Each work of art in Re-imagining the Distaff Toolkit has, at it’s visible core, a tool that was important for women’s domestic labor in the past. The old tool becomes the fulcrum for a contemporary work of art.
Betye Saar’s work- one of her iconic washboard pieces- perfectly conveys a trajectory of this exhibition: the impulse to transform an implement of domestic drudgery and degradation into a thing of beauty and a vehicle for representing and honoring the past, in this case, African American history. Flo Oy Wong has made a piece constructed in part out of kitchen implements and images from her immigrant family’s 1940’s Chinese restaurant in Oakland, CA. Lisa Alvarado in Chicago has made a small installation illuminating the cultural like of Mexican immigrant domestics in the World War II era. Alvarado expects the audience to rifle through the maid’s tote bag, demonstrating the thin claim such a person had to privacy as she toiled for wages in someone else’s household.
Oregon artist Marie Watt has contributed one of her acclaimed, “Blanket Columns” to the exhibition, along with two smaller wall pieces. Watt describes her project this way: “My work is about social and cultural histories embedded in commonplace objects. I consciously draw from indigenous design principles, oral traditions and personal experience to shape the inner logic of the work I make. Watt adds, I like how Indigenous Creation Stories connect us to soil and sky. Like the blankets, this vertical orientation (up and down) is easy to take for granted. But it is also the space where smoke rises, winged creatures fly, prayers are offered and water collects and releases.”
Distaff artists have placed these objects and others at the center of their work: a washboard, a dressmaker’s figure, graters, doilies, and advice book, cooking pans, a basket, a garden hoe, dress patterns, a rolling pin, buckets, darning eggs, a work glove, a needle threader, rug-beaters, ironing boards, mason jars, a telephone.
Part of the point of Distaff is to explore the idea of seeing-as-context. Many of these old tools facilitated very and repetitive labor and evoke the various histories (European American African American, Asian American, Native American, Mexican American) of women’s unpaid, often diminished and disrespected status within the household and society. But in the 21st century, at a moment when “old tools” have become anesthetized and expensive, we can look again, and see costly beauty.
The artists have put utility in conversation with the past. Reimagining the distaff toolkit for the purposes of this exhibition can include (overlapping) encounters in any of the following directions-or others: history / memory / gender / labor / material culture / household objects / family relations / power and powerlessness / drudgery / craft and beauty.
The distaff is a tool attached to a spinning wheel, designed to hold un-spun fibers. Over time, “distaff” came to refer to matters and objects in the domestic or women’s sphere, and then, to women, generally.
