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Textile Reborn: Revisiting Judy Chicago’s Birth Project

Jimena Luque, Harvard University

Undulating scarlet embroidery outlines a woman’s body upon a silk canvas. The tension of the threads against the fabric creates natural folds, at once disruptive against the silk’s smooth surface, and constructive by materializing the visceral emotions of the subject, who is depicted as in the process of giving birth. She holds her legs open as a vertical tear, resembling a vulva, rips across her body, creating concentric waves that emanate outward and consume the entire frame (fig. 1). 

Figure 1. Judy Chicago, Birth Tear/Tear, 1982. Embroidery on silk by Jane Gaddie Thompson, collection of Jeffrey N. Dauber and Marc A. Levin. Photo by author.

The artwork described above, Birth Tear/Tear (doubly referencing the physical slash and the pain being represented, respectively), belongs to a project spearheaded by twentieth-century American artist Judy Chicago. In the Birth Project (1980-1985), Chicago designed images centering on women and their experience of giving birth, which were to be translated into textile works by dozens of volunteer needleworkers across the United States and abroad. Despite the Birth Project’s large scale and the remarkable technical prowess of its textile works, it has been largely overlooked by art historical scholarship, in great part due to the project’s—and Chicago’s—association with second-wave, essentialist feminism.1 Briefly defined, essentialist feminism seeks to uncover the fundamental nature that defines womanhood, both physically and metaphysically. As art historian Helen Molesworth describes, the prevailing reception of the artwork done by Chicago and other 1970s feminist artists has been largely reduced to this essentialist characterization, leading to its main positioning within art historical scholarship to be one of oppositional, hierarchical contrast with art’s eventual progression into theory-based feminism.2 Because of its evident flaws as an inclusive, norm-challenging feminist practice—perpetuating confining notions of gender that create systems of inequality to begin with—feminist essentialism is considered an antiquated ideological trope. However, the art produced under this framework, such as Chicago’s Birth Project, has suffered from an unjustly simplistic analytical lens that prevents the fair insertion of such works into the art historical canon and their participation in broader scholarly discussion. As a growing number of recent exhibitions at renowned institutions such as the New Museum (New York, 2024) and the Serpentine Gallery (London, 2024) are reintroducing Chicago to contemporary audiences, it is more pertinent than ever to revisit the Birth Project in our renewed social and ideological context.

The imperative of revisiting this project also stems from the intriguing range of reactions to its works from both critics and other members of society. Professional critics’ descriptions of the Birth Project’s practical execution ranged from a “non-profit” endeavor that benefited feminine artistic production, to a neglectful enterprise that abused women by making them “[labor] for nothing.”3 In terms of Chicago’s art itself, some critics found it a brilliantly compelling and powerful set of images, while others dismissed it as a  “lumbering clash of stereotypes in an ideological bog.”4 The general public’s reception of these works during their exhibition was also divided, even amongst female audiences: while some women thought of it as “pagan pornography” and belonging to “a centerfold in Playboy,” others argued that it glorified the act of childbirth and evoked personal, “beautiful memories of giving life.”5 This wide range of feedback makes the Birth Project a highly compelling case study to examine relationships among artistic materiality, affect, and societal impact: why were these responses so divergent, and how can we understand them, and the art itself, today?

In this essay, I will revisit the Birth Project through a focus on its textile materiality, illustrating how this medium enabled successful spaces of female collaboration, therapeutic reflection and individual expression, while importantly responding to dominating narratives about traditional uses of textile art. To effectively illustrate the latter, I will narrow my analytical scope to a single work from the project, Birth Tear/Tear, investigating how the work challenges the historical use of embroidery for the construction of a docile, “soft” feminine ideal.6 This essay is not intended to join the ranks of the highly polarized opinions around Chicago’s work, but rather to explore the complexity of how the Birth Project fits within today’s societal and artistic landscape—a privilege of nuance that many other artists already receive.

