Elaine Reichek

Elaine Reichek (born 1943) is a New York-based visual artist. Much of her work concerns the history of the embroidered sampler. Through her pieces of hand and machine embroidery and digital sewing machine, she addresses issues such as the craft/art and the old/new divide, the nature of women's work, and the interplay of text and image.[1] The connection between the pixel and the stitch, as differently gendered types of mark-making, is a continuing theme in her work.[2]

Life and work

Elaine Reichek was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943 to an American Jewish family.[3] She received a BA from Brooklyn College in 1963 and BFA from Yale University in 1964, where she studied painting with Ad Reinhardt. She has created a wide body of work, including thread-based drawings, knitted pieces, and installations. In the 1990s she began to focus on needlework samplers, an object which combines image and text. Several of her series, including MADAMI'MADAM (2000–2002) and Ariadne's Thread (2008–2012), juxtapose famous quotes and lines of literature with hand- or digitally-embroidered images. The text relates narrative, drawing, and thread as parallel instances of linear structure. Her work tends to critique masculine traditions in modernist painting, as well as explore toward cultural assimilation and how family traditions form personal and cultural identity. Her work often features references to her Jewish heritage.[3]

Reichek's work is held in the collections of the MoMA, The Jewish Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, among others.[4]

Exhibitions

References
  1. "Elaine Reichek". www.artforum.com. Retrieved 2019-03-03.
  2. Birnbaum, Paula. "Elaine Reichek: Pixels, Bytes, and Stitches." Art Journal: 18-35.
  3. Birnbaum, Paula J. (2012). "Reichek, Elaine". Grove Art Online. doi:10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T2220546. ISBN 9781884446054. Retrieved 2023-03-08.
  4. "Brooklyn Museum: Elaine Reichek". www.brooklynmuseum.org. Retrieved 2018-02-03.
  5. Rosenberg, Karen (December 12, 2013). "Elaine Reichek: 'A Précis 1972-1995'". The New York Times.
  6. Johnson, Ken (September 5, 2013). "The Jewishness Is in the Details". The New York Times.
  7. "Elaine Reichek: A Postcolonial Kinderhood Revisited". The Jewish Museum. Retrieved 15 March 2015.
  8. Rosenberg, Karen (February 23, 2012). "Elaine Reichek: 'Ariadne's Thread'". The New York Times.
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