Contact: Jason A. Smith, communications director
Martha Glowacki, co-director, James Watrous Gallery
MADISON—Stitched Ground: Four Artists Embroider the Land, which runs from February 23–April 11, is a collaboration between the James Watrous Gallery and the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Design Gallery. Jody Clowes, Design Gallery curator, conceived Stitched Ground as an exploration of landscape through the painstaking and richly textured medium of fabric and embroidery. Each of the four artists in the show—Terese Agnew of LaFarge and Chris Niver of Milwaukee, whose careers are well-established, and two younger, Madison-area artists, Leah Evans and Sarah Gagnon—works with images of the land from a unique point of view, referencing neglected urban areas, strip-mined or heavily developed land, the underground urban ‘landscape,’ and iconic images of beauty spots like Niagara Falls. All four use needle and thread to create work that, while unabashedly beautiful, remains detached from the conventions of both landscape painting and pictorial embroidery. In distinct and provocative ways, these artists’ work embodies the contradictions implicit in our relationship to the land.
Exhibition Events
* Friday, February 26, 5:30–7:30 pm: Free, public exhibition reception with gallery talk led by guest curator Jody Clowes. Gallery talk begins at 6:30 pm. Exhibition artists will be present. Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments served in the Wisconsin Studio, third floor, Overture Center for the Arts.
* Sunday, March 7, 2:00 pm: Free, public gallery talk with exhibition artist Terese Agnew.
* Sunday, March 21, 2:00 pm: Free, public gallery talk with exhibition artist Leah Evans.
*Saturday, March 27, 1–3:00 pm: Children’s tour and workshop held in partnership with the Madison Children’s Museum and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Pre-registration required.
Stitched Ground: Four Artists Embroider The Land is supported by the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts, by a grant from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission with additional funds from the Endres Mfg. Company Foundation and the Overture Foundation, by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Anonymous Fund, by Suzanne and Richard R. Pieper Sr., and by Ann Neviaser. Ongoing gallery support comes from DoubleTree Hotel-Madison and Robert & Carroll Heideman. The Wisconsin Academy thanks these sponsors for their generous support.
We would also like to thank the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum for their loans of Terese Agnew’s pieces to the exhibition. Finally, we thank the exhibition artists, Terese Agnew, Leah Evans, Sarah Gagnon, and Chris Niver, for their enthusiastic participation in this project
About the Artists
Terese Agnew describes her process as “drawing with thread,” and her intensely embroidered quilts take up to three years to complete: while widely reproduced in print, they are rarely shown. Her work is often pointedly political. Madison viewers will remember her pictorial quilt, “Portrait of a Textile Worker,” composed of over 30,000 designer clothing labels pieced together to create the image of a teenage garment worker from Bangladesh working at her sewing machine. Stitched Ground will include another Agnew piece that makes a political statement: her gorgeous, verdant quilt with the explosive title “Practice Bomber Range in the Mississippi Flyway” frames a bombsight within a landscape of the rolling hills of southwestern Wisconsin.
Leah Evans’s embroidered and quilted hangings create imagined landscapes drawn from maps and aerial and satellite photographs, and often reflect the contours of land degraded by strip-mining or intense development. A piece titled “Energy Isthmus” depicts an aerial night landscape; patterns of light are delineated using glass beads and embroidery floss against a background of dark fabrics. The graphic sophistication and careful finishing of Evans’s pieces creates a poignant counterpoint to the compromised environments she depicts.
Sarah Gagnon—a graduate of the UW–Madison Design Studies program—will show work from a series of intimate pieces called “The City Under the City,” which combine her photographs of manholes and exposed water mains with delicately beaded and embroidered underground pipes and conduits.
Trained as a printmaker, Chris Niver works in black thread on white linen, translating his sketches of stagnant pools and drainage ditches into elegantly stitched meditations. His most recent work is inspired by Chinese and 19th-century American landscape paintings, conflating these sublime images with references to humble embroidered handkerchiefs.
About the James Watrous Gallery
The James Watrous Gallery is the premier gallery for Wisconsin visual art. A program of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, the James Watrous Gallery presents works by Wisconsin artists, Wisconsin art and craft history, works owned by Wisconsin collectors, and exhibitions that bridge the sciences, arts, and humanities. Our mission is to promote the visual arts in Wisconsin through quality exhibitions and related educational programs. For gallery hours and current exhibitions, please visit wisconsinacademy.org or call 608-265-2500.