The Birth Project was, crucially, grounded through the textile medium. After working with needleworkers for her widely successful large-scale installation known as the Dinner Party, Chicago was interested in continuing to engage with textile arts, in great part because of the medium’s historical association to both craft (i.e., of less value than fine art mediums) and female labor.7 Chicago’s perception of an iconographic void of images of birth within the art historical canon, sparked by an interest in creation myths, led her to explore birthing as a unifying concept for her nascent project. Given her own lack of childbirth experience, Chicago spoke to many women about their birthing processes and attended multiple live births. This socially constructed knowledge then informed her design of imagery that illuminated the previously occluded pain and complexity surrounding birthing. Over five years, 150 volunteer needleworkers, many of whom learned their textile art skills through generational mother-daughter transmission, worked from home to translate five thematic designs by Chicago into a total of eighty-four textile works. These were assembled into easily shipped exhibition units, together with accompanying information about the needlework labor process and creation myths, all owned and managed by Chicago’s nonprofit organization, Through The Flower. 

This vast network of domestic artists is reflective of the multilayered collaborative nature of the Birth Project, one that ranges from the microscopic level of material collectivity between individual threads that is inherent to textile as a medium; to cooperative processes of labor, exhibition, and expansion of the project. This framework is significant for understanding this project today, since as acknowledged by current feminist and sociological theory, conceptions of gender and womanhood are all socially constructed, therefore requiring a similarly collective, rather than individual, effort to dismantle.8 Starting from the narrowest field of view, to reiterate, textile art is materially collaborative: it involves joining many individual threads, which theoretically could be taken apart as individual subunits composing the artwork. One could imagine the painstaking, but ultimately possible, labor of disentangling the threads that make up the embroidery of Birth Tear/Tear, individual items that will remain mostly intact relative to their original state. The joining of independent units to create meaning beyond their individual value therefore composes a material representation of collaboration.

This is not to equate all textile art methods: quite on the contrary, the Birth Project’s material collaboration also involves the wide range of techniques (and their further personalization) that the needleworkers employed, including “embroidery, quilting, macramé, needlepoint, crochet and more.”9 In Birth Tear/Tear, volunteer artist Jane Gaddie Thompson created embroidery with a remarkable color gradient through an elaborate type of needlepoint she developed herself, requiring the use of nine needles with three threads each at a time.10 The range of materials that she used was equally impressive, ranging from mesh canvases and silk to batik fabric.11 Importantly, this wide range of techniques and materials was largely enabled by the multitude of women working on this project, each with their own individual artistic practice that, just like the individual threads in the works themselves, created a whole greater than the sum of its parts. 

Remarkably, this collaborative labor was not driven by direct compensation of the individual artists, as they worked voluntarily. Rather, their motivation seems drawn by three main factors: a collective response to Chicago’s paradoxically strained economic situation and lack of institutional backing despite her growing artistic renown; a perceived lack of spaces for women to be producers and observers of fine art; and societal taboos surrounding open discussions of birthing. While the problematization of employment of unpaid labor for this project remains (and has been referenced extensively by Chicago’s critics), the resulting collective of female artists through these common drivers remains a socially—perhaps even politically—significant example of textile art as a medium for ideological subversiveness. One might argue the needleworkers’ semantic denomination as “volunteers” already presumes a smaller hierarchical difference than that of “apprenticeship” and other unpaid labor practices that have been universally present in both classical and modern artistic production. Moreover, despite Chicago’s highly successful exhibition of the Dinner Party at SFMOMA in 1979, all other museums planning to exhibit her work the following year suddenly refused to do so, thus preventing her from recovering from the large debt she had accumulated for the completion of this artwork, and driving her close to bankruptcy.12 Yet, as a result of this exhibition, lots of women–including many needleworkers–wrote letters to Chicago manifesting their interest in participating in any future projects she may have. Lots of them expressed their gratitude for Chicago’s decision to center female experience in her work, an act of inclusion that, many confessed, prompted them to visit a museum for the first time in their lives. As a result of the institutional and critical hostility garnered by the Dinner Party, Chicago and the needleworkers she subsequently came in contact with developed a relationship grounded in collective resistance, one that is reminiscent of many other social movements that utilized textile art to drive ideological confrontation.13 

