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Embroidery, gesso, acrylic, and acrylic ink on canvas

This is art about being a worker bee and having your boss call you demeaning nicknames at work. 

It’s part of a series that included 10 pieces and took almost 4 months to complete. 

I taught myself some basic embroidery as part of this project, and I’m very happy with the unpretentious and unpolished aesthetic it gave the final pieces. 

VERY LONG, PRETENTIOUS EXPLANATION: 

CW very brief mention of sexual assault (nothing graphic) //

The honeybee motifs in the project call back to the daily lived experiences of the worker. For 2 years leading up to the project, as well as during it, I worked at an unnamed extremely popular corporate coffee shop that you have certainly heard of. I consulted my coworkers during the entire project, and at its conclusion I gave them most of the pieces. My coworkers and I were work study students, and we often felt alienated (in varying degrees) by the customers at the shop, who were also students, and would drop huge amounts of money on coffee and often mistreat us in the process. We made less than minimum wage and were forbidden from accepting tips under threat of being fired (this is all legal for work study, by the way). We were frustrated that we had gotten into the school just like the other students, but that they didn’t always treat us that way. Students of color at the shop pointed out how this treatment was raced as well as classed. Multiple incidents occurred at the shop where workers felt alienated due to their sexualities, and gender identities. An outspoken bigot on campus frequented the shop, as did a few sexual assailants I knew of, and we served them all with a smile because we needed the job. One day, I came into work to see that the college had put up a banner across from the coffee shop saying that the institution “supports sexual assault survivors.” The banner was huge and unavoidable at work. I was sexually assaulted on campus, and I know that the school actually does very little for survivors. Since the banner was massive and hung on a wall directly across from the coffee shop’s counter, anyone who worked there had to think about sexual assault every time they lifted their head to serve a customer or look across the student center. These events all solidified why the project had to challenge white-serving, normative academic environments, and push back against we consider to be “academic” and worthy of critical discussion. 

I used embroidery and pastel colors on purpose because art in academia often considers this color palette and “craft” to be juvenile, feminine, and not “real art.” I was very aware of the history of embroidery and of the arts and crafts movement as I completed and designed the project. 

When I took this medium and these colors into the academic studio, I received some of the kind of patronizing and rude treatment that one would expect from some professors and peers, but I also got a lot of really cool insight and support. It was amazing to have the full support of my professor and 3 classmates in my critique group. The patronizing experiences I had with other artists in the building mostly served to prove to me why the project was so important, and completing it was so rewarding and therapeutic. I’m pretty grateful that my college allowed me to essentially make up this course so that I could pursue this. Now, I’m really excited to explore these themes even further outside of The Institution. 

The piece above is gone. I gifted most of pieces to individual coworkers before leaving the coffee job, and never showed the work in a gallery or show. Though I did many critiques with classmates and worked closely with a professor on the project, in the end, answering to my work family instead of to a group of official art people felt way more authentic to who I am and true to this work. 

I really hope you can enjoy them as much as we did.