“Uncredited” is a new exhibit on display at Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke. By using the traditional needle art of doilies, the exhibit draws attention to markers of identity, shared experiences, and memories carried by their makers – who are typically women.
A companion work entitled “When,” maps wages earned by women compared to men since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed into law in the United States.
Both exhibits were curated by Felice Caivano, an artist and Chair of the Visual Art Department at Holyoke Community College, and she spoke with Producer Dave Fraser about this unique art form.
Learn more about Wisteriahurst Museum, home of these exhibits, in a digital exclusive interview with the museum’s director.
Read the full transcript:
Tony Dune, Connecting Point: “Uncredited,” currently on display at Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke, utilizes the traditional needle art of doilies to draw attention to markers of identity, shared experiences, and memories carried by their makers.
A companion work entitled “When” maps wages earned by women compared to men since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed into law in the United States.
Both exhibits were curated by Felice Caivano, an artist and chair of the Visual Art Department at Holyoke Community College, and she spoke with producer Dave Fraser about this unique art form.
Felice Caivano, Artist/Educator: This room could talk, if all of these people were here. If these women were here, what would the stories be? What would they say? It would be pretty lively, I would think.
I was never really drawn to doilies. Like most of us our age, because our grandparents had them and our great aunts and they were under everything and they were everywhere.
But as I started to buy them and wash them and iron them and hold them, I began to think about their makers and who the women were that made these things. And why were they in the households everywhere from the turn of the century here in the United States through the fifties? Why are they still made?
In 2018, I was invited to be part of this exhibition and it was simply called “Vote.” So I thought about it, and came up with this idea because we were approaching the 100th year anniversary of women’s right to vote, which was 2020. And I had this idea to get a doily that I thought was 100 years old. And on it, I simply wanted to embroider the word “vote” in a typeface that might have been from the 1920s.
And I selected French knots, because French knots are my favorite embroidery stitch. And this is the piece that started it all, because as I was washing the piece and then holding it and ironing it, and I spent a lot of time with this piece making each little tiny French knot. I began to wonder,”Well, who made this? Whose grandmother made this piece?”
The walls that are behind me and all around here, this piece is called “Uncredited.” And it’s composed of individual doilies, and together they make up the whole. They make up the installation. The piece is called “Uncredited” because, for the most part in this room, we don’t know who the women were that made these pieces.
If you notice, they’re all blank centers, because each blank in my thinking represents the unknown woman who made them. And there are a few cases in here where friends gave me doilies, so I know they’re made by so-and-so’s grandmother, but very few compared to the amount of doilies that are in this space.
This piece is titled “When” and most of these doilies I embroidered during COVID, as I sat home, in my chair each day embroidering. So the numbers represent the amount of money women have made, percentage to the dollar compared to men since the Equal Pay Act of 1963. So it begins on the lower level of the dollar with a 58.9%, and it moves around.
And what was important for me was not only to show the work and to put the labor into it, because it represents labor and wages, but to use threads that kind of look like money. So, there’s a lot of copper and silver and gold in here.
It was important for me to find doilies that I thought were made here in the United States, in America, by immigrant women. So each doily and each type of doily, for me, represents the history of that woman, the culture, the stories that they brought with them.
But what I didn’t expect was that I’d grow to love them so much, but that they’d be so beautiful when they’re all put together and up on a wall and installed. And that’s been the reaction of many people.