Moreover, in subsequent public interviews given by Birth Project needleworkers, many expressed excitement about publicly showcasing work that felt materially and thematically unprecedented in relation to their own perceptions of fine art. In a 1986 interview, needleworker Kathy Lenhart expressed her frustration over the many female textile artists who “weren’t considered artists because their art was thought to be women’s work.”14 Furthermore, she defends that since “art has always been male-dominated,” finishing her textile as she balanced a full-time job became a task of “spiritual” importance for her, one that contributed to the monumental goal of making the art world “look at women both as artists and the subject of the art.”15 Chicago, as a formally trained artist who was hesitant to engage with mediums associated with female labor, admittedly in an effort to ease her transition into the art establishment as a respected creative, saw a professional turning point with the Birth Project.16 In addition, her collaborative approach not only granted space for women to showcase their work as art in addition to craft, but also sought to represent the network of 30 million needleworkers in the United States who made the kinds of works that had been systematically excluded from equal participation in the art world.

The symbiotic relationship between the subsistence of Chicago’s artistic practice and the project’s reappraisal of textile art as both valuable and accessible led to levels of collaboration that extended beyond the process of making itself: the exhibitions of the Birth Project also led to a remarkable level of collective decision making and actively highlighted artistic labor. For example, a 1981 correspondence from Mary Ross Taylor, Project Director of the Birth Project, and Sasha McInnes-Hayman, founder of Womanspirit, one of Canada’s first women’s art galleries, illustrates the close-knit relationship Chicago’s team carried out with exhibitors – one that importantly granted freedom and specialization as well as advice.17 In one letter, Ross Taylor describes the purposefully low costs of artwork transportation in an effort to make the exhibition at Womanspirit as affordable as possible. The works would be sent with lots of supplementary material (documentary photographs, creation myth information, needleworker notes), yet the gallery would have the authority to exhibit as many works as they’d like, with or without the information being sent, a permission of liberty that is uncommon for contemporary exhibition practices. In addition, there is a conscious effort by Chicago’s team to spotlight the intricacy of textile labor involved in the project, as demonstrated by Ross Taylor’s proposal to have a needleworker speak at the opening of Womanspirit’s Birth Project exhibition. 

It is worth noting that the Birth Project’s collaborative nature grew dynamically and continually, as manifested in McInnes-Hayman’s suggestion that Chicago do an interview for Spirale, a quarterly newsletter released by Womanspirit that reached around 2500 women across Canada, who could potentially be interested in working for the project. This momentum also led to independent artistic initiatives in female-oriented spaces, as demonstrated by correspondence between Chicago’s team and Barat College, once a small women’s college in Lake Forest, Illinois.18 To celebrate Chicago’s lecturing visit in 1981, Barat’s Reicher Art Gallery put together an exhibition titled “White Work,” showcasing needleworks sourced from local private collections. Finally, Chicago’s archives reveal the dozens of local newspaper interviews, some already referenced in this essay, given by the Birth Project’s needleworkers, which highlighted their roles as community members and often full-time workers alongside their now revealed artistic prowess.19 This evidence suggests the ripple effects of the Birth Project in showcasing textile labor, along with promoting women-led artistic spaces, eventually reached far beyond what Chicago herself had direct supervision over. 

The Birth Project’s spotlight on the value of collaborative textile labor (manual work) was intimately linked to the thematic focus on the reality of labor (birthing). Largely perceived as out of the ordinary both during the project’s development and today, this conceptual link proved to not only drive collective strength, but also provide an opportunity for therapeutic engagement for both artists and wider audiences—particularly mothers. Noting her perception of a historical shift in creation mythology from a female-centered perspective during the Neolithic age to a male-centered one, Chicago wished to return women to the center of creationary imagery through a focus on not only the intellectual and spiritual, but also physical reality of birthing.20 Despite not having experienced giving birth herself, the imagery she created was recognized by many mothers as carrying violence and pain intertwined with beauty and struggle that evoked personal experiences of birth, with critic Barbara Roessner recalling how she “knitted her way through depression when [she] was in college” after viewing the project’s embroidered works, a comment that highlights the association between textile materiality and emotional healing.21 One mother of four wrote to her local newspaper after seeing works from the Birth Project at her local college: “Several of the pictures looked just like I felt during the act of childbirth. It is amazing how these feelings are captured through the medium of needlework.”22 Jane Gaddie Thompson’s complex emotions surrounding her own birthing experience, one she describes as “a lot more pain[ful] than expected,” led her to develop a personal relationship with Chicago’s Birth Tear/Tear design she ultimately translated into embroidery, imagery which she felt constructed a “representation of birth [that] was perfectly realistic.”23

