Textiles play a dual role in this exhibition, serving as both a medium and a conceptual framework. The artists use a variety of processes and forms, including sculpture, installation, clothing, fabric collage, and prints, to delve into these themes. The show’s title derives from a book of poems by Adrienne Rich, one of the most influential writers of the feminist movement, and reflects these artists’ collective interests in exploring themes of language, family lineage, and the history of feminized labor.

In Elizabeth Duffy’s project, “Wearing”, she unravels braided rugs. In doing so, she uncovers patterns and colors from the coats and clothing of which they had been traditionally made. Duffy irons out and sews together these excavated worn and tattered scraps, creating a composite fabric which she then transforms into garments as an homage to their anonymous makers, as well as into color field “paintings” that contrast the reverence of a male genius art hero with the repression and denigration of women’s voices in art historical contexts.  Her new configurations remain tethered to the rug they were unspooled from, alluding “to the cyclical nature and shifting boundaries of the objects.”

In another work, “For Lee Miller”, Duffy employs letterforms constructed from wrapped clothing suspended from a canopy of hangers above an open suitcase on the floor. The piece is a response to “ Obstruction” (1920-1964) by Man Ray. Lee Miller was an important artist and photographer in her own right, but is often remembered first as Man Ray’s muse and lover. Duffy pays tribute to her by providing a sense of agency through embodied language. 

Duffy has exhibited her work widely including at the Drawing Center, NYC, White Columns, NYC; Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; The RISD Museum, Providence, RI;  the Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI;  the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; and DM Contemporary, Long Island. She has held residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Sirius Art Centre in Cobh, Ireland, VCCA, and Ucross. Duffy is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, where she was awarded grants in both Sculpture and Craft in 2019. She received her MFA from CUNY/Brooklyn College and her BA at Rutgers College. She lives and works in Providence, RI and teaches in the Art Department at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island and in the Graduate Program at Vermont College of Fine Art.

Also on view, Lu Heintz’s installation “Habitus” articulates a reciprocal response between our bodies and various structures that confine and support us, such as garments, or chairs. She arranges an assortment of bare wood and machine-gray painted amalgams of furniture and prosthetics, intermixed with soft fabric forms that relate to both the internal organs, and the limbs, wrought in colors that reference work uniforms, or human flesh and organ tones.

Heintz’s Typewriter Drawings investigate the relationship of weaving to writing; some of the first social signifiers were woven into clothing and tapestries prior to the development of written language. She uses a Smith Corona Coronet Super-12 typewriter to make images of simple and complex twills- many of which appear to be either in-process, or unraveling.

Lu Heintz has exhibited widely, including at the RISD Museum; Metal Museum, Memphis, TN; Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock, TX; Strano Film Fest, Capestrano, Italy; and Wedding Cake House, Providence, RI. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, International Sculpture Center and the Sustainable Arts Foundation; and has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, Arts Letters & Numbers (NY), and Baer Art Center (Iceland). She balances her artistic endeavors with feminist scholarship and pedagogy, and has contributed essays to Book Marks (Pressing Concern Books: NY, 2020), Repair: Sustainable Design Futures (Routledge: London, 2023), and Event Scores by Artist-Parents (Rooftop Ins.: Hong Kong, 2023). Heintz holds a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Providence, RI, where her artistic practice has grown from DIY spaces, collectives, community organizing and care webs. She teaches at RISD and is a founding member of WARP, a mixed-media studio collective in Providence.

Anna McNeary’s interactive sculpture consists of two large racks that hold several modular fabric pieces, constructed from clothing patterns- sleeves, yokes, collars, shirt panels, pant legs, and on. Viewers may choose to participate by attaching pieces to one another and forming iterative, wearable garments, to be worn collectively or individually. Made from a simple color palette of pastel cloth that alludes to pink-collar vocations, childhood, and religious cults, the work delves into the complex undertones of care,  belonging, and unseen emotional labor.

In other works, McNeary aggregates and assembles multiple pieces of screen printed fabrics, containing contradictory phrases, in contrasting colors, into large, wall-mounted quilt-like collages. Of repetitive wordplay on display in this work, McNeary says it “represent(s) a process of second-guessing and indecision, a looping echo chamber of internal dialogue, deeply entrenched ways of being, and a halting  but persistent process of reshaping personal beliefs. The experience of “semantic satiation,” or the meaninglessness that emerges when we repeat a familiar word aloud many times over,  becomes a visual mechanism …when words obliterate as they repeat, becoming garbled, typographic, patchwork compositions”

Anna McNeary has exhibited at venues across the United States including Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center’s {Re}HAPPENING Festival, Asheville, NC; The Compound Gallery, Oakland, CA; the Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; and Print Center New York, NYC. Selected residencies and awards include a Post-Graduate Apprenticeship at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), a Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts residency (Nebraska City, NE), a Santa Fe Art Institute residency (NM), and a RISCA Make Art Grant. She holds an MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor in Printmaking and Drawing at College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA). McNeary lives in Providence, RI, where she is a member of The Wurks art cooperative.

On June 1st, at 6-8pm, the artists will host an event to include readings from “The Dream of a Common Language”, by Adrienne Rich, as well as a performance, and casual artist talks–speaking about their work within the context of the installation, and engaging in some Q & A.