woolpunk

Michelle Vitale has the hands of a gifted artisan, the soul of a social activist and the passion of an environmentalist.

Vitale had the benefit and pleasure, less typical today, of a family in which her grandmother and aunt, immigrants from Italy, were skilled in knitting, crocheting and lace-making. These domestic arts of thread and cloth were traditionally passed down through generations of family women. In Michelle’s case, they were enjoyable to watch and amenable to try as a young girl; her skills, and ultimately her interest stayed with her. College, and especially her graduate program at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, exposed her to cutting-edge contemporary art and encouraged her to seek her own creative voice. Given Vitale’s several areas of talent and lure of possibilities in the arts and media, it is interesting that the artist intuitively, and then insightfully, turned to skills that had en-riched her youthful development and integrated them into her mature vision and practice.

Surface Design Journal, 2009

Her early craft influence is combined with influence from abstract painters like Terry Winters and Tom Nozkowski and by artists who combine concepts of painting with in-stallation practice, like Jessica Stockholder and Judy Pfaff. Contemporary artists who work with fiber and textiles such as Ghada Amer, Patah Coyne and Chakia Booker have also influenced her work. For this project, the artist re-read Kenneth Frampton’s Studies in Tectonic Culture which is particularly sig-nificant of Ms Vitale’s work, as it deals with issues of construction and the ways in which American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was influenced by craft.

-- Rocio Aranda-Alvarado Curator Jersey City MuseumBound 2005, Jersey City Museum

The resonance in Michelle Vitale’s work re-sults from her willingness to layer and in-tegrate visual and physical components, image and architecture, photography and traditional craft, environmental conscience and unconventional colorful installation. Vi-tale is an artist in mid-reach, and a big and brave reach it is, testing a number of cre-ative possibilities.

--Hildreth York, Professor EmeritaRutgers University, is Curator of Art and Design, Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, New Jersey.Surface Design Journal, 2009

Vitale digitally prints her own photographs onto cross-stitch fabric and large-scale vinyl banners to create hybrid images comprised of print and stitch. Rather than cover the fabric, she deploys her stitches sparingly using what she refers to as “non-traditional embroidery techniques” through which she “responds to the sites’ current conditions, landscape and sur-roundings through the use of texture, colour, line and pattern. With each stitch,” she concludes, “I vitalise and hearten the recorded landscapes.”

“House and home gives you the fibre of your being”, Vitale explains of her interest in connecting the construction of buildings to the blocks of stitch seen in Love Wear House and Pacific Court. The latter is set against a bright expanse of cloudless blue sky with blocks of stitched colour deployed to embellish the incomplete construction site by filling half-constructed windows. Vitale’s stitches act like a felt-tip pen, scribbling across the photographic image with long looping lines. Spewing from the bottom left of Pacific Court is a tangle of red thread: an overflowing drainpipe perhaps that spills beyond the frame of the printed photograph. Its presence suggests the presence of contamination beneath the foundation of yet another incomplete American dream. Another work in the series Home Sweet Home and its boarded windows carry much the same message in a sobering image that manages to evoke pathos rather than irony.

410 Bergen Lafayette was made in response “to a building that was sitting there for years. I would drive by and think how can I make that prettier? I wanted to make it beautiful. To fill it with colour.” Much like graffiti, there is a desire to bring colour and life back to architecture that has long lost its shine. Unremarkable details are picked out and brought to the foreground, stitched with the colours of crayon box with a swiftness and ease that a child’s spontaneity and disregard for “rules” would bring to a colouring book. Vitale’s use of stitch is slightly irreverent, similar in its haste and spontaneity to Columbian artist Maria E. Piñeres [see Embroidery July/August 2005]. Her approach frees the stitch from the grid on which she has chosen to print her photographs and captures gesture and emotion rather than minutiae. This ease is also confirmed in her presen-tation style, which makes use of drawing board pins and little else. Vitale is far from precious about her work. Instead she reminds us of a bigger picture created by the cycles of prosperity and decline that mark every urban landscape. Perhaps we will look at the world a little differently the next time we step out the door. When seen through Vitale’s eyes, the potential is everywhere.

