I was meeting a client at a famous museumâs lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx âback when that was nothing to brag aboutâ and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.
What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.
What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girlâs wedding day.
What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her fatherâs lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her motherâs deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailorâs shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.
The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her motherâs lap: her mother doesnât had a pattern, but she doesnât need one to make her daughterâs dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughterâs majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.
And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we donât just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.
But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmotherâs quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Goghâs works hung in his poor friendsâ hallways. That your fatherâs hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parentsâ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sisterâs engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinciâs scribbles of flying machines.
I donât think thereâs any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - theyâve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that thereâs an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something thatâs beautiful to you.
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