“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know that place for the first time.”
I am a fiber artist and visual storyteller, piecing together personal stories through hand embroidery. I explore family relationships, the arc of generations and mechanisms of change through an intimate lens, challenging social mores, societal expectations and class structures.
I was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. on January 25th, 1942, the first born to upwardly mobile parents, who were children of Eastern European immigrants. I was raised to be a wife and mother. In the summer of 1962 I fulfilled their goal for me and became the perfect “fifties” wife. By the time the cultural revolution of the “sixties” had firmly taken root, I was the bewildered mother of three young sons.
It was 1969, America had landed a man on the Moon, and there was Woodstock, hippies, free love, Vietnam, civil rights, women’s rights and mind-altering drugs. I began asking myself, “Is this all there is?”
Before long with my boys tucked amid boxes of books, toys and Twinkie snack cakes, while “yellow submarine” blared from the radio, I backed out the driveway of my suburban Los Angeles home and fled to Northern California to live in a Tipi. I left behind my husband, financial security and the only lifestyle I had ever known. This was the defining moment of my life.
I call my generation “The Swing Generation”. We are not baby boomers, nor do we remember World War II. Rather we swing between the two on a wild ride through changing times.. I don’t want us to be forgotten.
I draw inspiration from my paternal great grandmother Rose, who was a seamstress in the summer palace of Franz Joseph during the Ottoman Empire, and my father, Lew, who was a haberdasher to the stars in Beverly Hills. The Bayeaux Tapestry, as well as historical American samplers.
I live in Richmond, CA