Since many of my followers cannot attend my exhibit in person, I’ve attached each of the tapestry photos and my artist statements with each.
“Enduring Change” Handwoven Tapestry, 15” x 12”. I continue to be amazed at how many people recognize and love Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I began weaving this tapestry after her death in 2020 as I was isolating on my boat in Florida, and it was a labor of love for myself as well. I used her famous Justice photo wearing her dissent collar and stayed as true to it as I could. I just love that she is wearing the bright green earrings in the photo, for me they represent her elegance. I used grey scale in this tapestry instead of color to represent that justice is not black and white, it is many shades of grey.
I named this piece “Enduring Change” after my favorite of her many famous quotes, “Real change, enduring change happens one step at a time”. I wove her image not only as a tribute to all she did for women, but also as a reminder that we have to continue working for enduring change to improve the lives of women and girls.
“It’s My Body”, Handwoven Tapestry, 19” x 26”. The subject of this piece, Women’s Health, is one of the hardest of all to represent with a tapestry. I didn’t want ot make it all about abortion and I didn’t want to back off too much either. What I tried to capture is how archaic it is that laws written by mostly men are still determining what we can do with our bodies. The issues are many: ability to procure contraceptives, menopause, violence against women, female genital mutilation, higher rate of dementia and abortion.
That is why I chose to use as my model for this tapestry a painting by Titian, “Danae”, painted in the 1560’s. The use of birth control and abortion has a long history, as well as a long history of being contentious. The idea that pregnancies can be prevented or stopped has raised ethical and moral issues, and, like today in the Middle Ages you will find many opinions about what should or shouldn’t be done.
The recent decision by the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade has made me very sad. I believe we should trust women and their doctors to make the right decision for themselves.
Pregnancy and childbirth still carry health risks to the mother. High blood pressure and preeclampsia, diabetes and hperemesis gravidarum are not uncommon during pregnancy. And maternal mortality is still a risk in the U.S. especially in many southern states, including South Carolina a, where the death rate is higher than the national average.
The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the arty shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.?
It is my opinion that forcing a woman to carry a child for nine months and labor through its birth against her will is the very definition of involuntary servitude and should be against the thirteenth amendment.
“With sorrow - for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection - we dissent,” Justices Breyer, Sotomayer and Kagan on the reversal of Roe v. Wade, June 24, 2022
“Peaceful Protest”, Handwoven Tapestry, 15” x 17”. I attended the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. on January 21, 2017, as my first ever march. I was able to march with my three daughters-in-law and their mothers. I used a photograph that I captured as the basis of my tapestry design. I wanted the tapestry to have the feeling of coldness and oppression at the top where downtown D.D. is and the warmth and color for hope at the bottom represented by all the hats, including the famous “pussy “ hat.
The Women’s March was a worldwide protest on January 21, 2017 the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president. It was prompted by several of Trump’s statements being considered by many as anti-women or otherwise offensive to women. It was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.
The Washington March drew over 470,000 people. Between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people participated in the marches in the U.S., approximately 1.0 to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population. Worldwide participation has been estimated at over seven million. At least 408 marches were reported to have been planned in the U.S. and 168 in 81 other countries. After the marches, organizers reported that around 673 marches took place worldwide, on all seven continents, 29 in Canada, 20 in Mexico and 1 in Antarctica. The crowds were peaceful: no arrests were made in D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City or Seattle, where a combined total of about two million people marched.
“Get Over ‘Em”, Handwoven Tapestry, 15” x 15”. This tapestry is representative of my experience of sexual harassment. It is a serious subject, and I don’t mean to make light of it with this piece. My experiences are very mild compared to some. I mainly experienced it as a hostile environment with certain individual managers and not a pervasive culture.
From the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when submission to or rejection of this conduct explicitly or implicitly affects an individual’s employment, unreasonably interferes with an individual’s work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile or offensive work environment.
It’s very difficult to determine how common sexual harassment really is but the recent #MeToo movement has brought it out in the open for discussion. Perhaps future studies will tell us more about the frequency and types, so that we can understand it better and work to remove sexual harassment from the workplace.
