Press

i-D Magazine

“Heather Marie Scholl is confronting fellow white women with embroidery”, 2018

“On the west coast, I spent a lot of time observing and trying to understand the layers of racism and white supremacy, but I wasn’t owning my personal strength in addressing those issues,” she says. Moving to New York at the nexus of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown’s killers going free shifted something in her. “The power of that and where I was at in my life really forced me to start addressing how I’m going to use my voice.”

Now 33, Scholl has lived in New York for five years, following a three-year stint in the Bay Area. As a fine artist who has “always been drawn to the crafts of fashion,” she works primarily in the embroidery arts, and her solo show Reflections exhibits pieces from her two main bodies of work. The Self-Portrait Series functions as journal pages, exploring “what it means to be a woman in this world dealing with trauma and depression and identity.” Whitework, meanwhile, “examines white women’s roles in the establishment and maintenance of white supremacy through the embroidery tradition of white thread on white fabric.”

(…)Scholl’s mission as an artist is to use personal investigating, accountability, and vulnerability as tools for change, and by modeling these concepts in her work, she hopes to open up space for others to do so as well, especially white women.

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“Instagram’s embroiderers are blurring the gendered divide between craft and art”, 2016

This is obviously not new, Tracey Emin’s textile works have been toying with notions of acceptable femininity for decades. While Ghada Amer has made a career of using a combination of painting and needlework to challenge entrenched ideas of masculinity, sexuality and postcolonial identities in art. More recently Heather Marie Scholl has examined the interplay of female history, race and white supremacy in her delicate series Whitework, and her own experiences of gender in an ongoing project of self portraits.

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Real Change

“Artist Confront’s White Womanhood”, 2018

Scholl’s fiber art works are in line with conversations happening within social justice, anti-racism and feminist circles — specifically, how White women uphold White supremacy. Calls for White women to address their complicity escalated with the election of 45 in the fall of 2016. Among White college-educated women, then-candidate Donald Trump received 44 percent of their vote. He fared even better among White women who weren’t college educated with 61 percent of their vote. Simply put, if large swaths of White women hadn’t voted for him, the White House might look and act a bit different today. Since the election, White women have also made headlines for calling the police on people of color, notably when a woman called the police on a young, Black girl who was selling bottled water to raise money to go to Disneyland.

Scholl’s “Whitework” series is in stark contrast to the dark walls of Virago Gallery. “The Perfect (white) Woman” is an intricate and layered embroidered work that hangs on the wall as if it’s a curtain covering a window. Within the vast amount of stitching, a police officer stands among headstones. The name Emmett Till is written on one of them. Till is arguably one of the most well-known victims of lynching in 1955 in Mississippi at the age of 14. His crime? Supposedly whistling at a White woman at a grocery store. His mother insisted on an open-casket funeral, revealing his beaten and bloated body to the world.

The delicate piece reflects the touchy nature of the conversations Scholl’s work can provoke…

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Cosmopolitan

“Inside the Most Popular Panel at the Women's Convention: "Confronting White Womanhood", 2016

Saturday, several hundred women were stampeding from one packed meeting room in Detroit's Cobo Center to another, hoping to snag a seat at the weekend's most popular event: a panel called "Confronting White Womanhood."

The panel was held on Friday as planned, but interest was so high that only a fraction of the (mostly white) women waiting in line were able to get in. Almost immediately after Friday's session ended, the panel organizers planned a repeat of "Confronting White Womanhood" for Saturday afternoon. The line outside of Saturday's panel was again so long that women behind me in line joked that every white woman at the convention must be in it. Women crowded in to sit on the floor and stand in the back of the room. Then the location was changed to a larger meeting room with about 500 seats, which is what prompted the unintended Women's March portion of the Women's Convention.

"I will be the first to admit that I was one of those people critiquing it heavily," said Heather Marie Scholl, one of the creators and moderators of the "Confronting White Womanhood" panel. Sophie Ellman-Golan, deputy director of communications for the Women's March and the co-creator of "Confronting White Womanhood," acknowledged that the conversation about race was "never fully had" during the evolution of the March. She said that's even more of a reason why a panel like this naturally belongs at the convention, which has also received criticism for an women who can afford the $295 ticket and costs to travel to Detroit…

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Slate

“Confronting White Womanhood at the Women’s Convention”, 2016

Billed as a space for white women to “unpack the ways white women uphold and benefit from white supremacy,” the panel began with a clarification. “This is not a safe space, because the world is not equally safe for all people,” one of the facilitators said. Instead, she termed it a “brave space,” where participants would be encouraged to speak honestly and suspend knee-jerk judgments against others in the group.(…)

“When white women say we’re frightened of scary black men, really bad things happen,” said Ellman-Golan. She encouraged the women in the room to reconsider their perceptions of safety, especially when what makes them feel safe may compromise the safety of others around them. Acknowledging that what she was about to say was provocative, she offered a suggestion: “Don’t call the police. Don’t do it. How dare we choose as the enforcer of safety an institution that has demonstrated how deeply unsafe it is?”

After a primer on “white savior-ism” from artist Heather Marie Scholl, the attendees split into groups of 15 to discuss how they’ve propagated white supremacy and how they might help build an anti-racist future. Sinead O’Donnell, a white 40-year-old from Denver, told her group that the panel was part of a personal reckoning that was prompted in part by the Women’s March.

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