Bean Gilsdorf
Loom
September - October 2022

A fourth-generation seamstress, Portland, Oregon-based artist Bean Gilsdorf examines the visual traces of political histories and cultural narratives through textiles and photography. During her residency, Gilsdorf conducted research on the role of women’s labor in the history of Massachusetts’s textile manufacturing industries (of which Holyoke served as a major center). From these investigations, Gilsdorf produced a loom-like sculptural intervention composed from 30,000 feet of yellow thread, in which the brick columns of the lower_cavity project space act as the warp, anchoring parallel weft threads dimensionally in the 90-foot-long woven structure. Formally elegant, the work responds to the architecture of the project space and its history as a former mill building. 

 Gilsdorf also used her time at the residency to begin work on a series of experimental cyanotypes that consider the labor of the countless young women who worked in the mills throughout the 1800s, a history which was to significantly inform both the labor and women’s movements of the late 19th and early 20th century.