at risk. And yet we do every day, sending weapons instead of aid, allowing gun rights to supersede human rights. So I started with an earth goddess in the center, holding a child, separating the men from the women. Then each person represented a country currently involved in a war. The women all have peace signs (except for the US) and the men have weapons or video game controllers. I wanted the goddess to be the wall between the men and the women, protecting the women and children from the violence the men were creating.
I believe in the women I see every day getting involved in their communities, running for office, and speaking for themselves and for future generations.
— Breanna Cee Martins
What does your piece respond to, both in the context of the play and in society?
MS: These two sides of the image create opposing forces, a type of yin and yang symbolizing the two sides of every situation, masculine and feminine, war and peace, and chaos and calm.
JB: In the play, Lysistrata's intention is to enlist women to withhold sex to end the war, thus creating a more peaceful world. My piece envisions the three Greek virgin goddesses that through immaculate conception give birth to hope, like a river that runs out of them covering the earth with thoughts for a better future.
BCM: The art of creative expression knows no boundaries when exploring themes of empowerment, solidarity, and female strength. By merging fiber art with the literary arts, we unravel a tapestry of narratives that celebrate the resilience and influence of women throughout history, particularly Aristophanes and Lysistrata. Through the context of the play that calls on women to unite and hold sway over their men, we delve into the transformative power that emerges when women come together as a collective force. Through the intricate threads of fiber art inspired by women who have paved the way for change, we highlight the potency of unity in confronting issues of war and violence.
KN: It responds to the death of children...and women. It responds to our current support of violence to gain territory and/or power over the rights of humans to live their lives. I feel like if enough people put their feet down (politically, financially, vocally), we could make a change to the world, to make it more peaceful.
Kathy Nida. Stop the Murder Madness, 2024. Hand-dyed and commercial cotton fabrics, rayon and cotton threads, cotton batting. 12 x 24 inches.
How do you hope viewers will respond to your piece?
MS: I hope the viewer will take the time to look deeply into my composition and find their own meanings.
JB: I hope the piece will inspire curiosity of the materials, as well as, leave them thinking about ways to improve the future.
BCM: I hope viewers can see themselves in the piece, and of themselves, learn something new. The piece encompasses a universal feeling, or experience of being lost, whether physically in the wilderness, or lost on our path in life.
KN: Well, ideally they would all support a peaceful world, get rid of their guns, send aid to people who need it, peacefully solve problems of land, power, and religion without killing people. Not very realistic. I just hope it pushes people who agree to actually DO something, to speak up, to support an aid group, to vote in a way that supports peace. And those who don't agree, maybe they will see something in the piece that makes them think along those lines too, although that is a harder sell.
So many women are conditioned to NOT speak up. It's important that we use our power to help the world, not just ourselves.
- Kathy Nida
Do you believe that women do have the power to effect change? How?
MS: Women are the mothers of society. We create change by nurturing the next generation.
JB: I believe women have the power to effect change. Strong women are needed to advocate for themselves at home, work and in the community. The women of the Home Economics Movement helped to advocate for women to better manage their homes - what better training than to better manage the world?
BCM: The last few years have made me doubtful and hopeless, but this year, I believe in being hopeful. I believe in the women I see every day getting involved in their communities, running for office, and speaking for themselves and for future generations. The activism I see translates to women running for office and winning, allowing them to effect meaningful change.
KN: Absolutely. Speaking up, not agreeing for the sake of agreement, using their minds for the good of others. Sending money to aid organizations, VOTING, speaking to their families and children about what upsets them about violence and war. So many women are conditioned to NOT speak up. It's important that we use our power to help the world, not just ourselves.
