Layers of Meaning

Embroidery: Hold the Sentiment

"For the past few decades, 52-year-old East Hampton, N.Y., artist Christa Maiwald has been sending up the social mores of privileged urbanites in paintings, sculpture and video. About a year and a half ago, she took up embroidery. No Grandma Moses she, Maiwald uses the quaint activity to explore feminist themes, much as Rosemarie Trockel did in the 1980s when she used knitting to create charged cultural symbols like the Playboy bunny. At MOCA, Maiwald sticks her needle into teenage angst -- mostly girls confronting their emerging sexuality and the good-girl/bad-girl conflict." from a special to the Washington Post

"For the past three years, Maiwald has been photographing adolescents and creating embroidered portraits of them, first on small linen handkerchiefs, then on larger pieces of cotton, and most recently on pillows. The exhibition will include three large pillow installations and a selection of digital photographs." from Florence Lynch Gallery

This is an artist who seems restless and determined to keep exploring new territory. A photo of her recent work, is not so controversial - and this shot is clear enough that you can see the detail! Maiwald's gallery has a page of perhaps the most intriguing work: the "Learning to Draw Series" and some sculptures. Unfortunately, the detail is lacking in the web site photos and the links to the larger images don't work. Art in America offers this evocative review of the series: "Christa Maiwald's recent oil paintings and gouache drawings, collectively titled "Learn to Draw," offer comic scenarios, often depicting instances of artistic coercion. Sometimes the pictured events are summed up by their titles: the teacher scolds the child in You Better Learn to Draw!, the aspiring artist faces a gallery's rejection in Sorry Nudes Are Out, Bugs Are In.... In You Better Learn to Drawl (1997), a small child in a classroom lined with children at easels is confronted by a shrewish teacher with a masklike face, a distorted hunch back and Medusalike hair. Maiwald's cartoon style engages with aspects of abstract picture-making in a black arch that seems both to be part of the wall and to form the teacher's back. Throughout this exhibition, Maiwald seems to delight in a certain kind of dark humor, one which perhaps expresses her frustrations with being an artist."