Underwear quilts, dinosaur Bayeux, & cactus wrens
Notes and pictures from a whirlwind trip to Atlanta and Tucson
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I was traveling earlier this month—first to Atlanta for a work offsite, then to Tucson to meet up with family for a brief vacation. It was a chaotic trip partially derailed by a gnarly cold and some garden variety travel hiccups, but I did manage to fit in a few fashion and textile moments, both by happenstance and on purpose.
First, some travel fits. I’m delighted to report that I have recently achieved "peak pants" in which pretty much all of my pants in regular rotation are both super cute (according to my personal criteria) and comfortable enough for a full day of flying.
I’d never been to Atlanta, and honestly didn’t have much time to explore the city on this visit, but I did go for a run my first morning and saw the hulking cement exoskeleton of Americas Mart and the public art at Centennial Olympic Park.
My work events took place in a cavernous midcentury beehive hotel (complete with rotating restaurant on the top!) in the kind of sparsely populated downtown neighborhood that is very easy to imagine as the backdrop for a post-apocalyptic film1.
I am a remote worker and also a peacock, so company offsites are the rare opportunity to parade my fashions and fineries. On the first day, I wore the gold upholstery wearable toile vest and pants I made for my Magic Suit2.
On one of my lunch breaks, I happened upon an outdoor makers’ fair. I bought a few pairs of earrings, including some dangly disco balls, from Sincerely Fearless. Check them out if you’re looking for fun, inventive novelty earrings by a Black-owned brand.
On Friday, there was no work programming and my flight didn’t leave until evening, so two of my coworkers and I went to the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA). I chose MODA by googling “textile museum Atlanta.” Their current exhibit is called “THREADS of CHANGE: Design & Data,” which sounded relevant to my interests so I did no further research. And GOOD LARD was it amazing, wowowow.
Some of my favorites were the communally created coral forms from the Crochet Coral Reef and a series of Geoscience Embroideries by Bonnie Peterson.
The piece that really put my jaw on the floor was The Black Gold Tapestry by Sandra Sawatzky. It’s a work of embroidery that depicts the history of oil—from the dinosaurs to the present day—in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry3.
Shockingly, it is also roughly the same size as the Bayeux Tapestry. Sawatzky’s 67 meters of meticulous embroidery lined the walls of multiple large gallery rooms. The Black Gold Tapestry was completed over nine years and required 16,000+ hours of labor. It’s truly a breathtaking feat, and one that’s especially powerful to see in person. Sawatzky’s couching stitches appear neater and more uniform than the ones on the nearly 1000-year-old Bayeux Tapestry, which was likely stitched by many needlewomen with varying levels of skill, but has much of the same energy and charm.
The piece is so huge and so impressive that I felt an almost frantic sense of wonder as I walked the gallery. I wanted to simultaneously appreciate each small detail, while also comprehending the larger story of the piece and taking in the scale. If you have the chance to see it at MODA or wherever it goes next, I cannot recommend it enough.
Before leaving Atlanta, I received one more textile treat in the form of good airport art! The exhibit in the terminal where I waited for my flight had some excellent fiber works made from reused fabrics, including a hand-sewn chaos quilt by Melissa Word, which appeared to be assembled largely from lingerie and athleisure.
It’s so nice to happen upon a well-curated airport art show amidst the minor misery of modern air travel.
Tucson seemed lovely, but I did not get to see much of it because I arrived with a nasty cold and spent a lot of the weekend in bed. My niece brought a separate, vomity plague into the vacation house my sister, my cousin, and I were renting with our families. Such is life. I did get out for a few walks to see the famous cactuses, and I heard the quail and cactus wrens making their morning racket.
And that’s all for this one, folks! May you stay healthy and un-snotted. May your pants fit well. May you come across good art in unpleasant places.
Like many folks, I find myself thinking umm, a lot, about dystopian and apocalyptic themes these days. And I try to keep in mind that the imagery of apocalypse need not be zombies swarming the balconies of the hotel atrium. Dystopia means eating aged cheeses in the rotating restaurant while people get disappeared to El Salvador and bombed in Gaza.
I bookended my trip by finishing Sofi Thanhauser’s Worn on the flight to Atlanta and starting Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower on the way home from Tucson. As many have pointed out, Parable of the Sower feels uncomfortably prescient right now. And Thanhauser’s depictions of contemporary and historical garment manufacturing conditions remind me that, of course, dystopian realities already undergird modern capitalism.
Full update on Magic Suit progress coming soon!
In the tradition of the Bayeux Tapestry, the Black Gold Tapestry is not truly a tapestry, but an embroidery that has been called a tapestry.