On the brink of becoming a centenarian, Stella Resnick has been honing her craft for nearly nine decades.
Last year saw the birth of The Contemporary Art Modern Project (CAMP) and Fibers Artists Miami Association (FAMA), and their first collaboration: Forty Women Pulling at the Threads of Social Discourse: FAMA & Guests. The annual collaboration returns as Women Pulling at The Threads of Social Discourse: FAMA Quilts this October 2021.
During FAMA's outreach to fiber artists, they received an unexpected email from Wish of a Lifetime from AARP, introducing FAMA and CAMP to Stella Resnick, whose wish is to realize her lifelong dream of seeing her works on a gallery wall. FAMA and the CAMP are pleased to showcase Resnick's work, which will make up September's exhibition at The CAMP Gallery entitled Stella's Stitch.
On the brink of becoming a centenarian, Stella Resnick has been honing her craft for nearly nine decades. The Brooklyn-born artist started sewing as a young child, inspired by the techniques of her housekeeper who hailed from Poland and her grandmother, who had a treadle sewing machine. In her late teens, she worked in the fashion world and later became a primary school teacher. The second chapter of her career involved supporting a successful family-owned textile business in Manhattan. The company imported beautiful fabric primarily from Italy and later Asia. Resnick began working with fibers in the late 1950s, traveling abroad to Europe on buying trips where she studied the techniques of local artisans. Rather than creating flat works, Resnick built on her research by pushing the medium, producing tactile and practical objects that entice viewers to reach out and touch them. Her immense body of work includes three-dimensional artworks, handbags, cornices, piano bench covers, quilts, receiving blankets, clothing, and even tablecloths & napkins to match sets of China.
Her textile and embroidery work features waves, flames, sunbursts, sailboats, and other motifs emblematic of these concepts. At age 99, she lives entirely independently at her beautiful home in Southeast Florida. The matriarch of the family, she has three children, eight grandchildren, and 12 great-grandchildren. She continues to produce extraordinary work.
Artists such as Resnick stand as an example of the experience of many women, trudging through life in both a public and a private manner, that life being her dedication to the creative voice, which one can see manifested it on a myriad of objects all the while feeding her creative need. Very reminiscent of Virginia Woolf and "A Room of One's Own," Stella has stayed true to that room and filled it with creations. Now we will offer her another room, a room to view and witness her life through textiles.