“STEM Strong”, Hanwoven Tapestry, 18.5” x 17.5”. As a retired aerospace engineer, I wanted my first tapestry in the series to be Rosie the Riveter to represent women in STEM careers. STEM industries have the lowest gender pay gap and often outstanding benefits and salary. Yet women are still wildly underrepresented. Statistics show that in the U.S. less than 30% of working engineers and computer systems designers are women.
While women during World War II worked in a variety of positions previously closed to them, the aviation industry saw the greatest increase in female workers. More than 310, 000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry in 1943, making up 675% of the industry’s total workforce (compared to just 1 percent in the pre-war years). The munitions industry also heavily recruited women workers, as illustrated by the U.S. government’s Rosie the Riveter propaganda campaign.
Though women who entered the workforce during World War II were crucial to the war effort, their pay continued to lag far behind their male counterparts: Female workers rarely earned more than 50% of male wages.
“Sojourner Truth”, Handwoven Tapestry, 15” X 12”. The U.S. movement for women’s suffrage started in the early 19th century during the campaign against slavery. Women, such as Lucretia Mott, showed a keen interest in the antislavery movement and proved to be admirable public speakers. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton joined the antislavery forces, she and Mott agreed that the rights of women as well as those of enslaved persons needed to be addressed.
Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree in 1797, wan an American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
I chose to weave Sojourner because there were many strong African American women in the suffrage movement, but few are remembered.
She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 after she became convinced that God had called her to leave the city and go into the countryside “testifying the hope that was in her.” Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title “Ain’t I a Woman?” During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army, after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for formerly enslave d people (summarized as the promise of “forty acres and a mule”). She continued to fight on behalf of women and African Americans until her death.
After rejecting ratification of the 19th Amendment (“Women’s Suffrage) in January of 1920, the SC legislature finally ratified on July 1, 1969, nearly 50 years later. BUT, the ratification was not officially “certified” until August of 1973.
“Women Work”, Handwoven Tapestry, 14” x 20”. This tapestry is entitled “women Work” because the equity issue is about work and being paid equally. The gender pay gap is REAL. Women are still paid roughly 80 cents for every $1 a man receives for the same work. And that’s the average, it’s much worse for African American and Hispanic women.
My tapestry uses a Leonardo DaVinci sketch of a woman’s hands as the basis. I’ve added the indigo blue yarn between her fingers because I want to depict her working. She is warping a loom, which is something that women did in Leonardo’s day as well as today. It represents the lack of progress in the pay gap. It has taken 25 years for us to make 8 cents worth of progress. At that rate it will be in the 2080’s before we make the same wage for the same work. I don’t know about you but that is TOO LONG!
But fixing the problem isn’t easy. We could keep men from getting raises while women increase their pay, or we could lay off a few men so women can get their raises. Neither of those ideas seem appealing. How about shareholders take less of a payout so management can give women bigger raises than their male counterparts? That will never happen. I think our big name Business Schools need to make this their number one priority to solve!
“ERA NOW”, Handwoven Tapestry, 17” diam. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is 24 words: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
The ERA is about equality in Constitutional law or “strict scrutiny”. 94% of adults believe in equal rights. 80% of Americans think the Constitution guarantees them. It does not.
In 1923, a young suffragist by the name of Alice Paul proposed the Equal Rights Amendment. While the 19th amendment had been ratified just three years earlier, she realized “the vote” just wasn’t enough. It did not give women “equal justice under law”. The ERA was written to do just that.
The ERA has been proposed into every Federal legislative session since, and in 1940, the Republican party became the first major political party to include it in their election platform. But it wasn’t until 1972 that Congress finally passed it (by over 90%) and sent it to the states for ratification. The vote of 3/4ths of state legislatures (38) is required to make an amendment into law.
Within the first five years, 35 state legislatures ratified. But by then a strong and well organized opposition took hold, and even though the 7-year deadline was extended to 10 years, on June 30, 1982 - when extension expired - the ERA fell three states short of ratification. South Carolina was one of the states that voted against ratifying.
Why should states ratify? There are many reasons. Ratification of the ERA is supported by the American Bar Association as a dimension of equality that is “a fundamental tenet of our society”.