Materializing this emotionally charged and complex reality of birthing through textile proved to also be a uniquely conducive medium for the participating artists themselves, helping them process and heal their own feelings regarding childbirth and conceptions of femininity during the artistic labor process. Needleworker Candis Duncan Pomykala shared in a 1986 interview that working on the Birth Project was “somewhat like therapy; with each knot made I took a firmer stand in my dedication to my own femininity.”24 Another artist, Judith Meyers, described her gratification in having the opportunity to make a quilt depicting a birth aided by a midwife, mentioning how it “expresses perfectly the birth experience [she] had with [her] first child.”25 Chicago herself revealed she was so “depressed … [she] didn’t know what to do” after several museums refused to exhibit the Dinner Party, leading to emotional and economic stress that led her to work alongside the needleworkers she had connected with through that project—first to complete a catalogue about the textile art in the installation, and ultimately to envision the Birth Project together.26

Importantly, the multiplexed healing nature of the Birth Project is deeply tied to the  historical characterization of textile work, particularly embroidery, as a “source of support and satisfaction for women” working within the household, as well as within the struggle against the lack of agency for birthing women during the late twentieth century.27 In the 1984 book The Subversive Stitch, notably contemporaneous to the Birth Project, psychotherapist and art historian Rozsika Parker theorizes how embroidery can “provide a vehicle for dealing with highly ambivalent, complex feelings,” a claim constructed both from observations in her personal therapeutic practice and historical knowledge about the presence of embroidery as a social signifier for women in Victorian era households and modern feminist social movements such as the Women’s Suffragette’s. In addition, after the forceful removal of midwives from birthing practices by the medical establishment at the turn of the 1920s, the latter half of the twentieth century saw a feminist-driven increase in midwife involvement during childbirth, arguing for the return of female labor and agency to the delivery room.28 In view of these precedents, the Birth Project’s collective therapeutic effects and collective labor as achieved through the materiality of textile art take on a crucial historical significance. 

The healing nature of the Birth Project is materially evident in its finished works through qualities that are unique to textile, thus reiterating the crucial role of this medium for the project’s overall characterization. For example, examining Birth Tear/Tear reveals how the intense strain childbirth places on the body is materially reflected in the way the embroidery creates physical tension against the underlying silk. This is especially visible near the woman’s inner thighs, where the embroidery naturally creates folds from tightly pulling on the fabric, a material quality that resembles the expression of the subject herself. These tensile folds also serve to disrupt the otherwise smooth silk comprising the woman’s skin, creating an organically uneven and “imperfect,” yet rich surface. Moreover, the smoothness of the silk highlights the center “tear” as disruptive: the tear does not follow a smooth border as the embroidery making up the woman and the concentric waves around her do. Yet, despite its differing visual character to the rest of the image, this tear does not seem out of place. Perhaps one reason for this seamless integration is that a tear is naturally part of the visual language of textiles: fabrics can be torn apart and re-stitched together, effectively “healed” in a way that is unique to this medium. 

Finally, in addition to the collaboration and therapeutic properties the textile medium is uniquely conducive towards, its mode of utilization in the Birth Project also importantly challenges its historically dominant usage. In the context of Birth Tear/Tear, for example, the use of embroidery to convey an emotionally charged, violent, and painful reality of birthing directly challenges the historical use of embroidery as emblematic of the soft, gentle ideal of femininity.29 In The Subversive Stitch, Parker explains how embroidery was reserved for elite women working from home as a symbolic representation of her “docility, obedience, love of home, and a life without work.” She notes how male intellectuals like Freud would consequently create associations between embroidery and “[rendering] women particularly prone to hysteria,” in an effort to justify the social characterization of women as irrational and emotionally driven. The slow, labor intensive process of embroidery would ensure women “spent long hours at home, retired in private,” yet it elevated the status of the male-led household as one of sufficient economic standing to allow the confined woman to do such work. 

