Textile Wisdom: Moving the Needle

Karen Keifer-Boyd, professor of art education and women’s studies, coordinated the 2016 Penn State edit-a-thon with graduate assistant, Leslie Sotomayor. Keifer-Boyd had been involved in similar collective efforts to edit Wikipedia entries. According to Keifer-Boyd, participating in such an effort is empowering. “We invite the public to join us by adding articles and information about artists, feminist curatorial practices, feminist art pedagogy and other topics absent from Wikipedia. By doing so we are contributing to what artist Judy Chicago began in the 1970s with The Dinner Party and the curriculum encounters with The Dinner Party that are part of the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection at Penn State to make certain women and their contributions to culture are remembered and acknowledged.”

Penn State on March 4, 2016 was one of the 125 nodes on all six inhabited continents to hold an Art+Feminism edit-a-thon. For Penn State’s second year of hosting an Art+Feminism edit-a-thon in what was to become an annual event, Susan Hill was invited as a keynote.

Visual artist, Susan Hill, was Head of Needlework during the creation of Judy Chicago’s monumental art installation, The Dinner Party (1975 – 1979). The Dinner Party chronicles the history of women of achievement in Western Civilization, counter-balancing exclusionary histories, while offering feminist models of research, creative production, and the generation of support networks. Hill co-authored with Chicago, “Embroidering our Heritage: The Needlework of The Dinner Party” (1980, Doubleday), and is narrator of Johanna Demetrakas’ documentary film, Right Out of History (1980, Johanna Demetrakas, 75 min).

After working with Judy Chicago to create The Dinner Party, and while traveling with the exhibition, Hill was Community Outreach staff for SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center) with muralist and SPARC founder Judy Baca.  At that time, The Great Wall mural was in production, depicting the history of Los Angeles from the point of view of the people rarely included in the history, engaging historians, community residents, educators, and working teams of artists and local young people.

From 1980 to 2005, Susan Hill was the Director of Artsreach, a non-profit organization based at UCLA, producing artist residency programs with teams of multi-disciplinary, multi-lingual artists, working collaboratively with institutionalized populations and marginalized urban constituencies. Mentors for Hill in this work included theatre director/educator Augusto Boal, the Geese Theatre Company, and the study of dream images with Dr. Stephen Aizenstat (Pacifica Graduate Institute).

Hill is also the author of a needlework textbook for a PBS education series (Los Angeles Daytime Emmy), former instructor at Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles, and has been a teaching Artist in Residence in California working with older adults, incarcerated adults and juveniles, pregnant teens, teen parents, and inner city first generation children.

Susan Hill’s presentation was an eye-opener to the students, and her involvement all day, especially the discussion during the film showing, was ideal for motivating Wikipedia editing. Jane Gerhard attended via Adobe Connect, who had interviewed Susan Hill for her book on The Dinner Party. She added historical contextual depth to the discussion.

There were 13 total, which includes 2-month old Sophia Ana, who participated in the 2016 Art+Feminism event held at the Arts Cottage on the Penn State University Park campus.

Keywords: needlework,The Dinner Party, Right Out of History, Embroidery Our Heritage

Question: How is feminist art that includes needlework presented in art history textbooks, courses, and on Wikipedia?