Elizabeth Duffy: What an exhilarating ride inside your brain, Anne Tait! It feels like all your neural networks are firing at once in this installation. I love the way you use the storefront gallery as a space for free association, allowing narratives to emerge that are probing, funny, unsettling, and timely. This installation balances humor with profound social critique. How do you think about creating that balance, and what possibilities does humor offer you that a more direct political language cannot?
Anne Tait: Thank you, Elizabeth Duffy, for taking the time to visit my playdate with the Dirt Palace storefront…and thank you, Pippi and Xander for letting me play there!
To answer your question about balance, humor and politics: The last thing I want to do is shove my beliefs or politics down someone else’s throat, but they’re going to come out somehow. Art making is my way of not having to answer a question, but to occupy a space of doubt, frustration, and to make myself laugh. Otherwise, I’d be crying all the time!..I established the crybaby reputation as the youngest of three, and apparently that has stuck.
Elizabeth Duffy: Questions of power, hierarchy, and the strength, vulnerability, and generative power of women's bodies recur throughout the installation. Forceps become bodies or limbs, a large pink pill contains an embryonic form, phallic laboratory glassware sits alongside glittering pills, while the Truth Social “T" and Viagra images smack of impotence and empty promises. Your work is often playful while addressing urgent political realities. What does this installation suggest about where we are culturally, and where do you think we may be headed?
Anne Tait: Goodness, Ms. Duffy, I must look into my crystal glitter pill ball to answer that question: where are we headed? …..I’m still waiting for the crystal ball to tell me. ….As I wait, I’ll give your question a stab: I can’t say where we are headed, but I do find myself surprised how ongoingly wreckless, and willingly ignorant human beings in power and not in power are, laughing at the basic tenants of the dominant faiths that they pretend to worship. From my art history interests and raised in a Christian Protestant tradition I found that virtues and the vices stretch back to all the faiths I have looked at: the Greeks, Romans, Hindi, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Muslim— all have lists of the virtues and the vices. And it is nothing new that people in power deploy religion cynically. Yes, I know we all see this, but it saddens me. The vices win and the biggest winner seems to be greed to me. And, it isn’t a new point, so I can only hope, make art, teach, serve, and keep asking “why?”.
Elizabeth Duffy: Spatial choreography feels important in your installation. The embroidered piece pinned to the ironing board, like a palimpsest, rests on the floor, leading the eye upward to a rectilinear embroidery frame, then further up to the forceps image, and finally to the genuflecting, pleading female figure. How are you thinking about movement through the space? Are ideas of burial, transformation or ascension informing the way you organized this installation.
Anne Tait: I think your poetic eye finds such beauty, Beth.
I looked at the window as a collage of test pieces/ideas/images: when ironing the smaller test pieces in preparation to the larger clinging lady. I’d pinned to the ironing board to block. I liked them still on there so instead of mounting them on a wall or frame, I left them fixed to the ironing board as you see them. which are tests for the larger framed piece at how they can inform another one, and maybe help me, and perhaps you, to see that I am not at a place to answer or solve a problem, but maybe to begin to understand, and to heal. The embroidered elements throughout the window are all questions, and some just recognitions of ideas that present some of my thoughts, worries, and concerns. By putting them out, they help me to step outside of my head, and to maybe convey something that I don’t fully understand myself.
What is the other side of the argument on faith? Good works. My 2 cents: I lean away from faith. What is it without some good being done in its name? But, I love the art made in the name of this statement: Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” is one of my favorite songs on that subject.
I replaced the cross with forceps.
And on the Truth Social logo, I dissected the logo when I should have been marching in a rally. Instead, I found, disturbingly, that is fit into a swaskika. I looked up the branding package for the colors: Truth Blue, Truth Green, and Truth White….which is just white by hex code…truly!
Elizabeth Duffy: Moving across the installation, the image with the three dogs immediately suggests family, companionship, and fidelity. Knowing that you're one of three siblings, I wondered how autobiography enters the work here and elsewhere. What personal narratives or memories are woven into this installation that viewers might not recognize?
Anne Tait: Yes, that is the only personal image. It is a celebrity-style picture of my Great Uncle Arthur’s dog, Jeepers. He used to sit out front of his flower shop in New York City….As I write this I also recall that one of my Uncles’, Arthur and Walter, and my grandfather’s flower shops was located in the Barbazon Plaza Hotel, which is now Trump Tower……never thought of that until now!!! But I just loved this picture of this doggie. He went to places such as the 21 Club with socialites in the hotel while my uncle would never get through the door….It is a memorial of sorts. Aren’t all portraits in the end?
Elizabeth Duffy: Embroidery is often imagined as a solitary, contemplative practice rooted in domestic tradition, but you expand what embroidery can be and where it can exist by bringing this intimate process into public space, engaging subjects like reproductive rights, sexuality, and political division. How does embroidery become a language for these conversations? And how does presenting the work in the highly visible storefront windows of Dirt Palace, at such a busy intersection in Olneyville, shift its meaning?
Anne Tait: I heard a report about the soccer games and the impulse for people to cheer for the underdog. I am such an underdog fan! I see women as the eternal underdogs. They are always the last concern and are pushed aside for the next. At this point, a fetus is beginning to have equal rights with the woman who carries it, and those ‘personhood’ laws again, put women behind even their own bodies.
