Art, like religion, is a window into cultures. Women’s stories often find expression in narrative textiles, a medium I have long admired but never quite understood. I encountered the fabric art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz recently. She was a Holocaust survivor who created stunning needlepoint pictures of her and her sister’s escape from Nazis in 1942. They left their Jewish parents behind and pretended to be Catholic girls from the country in order to survive. In 1977, she began to create 36 works of needlepoint in which she stitched the heart-wrenching episode with power and beauty, color and force, the memory of a child now seared in the heart of a woman.
Her daughters, Bernice Steinhardt and Helene McQuade, set up a foundation, Art and Remembrance, to show the “power of personal narrative in various forms of art to illuminate the effects of war, intolerance, and other forms of social injustice on its victims.” Their mother’s story is now available both in a book and a riveting film as well as in the art itself. These are narrative textiles of the most precious sort. Continue reading “Narrative Textiles and Women’s Stories by Mary E. Hunt”
Feminism and Religion 