American artist Kate Kretz is based in Baltimore. Her meticulous hand embroidery makes the viewer pause for thought. “I do obsessively detailed work about difficult truths”

What is your background in textiles?

I earned a certificate in French Civilization from the Sorbonne while working as an au pair in Paris, and a Drawing and Painting BFA from Binghamton University back when I returned to the states. For graduate school, I was accepted into the Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA, but could not afford to attend, so I earned an MFA in Painting from The University of Georgia through a teaching assistantship. 

I watched my mother lay out patterns and sew clothes when I was young. She never walked me through the process to teach me, but I’m sure I picked up some things by osmosis. In my twenties, I began sewing throw pillows for my house, and taught myself how to reupholster thrift store finds. One day, a curator was visiting, and pulled one of my little quilted objects off the shelf and asked if we could include it in my painting exhibition. I’d just gotten tenure: I felt like I no longer needed to make consistent work to appease the powers that be, so I just started experimenting, using the skills I had developed outlandishly decorating my home to make art objects. I would learn just enough to successfully carry out my ideas. I have a great fiber art library, my overcompensation for feeling like a novice. Having very high standards helps. There were times along the way when I hired someone else to, say, put in an invisible zipper, because I had put a hundred hours into a garment and did not want to ruin it with less than perfect detail. Being completely self-taught has enabled me to approach my work from a different angle, but sometimes it’s bizarre to be considered “a fiber artist” and have so many gaps in my education. It often happens that I’m a visiting artist in an art school fiber class, and I ask if I can stay for the felting or shibori demo after my lecture, so I can learn another basic fiber skill.

How do you describe your work? 

I do obsessively detailed work about difficult truths. I often work in unusual materials and try to push the boundaries of those materials. For the past seven years, I have been focused on how so many aspects of American life contribute to what I call #bullyculture: misogyny, racism, speciesism, capitalism, unfettered access to people-killing machines, etc.

You work with a lot of mediums but what is it that appeals to you about textiles / fiber?

As our world becomes more virtual and screen-based, I believe our bodies hunger for the tactile. Fiber is a vital part of our personal sensory history, so we respond to it on a primal, emotional level. We all have memories of some textile from our past: our grandmother’s dress, a bedspread, tablecloth, or couch we touched every day. 

The 20 years of work I’ve done with hair is particularly resonant for me, a choice originally made because it was the most potent art medium I could imagine. Hair, like rings of a tree, records our most extreme life experiences: there’s actual biological/psychological history embedded in it. So, the hair on my head from when I was carrying my daughter, the collective life experiences in the grey hair of many women, or the “before” & “after” states in the hair of people who have experienced great loss are present in the piece before I even embroider a stitch. 

I was trained as a painter, and, even though I forged my own unique voice in the medium, the art historical burden of painting is a heavy mantle. The extra investment I put into my paintings is not really seen and understood by many viewers, but the way we are trained to look at textiles is different, people seem to make greater effort to appreciate what goes into making them. Fiber also has a rich history, but much of it is decorative and utilitarian, so there’s still a lot of space for adding layers to the work I make through subversion, irony, contemporary art references, etc. Working in textiles is incredibly freeing for me because I was never taught “the right way” to do anything. When I was younger, I was an adrenaline junkie, flew planes, jumped out of them, collected as many in-air experiences as I could, and I think art making fills that void now: I love the thrill of starting a new work and not having any idea if I’m going to be able to pull it off. 

Can you talk through the process of creating a piece.

Occasionally, ideas just come and I make them. In most cases, though, I get an idea and gestate it, do some research, which inevitably adds layers to the work, and (because I have a lot of ideas), the piece simmers on the back burner for a while. Then it has to fight its way to the front burner and demand to be next in line. I am a big believer in listening to the Universe: it tells me what needs to be made next, and sends me serendipitous clues to make the work more layered and powerful.  

You cover a lot of themes in your work. Where do you get your ideas from? 

My work was highly personal for several decades, but for the past seven or eight years, I have been compulsively making work about all the injustices in the world that keep me awake at night, so current events, as well as deep research on related topics, inspires the work. I decided that all of these disparate cultural problems must be related, and that was the beginning of my “#bullyculture” work. There seems to be no end in sight: there is a distinct possibility this may be evolving from an individual series to my life practice. 

Some of your work is quite controversial. Can you talk us through the MAGA hat series?

Some of my work foreshadowed both the #metoo movement and the last presidential election. Since 2016, I’ve made a lot of work about the Sadist-In-Chief simply to maintain my sanity. For me, gestating and creating is a way for me to process what is happening in the world around me, and exorcize a lot of negativity from my body. The MAGA Hat Collection is a big part of that. When I made the first piece, Hate Hat, I was actually concerned that the piece was too obvious, but I also felt that this object simply HAD to exist in the world, so I might as well be the one to do it. The pieces, to me, are much more about his supporters, calling them out and reminding them that they are complicit in the crimes committed by the man they brought to power and support. He’s just one malignant sociopath, but it’s his supporters who gave him this dangerous power over the world. So I’ve ripped hundreds of (fake, so as not to support the president) MAGA hats apart, which was a symbolic, cathartic activity, and then I reconfigured them into more overt symbols of hatred and oppression. The works are meant to both call out wearers who claim the hats to be innocuous, and to sound the alarm that history is repeating itself. When I first made “Only The Terrorized Own The Right To Name Symbols of Terror”, a Nazi armband, out of MAGA hat parts, it was early 2019, and some people said I had gone too far. By the end of 2019, the association of this administration with Nazism had become somewhat ubiquitous. 

