Untitled (Paul Tannenbaum), from A Postcolonial Kinderhood

Elaine Reichek

1993

Needlework in a frame with a border of designs, the alphabet and numbers in the center, and text at the bottom.
Tooltip info icon

Reichek used needlework to comment on and subvert the embroidered sampler, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century woman’s craft, transforming it into a feminist exploration of the exposure and repression of identity. In A Postcolonial Kinderhood, Reichek reimagined her childhood room. Her German-Jewish parents had filled their home with furnishings that expressed their devotion to living an assimilated American life. But in Reichek’s installation what look like ordinary American samplers are embroidered with messages that reveal their Jewish identity. 

Credits

Elaine Reichek, Untitled (Paul Tannenbaum), 1993, from A Postcolonial Kinderhood. Hand embroidery on linen, 16.75 x 17.625 in. (42.5 x 44.9 cm). Photograph by Paul Kennedy. Collection of The Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Purchase: Melva Bucksbaum, Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Shaffran, and Joan Kaplan Gifts; Fine Arts Acquisitions Committee Fund; and Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, Cheryl and Henry Welt, Paula Krulak, Toby Devan Lewis, and Henry Buhl Gifts, 1997-195l.l. Courtesy of the artist.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 10.

Engage with this Source

Creator Bio

Elaine Reichek

b. 1943

American conceptual artist Elaine Reichek uses embroidery to explore aesthetics. Born in New York, she studied at Yale University. Her work has appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Belgium; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, among other venues. She lives in New York City.

You may also like

Abstract painting with lines in a volcano shape.
Tooltip info icon

Untitled

Though Nikel’s style of expressionist abstraction has sometimes been characterized as lyrical abstraction, a style associated with Israel’s New Horizons group, she was not formally connected with any…
View Source
Photograph featuring man seated at a dinner table covered with dishes with his face partially covered by a chandelier.
Tooltip info icon

Grubman Wedding NYC #9-11

Fink is well known for his photographs of upper-crust Americans at weddings, parties, and other occasions where wealth and status are on display, as in this photograph where objects take priority over…
View Source
Photograph featuring four young girls holding onto each other's shoulders walking down the stairs in a train with two older women in the front and back.
Tooltip info icon

Blind Women, Egypt

Photojournalist Lori Grinker has become well known for her photographs of the aftereffects of war and for her photo essays on her brother’s death from AIDS and her mother’s struggle with cancer. In…
View Source
Painted bronze figurine climbing wall with no hair or shirt and silver-covered feet; tattoo of figure climbing.
Tooltip info icon

Love Dub

In Love Dub, small figures climb up the walls of the gallery wearing flipper-like footwear. A similar image was replicated in a tattoo, shown in a photograph as part of the installation. Katzenstein…
View Source
Ink painting of Hebrew letters, Hebrew words, and English transliteration.
Tooltip info icon

Kaddish

Logemann began Kaddish, a series of ten ink, oil, and varnish paintings, in 1993 and completed it in 1996. Each canvas includes a circle with the Jewish memorial prayer in Hebrew and English…
View Source