Dr Jessica Hemmings Associate Director of the Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies at the Edinburgh College of ArtEmbroidery Magazine (Jan./Feb. 2009: 24-27

Home Sweet Home: Michelle VitaleWritten by Jessica Hemmings, Embradery Magazine

Michelle Vitale has an eye for the unremarkable. Street corners, shabby shop fronts and abandoned buildings are the source material for her recent series Urban Weavings, a collection of embroideries that celebrate “sites of communal and historical relevance” in Jersey City, New Jersey. Since the mid-nineties, Vitale has watched the demolition of many buildings in her local community. She explains that the rising property prices of New York City over the past decade have pushed neighbouring Jersey City towards a previously unknown gentrification. Some of the changes, she concedes, are positive. For example, in the summer of 2008 the developments of Pacific Court and Woodward Terrace received the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency’s first Green Building Award. Both areas bring together low, and middle-income housing and have included a number of green initiatives such as incorporation of recycled materials acquired from existing buildings. But elsewhere much of this change has arrived at a cost. Feeling helpless in the face of rapid redevelopment, Vitale set about recording the bricks and mortar of her community, transferring her photographs into embroidered scenes that show the ur-ban landscape in a decidedly different light.Vitale’s grandmother immigrated to America from Foggia, Italy in the 1920’s and Jean Giono made her living sewing American flags in the country she came to call her home. “Growing up I saw the lace that my great aunt made and knew that my patriotic grandmother had worked as a seamstress in a flag factory before my birth. That is why I am here [in America] and it reflects in my work in a lot of ways. But so too does the disappointment, like the changes I now see around me and that also comes out in my work.” Vitale admits that it took some time for her to real-ise that working with textiles could be part of the vocabulary she was developing as an artist. After studying Fine Art at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, Vitale began painting directly onto blankets in the mid-nineties just as she began to notice the changes to her local area that were pushing out many residents. Painting took back seat to textiles when she developed a reaction to toxins contained in the paints she was using. Looking for alternatives she came to realise that there was a wealth of materials her relatives had been using under her nose since childhood. “But even if that [sickness] had not happened, I still think I would be going this direction,” she explains. “My grandmother is no longer alive, and these materials remind me of who I was as a little girl. Fibre and these materials are my voice now. It is what I know.” Vitale cites the writings of Bauhaus designer Anni Albers and architectural historian Kenneth Frampton who “highlight the woven history of craft, architecture, knit and form” as inspiration for her recent work. “I document sites of communal or historical relevance that are in the midst of physical and/or social change. Sites of interest include demolished and abandoned buildings, areas of urban blight, re-development areas, and dumping grounds,” she explains.

Water falls., 2011 - 2012

The work I have chosen is not only art for art’s sake, it is art for water’s sake and therefore it is art for our sakes. I have attempted to make choices broad and inclusive enough to connect to the majority of the half-million visitors who will see our exhibition. Our hope is that each will leave with a deeper relationship to water, art and to the Cathedral.

-- Fredericka Foster, guest. curator and participating artist

Gimmie Shelter 2 Opening Reception for Jersey City Studio Tour 2014

e are fortunate to be able to launch Michelle Vitale’s first public art, Gimme Shelter roject in the Jerseyscapes exhibition at ew Jersey City University Galleries. The oint in Time Count of 20 chronicled the homeless population throughout the state of New Jersey in one day and estimated a 16 percent increase throughout the state. During the summer of 2014, the artist collected, recycled, collaged and re-stitched a variety of knitted materials to create a weatherized blanket or temporary shelter that is a combination of half blanket and half weatherized tarp to give added protection for winter weather conditions. The pro-totype which is included in the Jerseyscapes exhibition is not only functional, but is also cheerful with colorful patterns found in the collaged knits. Looking ahead to this upcoming winter, Michelle is calling for donations of materials to produce more blankets and distribute them in parks in the udson County. er project draws the public attention to an often neglected issue of spreading poverty in the United States. Midori oshimoto, h.D. Gallery Director and Associate rofessor of Art istory New Jersey City University

Michelle Vitale(aka woolpunk) is an American artist, born in Summit, NJ in 1971. Inspired by an immigrant seamstress grandmother, who sewed American flags, Vitale machine knits fiber installations and embroiders on photos of urban sprawl. She has created large-scale site specific forms for a variety of institutions including St John’s Cathedral, NYC; Hunterdon Museum, NJ; Lion Brand Yarn Studio, NYC; Casaterra Residency, Italy; and the Object and Thought Gallery, CO. Vitale has been included in numerous exhibitions including both New Jersey Arts Annual and Crafts Annual, Arts and Crafts Museum, Itami, Japan; Grey Lock Arts, North Adam, MA; ABC No Rio, NYC; and Galerie Kurt I’m Hirsch, Berlin, Germany. Her work has been included in several publications and

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