Kate Madeira
About a week after Donald Trump was sworn in, fiber artist Kate Madeira couldn’t sleep. That’s when everything clicked.
“It was midnight,” she says from a vintage couch in her Wedgewood-Houston home. “I had taken an edible and was pretty hyped, and was just like, ‘I’m really anxious, I just want to make something. I’m going to grab a piece of fabric and start stitching and see what happens.’
“It was just this whole, ‘Fuck Trump, fuck all you fasc-holes that I don’t have time for,’ ” she continues, miming sewing motions. “After doing that I was like, ‘Huh, that felt really good. I’m going to roll with that.’ ”
The result is a pale-pink piece of felt, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, with a stitched set of bright-red lips saying, “Fuck Trump Pence Bannon McConnell Ryan DeVos Conway Sessions & the rest of y’all faschole creeps life & this fabric ain’t got room for!” The text is surrounded by little purple knots, a stitched line of blue thread and a cloud of pearlescent sequins and gold beads. It’s pissed off, and it’s pretty — an instantly appealing square that lures you in closer before it bites.
A couple weeks later, just before Valentine’s Day 2017, Madeira let loose on some more fabric, this time embroidering a trio of roses with red clenched fists for petals, along with a poem: “Roses are red, alt-facts aren’t true. I want to destroy white supremacy with you.” The internet went wild. Madeira got thousands of likes on Instagram. A picture of the piece was posted and reposted hundreds of times on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
“On the morning of Valentine’s Day, [I] went to work, and then I came home and just had all these notifications and was just like, ‘What is going on?’ ” Madeira recalls. “I was just sitting there for an hour, until I had to go to my other job, just refreshing pages, just shaking, like, ‘What is this? This is intense.’ ”
Now Madeira has about a dozen different pieces of protest art — Postcards From Bummerville USA, she calls them — and each one is a colorful burst of gut feelings. Frustration, anger, humor, hopelessness and the urge to make a difference in the world are all sewn together into charming tapestries of sequins, beads, zombie heads with bunny ears and hand-stitched lettering. And it all echoes the sentiments seen on the protest signs that have become ubiquitous at our weekend rallies and marches.
In one piece, Madeira has stitched a woman — maybe herself — smoking and saying, “This place ain’t some old boys club & we don’t give a damn who yr boiz yr boiz yr boiz are GTFO.” Another says, “You can’t silence science,” over a tiny bubbling beaker and shimmering silver stars. Some are adorned with tiny puff balls, others have googly eyes. My favorite is one that simply says “Uuugggghhhhh” amid a garden of other tiny Ughs — my constant mental state, freshly barfed up with thread into a pool beadwork.
“One thing I’ve said to friends in the past is that I want to figure out how to embroider wrathfully,” Madeira says. “If you’re in a medium like painting, or if you play music, you can just pound the hell out of some drums or throw some paint on a canvas. I feel like I’m still trying to figure out how to just explode into it.”
Though each sparkling piece is laced with restless emotions, Madeira’s work displays an impressive amount of patience. Before she started the Postcards series, she spent hundreds of hours on stunning photorealistic pieces, including a series of concert photos called Live in Stitches that features local bands Pujol, How Cozy! and JEFF the Brotherhood. She has a notebook full of partially finished projects, including a miniature hand-drawn zine and a thumbnail of white supremacist poster boy Richard Spencer getting punched in the face.
“The really frustrating thing about working in embroidery is I can’t make things at the rate that I come up with ideas for them,” she says.
One of her newest ideas? Using food as a canvas. Yup, Madeira can stitch words onto stale slices of bread (“It’s like embroidering Styrofoam,” she says) and Cheez-Its and somehow manage to make it look cool as fuck.
“For now I’m trying to just stick with nonperishable stuff, because I’ve had a couple people ask, ‘Can I get this as a print?’ and I would love to print them, but also I want it to be decent quality,” Madeira says. “I just have a desk full of little baggies of bread and Cheez-Its right now. But I’ve had some ideas. There’s one piece I have in mind with bread and apple slices.”
