Women’s Work

Women’s Work has been first published in Adanna Literary Magazine in issue number ten in October 2020. 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all –

                                     Emily Dickenson

 

As I was listening casually to NPR during a drive, a story caught my attention. It was about an elderly woman named Rita whose unfinished quilt had shown up in an estate sale. She’d passed away in her nineties without completing it. A woman artist who enjoys completing unfinished work purchased it. It was comprised of each state, with the state flag, symbol and bird. Only in its beginning stages, the artist knew that the quilt would require a community of women to help finish it. Around the country, women responded to her invitation, signed on to the project, and worked together until it was completed.

The artist spoke about how women’s projects so often remain unknown, whether they be art, journals, or incomplete manuscripts. How much do we have a responsibility to help those works continue, though the original artist could not? She may have given up or passed away before it could be shared. Completing women’s unfinished artwork became this artist’s mission, her way to support unique women so their work would no longer lie in drawers, hidden away for no one to see. It moved me.

I thought of my best friend who died a year ago, an artist who’d proudly created a collaborative women’s quilt entitled “Twelve by Twelve.” Each woman participating was responsible for twelve embroidered squares that were quilted together and shown at annual exhibits. Every year my friend proudly brought her twelve squares to my home to share with other friends and me. She’d place the squares on the floor, we’d gather around, and marvel at the colors and designs. I wanted to attend one of her annual quilt exhibits, but because of distance, I never made it. Now, in her memory, some of those squares hang on my wall.

But it is what my friend chose not to share or display that I now contemplate. Stacked in thick, taped, battered folders leaning against the wall in my office are hundreds of paintings she created during her years of art therapy in the 1980’s where she allowed her uninhibited pain and vision to be expressed. With their rawness and intensity, and her focus on skeletons, fetuses, body parts and bright bold colors, they resemble Day of the Dead paintings influenced by artists such as Frida Kahlo.

She’d stored them in her attic, unknown and unseen, a trove of her soul hidden away in her intimate cottage, filled with art and nestled in lush gardens. These works were not on her wall and, like Rita’s incomplete quilt, were never shared. Yet these paintings are completed pieces of art, colored in vibrant deep blues and reds, greens and orange, shades of purple and black. There are faces with thick black tears falling from their cheeks.  The figure of a giant woman, like a hybrid of an octopus and skeleton, repeats through many of the paintings.

While she chose to display the more decorative art and her “Twelve by Twelve” quilt, these other deeply intimate, profound images of women trying to give birth, or expressing regret at not bearing children, stayed in her attic. Perhaps she’d had an abortion, or had been trying to figure out what role bearing children had in her life. She died childless, and while I assumed she may have had regrets, she seemed to relish her single life as an artist with a love of her home, two dogs, friends, and family.

These masterful paintings remain a mystery, with my office a virtual museum of her work.  I’ve become the curator of these personal paintings revealing my friend’s inner visions and longings. They are beautiful and compelling and deserve to be shown. She may not have intended them to be shared, but she also often repressed thinking of herself as an artist, fearing family censure. Art will not put food on the table, her father told her, prompting her to keep her work largely hidden.  

Hidden and unfinished works of art left by our treasured friends provide hope for the future of women’s stories and artistic expression. How many other attics hide women’s creative work? How much talent lies unfinished in estate sales or in refuse bins? How many women hide their work with shame, embarrassment, or fear?  It’s important to remember that if it were not for family members who found Emily Dickinson’s poetry after she died, and who decided to publish it, we might not have her poetry today.

I miss my friend, and hope she would encourage me to celebrate her artistry by bringing these bold, powerful paintings out of the dust and darkness into the light and the public eye. I will do so with pride and with love. I do it in her memory and in memory of women like Rita, and all the women who felt compelled to hide their art in attics. Women’s unfinished and hidden work deserves to be completed and shown.  

By Nitza Agam