Coming to the Institute of Contemporary Art is "Gospel of the Working Class", a solo exhibition of recent new labor-intensive textiles by Tabitha Arnold, including both archival ephemera and contemporary videos by collections and collaborators that inform Arnold’s studio practice and personal ethos.
Relocated back to Chattanooga after the pandemic, Arnold’s new work focuses on both historic and contemporary labor histories unique to our city. New scholarship on Arnold’s work is contributed by writer and reporter Sarah Jaffe.
“I have a romantic idea about Chattanooga,” Arnold says during a recent studio visit. Her large tapestries borrow imagery from Bible Belt spirituality, social-realist public art movements, and ancient art motifs to create, what she believes, are new artifacts from a working-class perspective.
Her work interweaves contemporary events with images of historical class struggle, with a special focus on the lesser-known history of labor organizing in the South. On view are three new textiles completed in the past year informed by specific labor histories in Chattanooga, titled These Hands, Mill Town, and I Walk.
Born in Chattanooga, Arnold studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and only later transitioned into a self-learned practice of weaving and punch needle embroidery. As a socialist and labor organizer, she’s inspired by her own experience coming of age during a wave of unionization in the United States.
Working in the service industry for many years—a marketspace she says has a high physical but low mental load—Arnold began to think about “work” differently, and how this perspective applies to stereotyping art workers or art jobs. For Arnold, tracking her time and effort (the labor of her making—whether physical, intellectual, or emotional) is a critical practice that quantifies the unique resource created.
Arnold hopes that her work can live both as a motivational object and serve a future life as a historic artifact or monument that documents moments from a worker’s perspective. In this way, these textiles serve a function as political education and hopefully speak to our city’s labor histories and events in the context of collective heroism.
The artist will be in attendance for the public reception on Saturday, Jan 18th from 5-7pm in the ICA Galleries and Fine Arts Center lobby on the UTC campus at 752 Vine Street.
Arnold will also give an artist talk on Friday, Jan 24, at 12pm in the UTC Fine Arts Center room 315.
General operating support for the ICA is provided by UTC’s College of Arts and Sciences.