In response to the dominating historical conception of embroidery as soft, delicate, and easygoing, Birth Tear/Tear presents a strikingly violent image that confronts the viewer with full force. The expression of the woman giving birth is ridden with pain and intensity, and the vulval tear rips through her body with jagged edges and a forcefulness that is a far cry from the softness expected from embroidered work (and workers). The affective quality of this image is not only present in the subject herself (the way her hands press intensely against her thighs, her posture leaning back in seemingly tormenting agony), but in the embroidered umbilical cords emanating from her body. Some of them are tightly twisted around themselves, creating visual and mechanical pressure against the underlying silk. Others have varying shades of red and pink that become darker as they approach the woman’s head, centering it as one of the sources of her turmoil. Her body is vigorously put on display, though she remains the agent of this decision by actively separating her legs towards the viewer: her pain is strong and cannot be ignored. Overall, the emotional quality of Birth Tear/Tear unequivocally conveys intense suffering that is not only occluded from the few previous classical depictions of birth (especially regarding the trope of the Virgin Mary), but one that confronts the domineering conception of the materiality of embroidery itself as a symbol of gentleness and femininity.

A close analysis of Birth Tear/Tear, together with archival materials connected to Birth Project, all reveal a highly collaborative, therapeutic, and historically responsive outcome that is largely attainable thanks to the materiality of textile art. Fittingly, the stakes of revisiting this project are also wide-ranging. To begin, it is useful to acknowledge the increasingly widening gap between the theoretical development of feminist and sociological theory (regarding the failures of essentialist notions with respect to perpetuating gender stereotypes, for example), and the very real systemic disadvantages that, perhaps not all, but many women continue to face. I propose the Birth Project as an example of how art can bridge this divide by producing ideologically forward works that are still operationally successful. The textile works in the project challenged social conceptions of the reality of birthing, while also confronting a historical precedent of embroidery as emblematic of docile femininity. Alongside this theoretically advanced framework, it also enabled many women to publicly exhibit their artistic capabilities, providing a platform for them to share personal experiences regarding birthing and their own creative process. In this way, the Birth Project may be seamlessly integrated into the growing framework of the textile medium, recently explored by art historians such as Julia Bryan-Wilson as particularly conducive to political and social action, as well as a uniquely qualified space for interconnection between “fine art and amateur practices,” bridging the gap between professionally trained full-time artists and nonspecialist creatives.30

More specifically in relation to art history as a field, rediscovering the multidimensional qualities of the Birth Project raises an open question regarding which artists are permitted to be viewed under a nuanced lens. It is true that this project mostly involved white women who had a stable income that allowed them to partake in unpaid labor, and of course, the essentialist character of the imagery may not go unnoticed. However, does this automatically imply that the whole endeavor must be automatically marked as detrimental and unworthy of further analysis? Do we not allow artists who had notably racist, sexist, and otherwise highly exclusionary views of the world to be interpreted through multiple lenses, allowing them to enter art historical discussions sometimes even regardless of the political nature of their work? Moreover, the beginning of modernity saw a huge theoretical shift in motivations and interpretations of art from the spiritual to the political realm—who, then, do we allow to be democratically political and still be worthy of greater aesthetic analysis? As highlighted by Paris Spies-Gans during Harvard’s 2024 Annual Henri Zerner Lecture, those who write about art have a tremendous responsibility in defining not only the art historical canon, but our societal perceptions about who has been, is, and can be an artist in the first place. It is therefore crucial for scholarship to consider how artists whose political views one may find incongruent or antiquated can be viewed under a nuanced lens, in particular regarding those who come from groups that are still largely excluded from the history of art.

