In Residence, Monday, 10/26 – Sunday, 11/8

Join me at Workshop Gallery Artists Foundation at Brooklyn Workshop Gallery for the 2015 finale to Native/Immigrant City, my exploration of New York natives, immigrants and transplants from other parts of the country through soft sculpture. Since December 2014, I've been collecting stories and memories of moving to and from NYC, surviving rent hikes, questionable roommates and landlords, and falling in love with the City despite all the stress and vowing never to leave.

I translate friends' and strangers' stories into stop motion animations and embroideries on fabric paintings and sculptures. I try to give voice and tactile form to varying cultural points of view. With a Brooklyn Arts Council grant, I've had the opportunity to host some communal storytelling and embroidery events in the past year. Thanks to 61 Local and Brooklyn Workshop Gallery for donating space.

From 10/26–11/8, you can find me at Brooklyn Workshop Gallery. Special hours are:
Monday, 10/26, 12–7pm
Saturday, 10/31, 12–5pm
Sunday, 11/1, 2–5pm
Monday, 11/2, 12–6pm
Tuesday, 11/3, 11am–4pm

Join us on Thursday, 11/5 from 7-9pm for a poetry reading featuring KC Trommer and friends.

For additional hours and dates, contact me to set up a private viewing of the work, or look for updates via Facebook.

Artists Who Write

I'd like to think that Artists Who Write, Salon II, was as moving for audience members and performers as Salon I. Thank you Swati Khurana and Montana Ray for sharing your never-before seen or heard works. Thank you Jenny Douglas for trusting my curatorial vision and for the warmth and generosity that makes The Brooklyn Cottage a community home.

We just might do this again sometime, when The Cottage resumes programming in September. Until then, enjoy the summer. I leave you with some of my favorite photographs from 6/17...

#ArtistsWhoWrite @TheBrooklynCottage

Thrilled to be teaming up again with Jenny Douglas of The Brooklyn Cottage for a new literary reading series mining multiplicity. Artists Who Write features sculptors, installation artists, dancers, designers, performance artists, painters, crafts people, book artists, for whom writing is an integral part of their creative practice and a pursuit on its own.

Seldon Yuan, Plant Poem. 


Join us this Wednesday, 6/10 from 7–9pm for Artists Who Write Salon I, featuring Yazmany Arboleda, Kent Shell and Seldon Yuan – heavy hitters in the visual and literary art worlds and in design.
Tickets are going fast. Get yours here now!

Join us also Wednesday, 6/17 from 7–9pm for Artists Who Write Salon II featuring
Swati Khurana, Montana Ray and Iviva Olenick 
Tickets available here.

Thank you, Jenny, for your warmth and radiant generosity, which pulled the inner curator out of me. And thank you roster of artists I've admired for years. Assembling us in a collaborative series of evenings is a dream come true.

Join us!

He stepped in a pool of red paint...

I may have mentioned that I started writing poetry again, inspired in part by the wonderful poets with whom I interacted through my @EmbroideryPoems project. In a direction related to that work but with a twist, I am stitching parts of poems on dolls and their accoutrements and environments. This is my first attempt at this new process, in which I put together bits and pieces of ideas from various other projects. It is a very time-consuming process!

A lot of work and ideas lie ahead! This is just an excerpt of a poem in which I and a number of others appear. I should mention that my poems are like stories written in poem form with some internal rhyming.

Night Static, Frost

2013 reignited my interest in poetry, thanks in part to a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council for my @EmbroideryPoems project. 

Yeah, I was one of those literary kids - poetry editor of my high school literary magazine, Patterns (thanks Sharon Lustbader), with a librarian-poet father and a linguistically-gifted mother. My brother also wrote poetry - he had a "blog" of sorts long before anyone had a blog.

Anyway, I'm back to writing WITHOUT embroidering first/while writing. It feels weird but somehow like a high school reunion with myself. Know what I mean?

Here is something I'm working on - something new. I feel totally uncertain about this direction - writing for writing's sake. But when I sat down at my computer the other day, this poured out, surprising me.

Maybe the best thing to come out of all of this is that I'm spending lots of time with InDesign - not a bad tool to learn...and as I'm a freelance artist, I'm up for hire...writing, design, art commissions, etc. Inquire within.

"Night Static; Frost"

Do you remember

the night we stood

on 7th Avenue

on mounds

of hope like snow?

The soft crunch evidence
that purity
could still exist
in NYC.
Do you remember
our talk on 7th Ave?
Static crackled
as you pointed to the hospital
where your nephew was born.
You admitted
how scared you'd been.
I shared
a story of loss that had left me
crying in the street,
on the train,
in a doctor's office,
everywhere, really.
"Sorry
to end your
Saturday night like this,"
you said. We stood
for 10 minutes or more.
You never stopped talking
Sidewalks seemed to invoke
your tongue, the thief
who stole
another morsel
of my time and attention,
pulling
grey hairs from my head,
the ones you claimed
never to see amidst the red.

That night on 7th Ave
our snow
started to melt
under my tiny feet—
my one foot
pointed towards you
as you reassembled your bike,
unlocking and then snapping
the detached front wheel
to the slim body;
My other foot
pointed towards the subway.
I was looking
for a way
into you or a way home;
for the night's 
static to leap from your cowlick
into my mouth
encasing me 
in unrelenting light.
I would have
stood there all night
but you rode off,
slightly drunk,
without a helmet,
still talking,
as I took my snow
home with me on the F train.

Crustacean support group

"Maybe I have to have a soft shell, be a soft shell crab so that I don't get smashed. But then I'll just end up in someone's sandwich." Crustacean Support Group.

Text by a friend for @EmbroideryPoems, BAC-sponsored project. 2013. 

Embroidery and watercolor on silk. 3"x3.75".

The nano-satellite of my sorrow

Thanks to Olisa Corocan for the text. This piece is for her - it's her "found
poem" from the June 6 poetry reading at 61 Local. A pleasure to make this!

Poetry reading June 6 - join me!

Thursday, June 6, 6-9pm 
@61 Local, 61 Bergen Street near Smith Street
F/G to Bergen Street

As poets read and musicians play, embroiderers will stitch snippets of lyrics and verse to create new, "found" poems.

Join us!

Creative Voice, text by Sandy Denarski

Thanks to Sandy Denarski for writing the text for this piece. Of course, you're probably thinking that the piece could refer to me...

Creamsicle by @EmbroideryPoems

"Orange Brooklyn - Running under a creamsicle-colored sky."
2013. Embroidery and watercolor on fabric.
Text by @EmbroideryPoems. 

Get Out of My Dreams

Text by poet @melissabroder

"get out of my dreams and into my fear"

Dad Knows Best

Thanks, Dad.

Emotional Mollusks

My own "tweet."

Restless leg syndrome

I'm pretty sure this is one of the lines from one of Spencer Madsen's poems from the Sorry House reading of a few weeks ago. So funny! I took notes in my iPhone during the reading, but of course, I'm not exactly sure that I transcribed properly what was being read.

Poems to come/ in process

One of my favorite poets sent me some poems to embroider via email, each one carefully considered and rendered in 140 or fewer characters:

Can't wait to stitch these! 

Thanks to my father, Monte Olenick. Is he trying to tell me something in the last tweet?!


















Look out for my forthcoming embroideries with #Dadknowsbest!

@Spencermadsen #dateme

Text by @spencermadsen

Thanks for this entertaining bit of self deprecation!

Embroidery on fabric. 2013. @spencermadsen #dateme