The work was banned on Facebook and Instagram, and my Facebook account was taken down for a few weeks. It’s unclear whether it was an algorithm gone awry or if my many trolls banded together to report the work. After a week passed without reinstatement, I penned an article for Medium about Facebook’s policies and the effects on artists. It received a lot of press, I received a lot of hate mail and threats to both myself and the work. Some kind person started a petition to get me reinstated. I was going to have a solo show with Jen Tough Gallery in San Francisco to exhibit the MAGA work, but we had to turn it into a weekend popup, by invitation only, with a lot of security.  

Facebook and Instagram are great tools for artists, but we have to cultivate other ways of getting our work out there, because there is a lot of censoring happening on these platforms, and we need the voices of artists more than ever. Social media can be problematic for sharing difficult work. When you go into a gallery or museum, as a viewer, you’re prepared to be challenged once you cross the threshold, but when art just turns up in your feed on a Tuesday morning, you may not be. Add to this that kids are not exposed to enough art in school, and so it can be hard to unpack work like mine. At first glance, if you don’t look hard and see what it is made of, it can be misinterpreted. I am grateful for the endorsement of the work by some public leaders of the African American community. 

Making The MAGA Hat series empowers me: it makes me feel as if I am doing something to speak out and fight back, instead of just reposting memes and going to an occasional protest. Technically, they take some planning to make, but I also love working on these pieces that demand rough edges when most of my other work is highly finished. 

Your Final Word piece really evokes an emotional response. Are you vegetarian? 

I have been researching the sentience of animals, the abuses we as humans put them through, and connections between the way we treat animals and the way we treat more vulnerable members of the human population. I was born into a meat-loving family. It has been a long, hard road, but now I am primarily a pescatarian, with some occasional poultry. I am working toward vegetarianism as an end goal. 

I know it’s a hard question but roughly how long does one piece take?

For some reason, most of my work takes a tremendous amount of time. It’s not deliberate, I just know what the piece demands in order to be successful, and taking shortcuts is not an option. I am currently working on a 500-hour project, ripping out the embroidered stars of an American flag, and re-embroidering them by hand. The fastest project ever took me 4 hours, that’s very unusual. I tend to hold on to my work until there is not one thing I could do to make it stronger. In The Final Word, for example, I thought I was done, then I spent an extra eight and a half hours on the ½” inch face sewing with single threads until it looked the way I wanted it to look. It’s a big joke in my house to ask me when I think the current piece will be done, because everything takes me much longer than I expect. A very wise friend recently told me that she thinks I’m trying to make work that is above reproach… I’m still chewing on that observation.   

How has your work evolved over time?

The work has become bolder over time. My early paintings and embroideries were very subtle, and now, almost everything I make is aggressively confrontational. I started owning my anger as a woman living in a patriarchal society years ago. 

I’ve also developed a healthier relationship with my creativity. I’ve let go of strange motivations that used to drive my work, like proving skill, taste, or knowledge, or trying to please anyone but myself. I’ve come to understand that the art happens through me, and while I do a lot of work to research, make the piece as powerful as possible, and put my spin on it, I’m primarily opening myself up to make what needs to be made right now. Early in my career, I would have dismissed that concept as flaky. 

Can you give any advice to aspiring textile artists?

Even if you are still learning technique, it’s never too early to try and find your voice, to figure out your uniqueness and what you alone can contribute to this conversation. Keep your studio practice and your Art Life sacred and separate from The Art World. Maintain the integrity of your work above all else. Trust your intuition. There are many people who say that art can’t change the world. I disagree. If you are brave, you will inspire others to do the same, and then there’s no end to what we can accomplish. 

What are you most proud of in your career so far?

Well, I’m working on my first book as we speak, for Intellect Press, on the topic of how to find visual voice. It’s different from other creativity books because, based on 20 years of research, I have developed a series of exercises that will essentially create a prescriptive roadmap (or, at least, a number of starting points) for “the work that you alone were born to make”, distinct to each person. I’ve read every book on creativity that has come out in the past few decades, and I know it provides unique information, so I am very excited!

Is there anything you would like to add?

Well, almost everything has been either cancelled or postponed, but, in the future I hope these things will be rescheduled: I’m currently a Renwick Distinguished Artist, and I will be giving a lecture and weekend workshop in D.C. in the future. I was scheduled to be in a group show at York College, and another one at Dorsky Gallery in New York, called “On The Uses of History”. My gallery, Jen Tough, has some projects planned for the coming year to replace the solo show and group shows that had to be cancelled due to giving up her brick and mortar space. 

www.katekretz.com, 

https://www.instagram.com/katekretzartist