I see the beautiful work of domestic spheres such as the delicate table linens and handkerchiefs that go for nothing $$$-wise, and see that that they are little underdogs of great beauty. I love still life painting as they document the intimacy of everyday life. I see the vernacular crafting of the drawings from my research of marble gravestones such as the Clinging Woman image as important as are the gravestones carved by anonymous men shipped over for the industry such as the man who, in the large photo is carving the same image that I have altered in my embroidered piece. But, to advocate for them, one must rip them out of the drawer, expand them beyond their size to bring them to the public sphere. I’ve done this before with gravestone drawings which I brought to downtown department store windows here in Providence and also in the marble city of Vermont, Rutland.
Elizabeth Duffy: Round forms (tondos) have long histories in devotional painting and religious imagery. The embroidery hoop is an obvious echo, but circular forms appear throughout your practice, including in your large installation at Roger Williams University. When did the circle become central to your visual language, and what continues to draw you back to it?
Anne Tait: I began using round forms in my paintings when I was in graduate school in the mid-1990s. I find that corners make me turn on them as I’m afraid to be trapped in them physically, When I moved to the round form, I felt I was free to experiment with the materials and the form. Then I was working with poetry that inspired my work. One piece, “Spawn” was inspired by Bob Brown’s poem by the same name. They became large scale petrie dishes.
Round paintings, Tondi, come from plates that were given to newlyweds in Italy with images of Mary & Jesus generally. Over time they evolved into paintings for couples of wealth. My favorite is predicable but beautiful, The Alba Madonna by Raphael. I still love the forgiveness of the circle, though I find it lame when people present their embroidery in hoops.
Elizabeth Duffy: Throughout your installation there are repeated gestures of holding: some tender, some violent. Objects tether, pierce, impale, pin, stretch, and support. One figure nearly has her eyes pierced by a needle! It made me think about art as a way of holding what is otherwise difficult to contain: memory, grief, uncertainty, desire, possibility. How does this notion of holding shape your practice? And how do you shift when the work leads you to somewhere you hadn't anticipated?
Anne Tait: Hands are not a new focus for artists, nor for me, but I found them amusing on gravestones because I am a product of the Addams Family 1960s sitcom and the movie with Peter Lorre, The Beast with Five Fingers, 1946. I don’t think that is the point of your question, but it is insightful that you address the hand since is very important to me as a tool to hold, to care, to hurt, and create. There is a line in the poem, “The Hound”, by Robert Francis: Life will come at you like a hound…..you don’t know if the dog will bite or lick your hand. I love this appendage as it is so powerful, beautiful delicate and transformative. Using it changes us: for the good if we find meaning with it. Sadly, I was hit in my face a few times when I was a kid. It made me head shy for awhile. I would flinch when a hand was near me. I don’t think that happens now that I’m older. I remember it being a quality in some horses I cared for at camp.
Anne Tait: I’ve been reading The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St. Clair this past year. She makes something that should be obvious to us all obvious: that being naked is not going on in our world and fabric is the foundation of civilization. From the Greek Myth of the Three Fates: three women who spin, and ultimately cut our life to its destined length to the complexity of fabric making and garments through history. It seems so obvious, but we take these complex items for granted. I taught an embroidery class this past Spring. So many in the class of 10 women and 5 men didn’t know how to thread a needle. They grew quite good at making things in different ways within the class, and time became an issue as one can’t rush embroidery.
Elizabeth Duffy: The word embroider has an intriguing double meaning. Beyond stitching, it can also mean to embellish or even to fictionalize, to add persuasive or meretricious details to a story. That double meaning feels relevant to your installation. Does that space between truth, invention, memory, and fabrication interest you?
The conversation you initiate here, Beth Duffy, interests me. I find things through certain processes. Some are predicable for me, but some surprise me, making me realize how little I understand myself until I make something. For instance, when I was trying to get my feet to look right in my “Woman Clinging” embroidered piece, I did some tests that are on the ironing board in the window. I’ll include it here since it accidently became a series of feet in a bed of redwork. They look to me like feet slipping in blood. And since childbirth is an inevitable association with the forceps it now seems obvious. But I was just having fun with feet and the colors I was aiming to use in the ‘real’ piece.
Elizabeth Duffy: I love the title “Play Date with Anne Tait.” It suggests freedom, experimentation, curiosity, and improvisation, but it also has structure within it. Someone organized the play. Your work exists in tension between careful control and unruly spontaneous discovery. What does "play" mean in your practice, and what kinds of discoveries does it make possible that planning alone can not?
Anne Tait: As you mentioned earlier, I like to think I have some humor to offer. When one has a most-rhymable last name as “Tait” they grow up with many nicknames. In my case, for this window, this title was my license to play, to free myself from doubt, to take all the loose threads of projects and ideas and try to bring them together. When I allow myself to play, I offer myself forgiveness for not knowing what I’m doing or making logical sense. Goodness, this world doesn’t make sense! As Nick Lowe wrote: “What’s So Funny ‘bout Peace, Love and Understanding?” Well, it’s not funny but if we can’t have fun asking questions and doing storefronts for my friends and neighbors, I’d just cry.
Thank you!