Endnotes

  1. Hal Foster, “‘1975’, in Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Vol 2, 1945 to the Present (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2004).,” in Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, vol. 2. ↩︎
  2. Helen Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” October 92 (2000): 73, https://doi.org/10.2307/779234. ↩︎
  3. Series VI. THE BIRTH PROJECT. Papers of Judy Chicago, 1947-2004 (inclusive), 1957-2004 (bulk), MC 502. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. ↩︎
  4. “Series VI. THE BIRTH PROJECT. Papers of Judy Chicago.” ↩︎
  5. “Series VI. THE BIRTH PROJECT. Papers of Judy Chicago.” ↩︎
  6. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, 1984, 11. ↩︎
  7. Judy Chicago, The Birth Project, 1985. ↩︎
  8. Foster, “‘1975’, in Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Vol 2, 1945 to the Present (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2004).” ↩︎
  9. Excerpt from Birth Tear/Tear tombstone at Unravel exhibition (Barbican, 2024). ↩︎
  10. “Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textile in Art” (Barbican Museum, 2024). ↩︎
  11. Chicago, The Birth Project. ↩︎
  12. “Essays and Other Writings. Retrospective Writing, Beginning of Birth Project, 1982. Papers of Judy Chicago, 1947-2004 (Inclusive), 1957-2004 (Bulk), MC 502, 6.5., Carton: 6.” (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). ↩︎
  13. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, 2017. ↩︎
  14. “Kathy Lenhart Interview. In Judy Chicago Papers. The Birth Project. Clippings, 1986. MC 502, Folder 71.12-71.13.” (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). ↩︎
  15. “Kathy Lenhart Interview. In Judy Chicago Papers. The Birth Project. Clippings, 1986. MC 502, Folder 71.12-71.13.” ↩︎
  16. Chicago, The Birth Project. ↩︎
  17. “Letter from Sasha McInnes Hayman to Mary Ross Taylor, 1981. In Judy Chicago Papers. Papers, 1947-2004 (Inclusive), 1957-2004 (Bulk). MC 502, Carton 6, Folder 13” (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). ↩︎
  18. “Letter from Cam Springer to Mary Ross Taylor, 1981. In Judy Chicago Papers. Papers, 1947-2004 (Inclusive), 1957-2004 (Bulk). MC 502, Carton 6, Folder 13” (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). ↩︎
  19. “Series VI. THE BIRTH PROJECT. Papers of Judy Chicago.” ↩︎
  20. Chicago, The Birth Project. ↩︎
  21. “‘Bearing Children Is What Women Do’, Column by Barbara T. Roessner in the Herald Tribune. In Judy Chicago Papers. The Birth Project. Clippings, 1987. MC 502, Folder 71.14.” (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). ↩︎
  22. “Letters in Response to Birth Project Exhibition at Northwestern Michigan College,  In Judy Chicago Papers. The Birth Project. Clippings, 1986. MC 502, Folder 71.12-71.13.” (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). ↩︎
  23. Chicago, The Birth Project, 85. ↩︎
  24. “‘The Birth Project: Judy Chicago’s Undertaking a Huge Hit in the Midwest’, Column by Laura A. Salsini in the Press Democrat. In Judy Chicago Papers. The Birth Project. Clippings, 1986. MC 502, Folder 71.12-71.13.” (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). ↩︎
  25. “‘Birth Project Extols Poetry of Procreation’, by Cate Terwilliger for the Gazette Telegraph. In Judy Chicago Papers. The Birth Project. Clippings, 1987. MC 502, Folder 71.14.” (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). ↩︎
  26. “‘The Birth Project’, Judy Chicago 1980 Interview in ContraCostaTimes. In Judy Chicago Papers. The Birth Project. Clippings, 1980. MC 502, Folder 71.1.” (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.). ↩︎
  27. Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, 11. ↩︎
  28. Phyllis L. Brodsky, “Where Have All the Midwives Gone?,” The Journal of Perinatal Education 17, no. 4 (2008): 48–51, https://doi.org/10.1624/105812408X324912. ↩︎
  29. Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, 11. ↩︎
  30. Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics. ↩︎

About the Author

Jimena Luque is a senior at Harvard studying Art History and Biology from Lima, Peru. She is interested in studying the interactions between textile art, social justice, spiritual/cultural legacies, and female labor. In her spare time, she enjoys dancing, café hopping, and cheering on the Boston Celtics.