Events

These eight works on paper from the Museum’s collection depict women who are engaged in various facets of needlework, such as knitting, sewing, embroidering and carding. Featuring works by such artists as Childe Hassam and Jean François Millet, A Stitch in Time demonstrates a pronounced interest in the production of handmade crafts during the mid-19th century’s rise of industrial manufacturing in Europe and America. Artists who depicted needleworking as an occupation for the working classes portrayed the craft with reverence and quiet dignity.

Kota Ezawa (German, born 1966) is best known for the videos that he makes by hand-tracing film and television footage with a computer software program––an approach that flattens the images, eliminates details and amplifies the remaining gestures. For Lennon Sontag Beuys, Ezawa selected clips from John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 “sleep-in” for peace in Amsterdam, a 2001 lecture by Susan Sontag at Columbia University and Joseph Beuys’ 1974 lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York, redrew them as simplified animations and ran the animations in a continuous loop.