Even if younger postmodern artists who use the same materials as Elaine Reichek—cloth, thread—to make work that involves stitching and the like don’t know it, the eighty-two-year-old artist is the mother of their invention. Or, at least, she certainly influenced it. I remember seeing her embroidery in the Whitney Museum’s 2012 Biennial; I got carried away by how fresh the language was in “Ariadne’s Thread” (2008-12), her series that visualizes the Greek myth about the Cretan princess helping her lover, Theseus, escape the Minotaur’s lair by following a thread she’d given him. One of the pieces, “Ariadne’s Lament” (2009), was composed of tiny, embroidered figures—a vase, a crying eye, a warrior—that were spaced apart, like those rebus puzzles that show an eye, then a heart, then a ewe (say it out loud).
Reichek’s use of language in her art, always so witty, is undeniably feminist, and works from her “Sampler” series, which she’s been making since the nineteen-nineties, are unabashedly so. By taking the sentiment of the traditional embroidered sampler and throwing it out in favor of quotes that address art-making and women becoming themselves, she seduces with the delicacy of her needlepoint and the primacy of the message. Born in New York in 1943, Reichek attended Brooklyn College, where she studied with the minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt. She moved past traditional picture-making in the nineteen-seventies, and “Back Stitch” (at Hoffman Donahue, in collaboration with Marinaro, through April 4), while not a full-scale retrospective, which she should have—hear that, Brooklyn Museum?—takes its title from a sewing method in which the maker goes back over a stitched line to fill in any open spaces. Reichek has helped close those gaps where art history has left women out, and, using the most “ladylike” of occupations—sewing, embroidering, all that which requires a special patience—wipes our faces with handkerchiefs drenched in the thought sweat and the freedom of the not at all pious woman warrior.—Hilton Als ...
