Textile Woman: New Historiographical Atlas

I bought a sewing box and an embroidered blanket three years ago in a thrift shop. Inside the box were textile materials with instructions to make a work with beads. And the blanket had the following note: “Alexa, This is a Linen huck towel. The Basket of Flowers is pettit point. I will show you how to do it too. The Hem is hand-Hemstitched, and it is fun to do, too. Love G’ma Pauline.” I had never met those women; however, I considered these findings as inheritance instructions and decided to follow them.

This is an ongoing project. I have been asking people to send me a photograph of a woman who has influenced their life and a comment telling me why.

Some details

1. Marisol Garcia Walls, from Mexico, sent me a photo and an explanation:

Marisol’s comment:  The woman in the photograph is Margit Frenk, whose research assistant I was when I was 24 and she was 87. At this time, she was practically blind, but she continued to “read” with the help of her assistants (and publishing books, papers, and books!) articles for Conacyt!). I spent three beautiful years working alongside her, reading her novels, medieval songbooks, and popular lyric songs, and watching the little birds in her garden. Sometime later, my work began to gravitate towards the personal sphere. Margit was involved in a lawsuit in the New York court to return some works of art that were stolen from her stepfather during World War II, so she had to go into the archive of Mariana, Margit’s mother, and search and translate documents into French, English, or German. We spent a whole summer unraveling the history of the paintings from the archive documents. And then we went to New York, where we took a picture – sadly, I couldn’t find it. Then, I’m attaching one I got from the internet, where Margit appears smiling.

New Historiographical Atlas

This is the portrait that I made, and it is now part of the historiographical atlas. I printed the photo on an Atlas page, and with the materials in the sewing box, I made textile interventions and the frame in crochet.

2. Dulce María Nunes Oseguera From México, sent me a Photo and an explanation:

Dulce comment: dear Yohanna, I am sending you a photo of my maternal grandmother; I admire her for her strength in life. She had cancer while pregnant and was a warrior until the end. She married my grandfather, Roberto; she met him on an island where she lived in Campeche. My grandfather became a sailor after living his entire childhood on the streets. They were married until the end of their lives. I’m sending you a poem made by my grandfather. The notebook got wet on the boat, and that’s why it looks like that. It is rumored that it generated curiosity to see my grandfather, a man with white skin and blue eyes, married to a Mayan woman with Indigenous features, but the family understands that perhaps what my grandfather fell in love with (beyond the physical beauty of my grandmother) was of the extraordinary courage with which she faced life, her bravery and strength.

New Historiographical Atlas

This is the portrait that I made, and it is now part of the historiographical atlas. I printed the photo on an Atlas page, and with the materials in the sewing box, I made textile interventions and the frame in crochet.

I am creating a textile cartography with their portraits and stories.

More details