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Andrea Dezsö’s Embroidered “Lessons From My Mother”

I met Andrea in San Diego last year and was immediately floored by her work. (Also, being ¼ Romanian but still knowing almost nothing about Romania, I’m always fascinated by Romanian artists.)

NYTimes:

From afar, the stitching and calming colors looked like the work of a doting grandmother, but up close there were images of vaginas, fetuses and a study of the myths that mothers told their daughters in Transylvania, Romania, where Ms. Dezsö, 39, was raised…

Working in the city has provided fodder for many of her ideas and for her embroidery series, which she stitched while traveling throughout the city. A woman stitching in public is viewed differently in different neighborhoods, Ms. Dezsö found.

“If I’m in Queens, people think I’m a traditional woman,” Ms. Dezsö said. “If I’m in Manhattan, it’s the hippest thing.”

domestic cats, on the other hand, do know how to make friends. they are friendly to the point that lots of feral cats live in colonies— the females hang out together, even raise kids together, and the males like to spend nonsexual time with their baby mommas. they groom each other, play around, and have a particular tail position to signal to one another— straight up with the tip curled— that they’re friendly and happy to see each other. cats learned how to be chill with each other in order to take full advantage of human food sources: an ancient granary supplies enough rats for a lot of cats, as does a modern lady with a big bag of frisky bits, so it would be a waste of time and energy for any one cat to try and stake the entire foodsource out for exclusive use. less fighting means more eating and resting which means a longer, nicer life and a lot more kittens. 

so this stray cat, she obviously has no colony if she’s wandering around and sneaking into zoo enclosures, so she’s like ‘hey! there’s food here! what up, other cat, let’s be friends, let’s be friends and share that food’. and the bobcat is like ‘??????’ because actually wild cats are pretty cautious about initiating hostilities and anything new and aggressive makes them very worried. and the domestic cat is like ‘haha cool, ok, we’re friends now, big guy. no problems.’ and the bobcat is like ‘????? well…?? ok?’ and then they are friends. 

the super interesting thing about most wild cat species is they don’t really have the capacity to make friends on their own, especially outside of sibling bonds, but, if someone comes along and does all the friend-making themselves, they’ll totally roll with it. zoo cats can get really attached to their caregivers— or, in this case, a very confident little calico demonstrating exactly why her species has been so darn successful over the last nine thousand years .