Grace Henderson Nez lived her entire life in a hogan at the base of Ganado Mesa on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. For more than seven decades, she raised and sheared sheep, carded and dyed the wool, and wove intricate and distinctive Navajo rugs.
Like other quilters in the region, Wells and Williams tended to emphasize design, bright colors, and vivid contrasts in their quilts. They played endlessly with the form of the square and the straightforward strip, disguising and exploding these essential design elements in myriad ways.
Herminia Albarrán Romero learned the art of papel picado (Mexican paper cutting) as a child growing up in the small Mexican village of San Francisco de Asís, south of Mexico City.
Because of the utilitarian nature of her quilting, Rankin never thought of herself as an artist. That began to change in 1981 when she was invited to be a resident artist at the junior high school in her hometown of Lorman, Mississippi.
Over the course of her life, Harris worked to preserve the Catawba pottery tradition that originated centuries ago.
Gladys Kukana Grace learned the art of weaving lauhala (lau = leaf, hala = pandanus tree) from her maternal grandmother, Kukana, through a longstanding oral tradition.
Adèle Clark was a founding member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, the chair of the Virginia League of Women Voters (1921–1925, 1929–1944), a New Deal–era field worker, and an accomplished artist and arts advocate.
Ailsa O’Connor linked her art to society, both the themes she developed in her art and in the essays she wrote to explain the role of art in society.
Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim is an embroiderer whose journey as an artist started in her birthplace of Safad.
Graves excelled at embroidering colchas with birds, animals, flowers, and other whimsical images. Her favorite subjects, however, were Catholic saints borrowed from religious paintings called retablos and three-dimensional sculptures called bultos.