Catherine Reinhart, 2020, Iowa Artist Fellow, Image credit: Karla Conrad, 2020.

Today’s a very special day. Today’s the day that my lovely friend and inspiring artist, Catherine Reinhart, is in the For the Common Good hot seat. Catherine and I have been friends and artist pals for years. We worked together at Iowa State University’s Design on Main Community Gallery while Catherine was the Artist-in-Residence and Gallery Director and I taught a class for the gallery’s interns; she’s generously been a part of lots of weird community art projects I’ve instigated over the years (including this one), and best of all, she’s always up for talking shop about what artists can do with folks, and what art can do for folks.

A little about Catherine:

Catherine’s an interdisciplinary artist from Ames, Iowa. She received her MFA in textiles from the University of Kansas and a BFA in integrated studio arts from Iowa State University. Her work has been exhibited at the Department of Land Economy, Cambridge University and Cambridge Artworks, Cambridge, UK, and the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS, as well as in collections at University of Mississippi and Kyoto Keika University, Kyoto, Japan. Catherine’s received numerous grants and residencies, including from the Iowa Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts. She is currently a 2020 Iowa Artist Fellow.

Follow her on Facebook, Instagram, visit her website, and sign up for her newsletter to keep up-to-date with her current and future projects.

Who are you in 10 words?

Curious. Impatient. Caring. Cautious. Grit. Mother. Christ - follower. Tending. Creative. Intuitive.

What are your creative rituals?

What community rituals do you value?

For my social practice work, The Collective Mending Sessions, I begin every workshop of my with the same Mary Oliver poem, titled Mindful. As a poet, Oliver was great at lingering, at attending a certain thing. Since the Collective Mending Sessions is a project that revolves around mending, it is most helpful to attune yourself to that practice before engaging that kind of work. Paying attention is of the utmost importance in mending what is broken.

Another ritual of mine is working on studio projects in public. These were mostly hand embroidered text onto found domestic textiles and of course, in the Before - times. It was a ritual situated somewhere between public and private. Typically, I would work on these projects in a busy, public space but talk to no one! It was a great joy when some unsuspecting stranger asked me what I was working on and I could say, “Art!”. They were always caught off guard by that.

How do you merge your creative work with your community work?

It’s necessary for me to blend my creative work with my community work and my domestic life. To me, there is great richness in merging these various landscapes. For me, I typically have two arms to my artistic practice; first, a robust and productive personal practice, and second, a community practice that extends into social practice*** projects. They usually feed each other.

One example of this symbiosis is my project The Collective Mending Sessions. This project is a series of socially engaged workshops that center around mending abandoned quilts. It began in my personal studio practice with a quilt my mother saved from my tumultuous teenage years. I told her to discard it--being wise, she did not; 15 years later she gave it back to me. It was damaged and torn--deeply in need of repair. My intention was to mend the (queen-sized!) quilt by myself, but I soon realized that this would be impossible.

And so, The Collective Mending Sessions was born, as I asked friends and strangers to stitch alongside me. As I educated participants in basic mending and textile care, we repaired that first quilt together. We created a space of agency, of making, learning, teaching, sharing, and connecting.

(***Jennifer here. For those of us less fluent in the contemporary art world, the term social practice refers to artworks and projects that engage people in the process of making, usually with the intention of creating social or civic change. The community ties and networks created between folks throughout the projects are as important in the outputs of social practice as, say, a mural or a public sculpture would be to a public art project.)

Image shows Catherine leading a mending session at the ISU Design on Main Gallery, January, 2020, Image credit: Zachary Reinhart, 2020.

How has that changed in the last six months?

What hasn’t?

Although these last six months have been tumultuous, there have been bright spots. For example, I was selected as an Iowa Artist Fellow. This is such an honor, and I am sincerely grateful for this affirmation of my studio practice. It’s allowed me to invest in other artists through purchasing their work, and to invest in my Ames artist community through renting a larger studio space. Located in a new artist collective/shared studio space called The Bean Palace, the space is adjacent to Reliable Street here in Ames, IA.

And I have moved my Collective Mending Sessions online with a co-hort that is international - from Ames to the UK, even Malta.

In the last six months, I’ve also connected with many artists over social media and through the mail. I’ve gathered cloth mask scraps from home sewers for sculptures like Home Labours. We’ve exchanged postcards, old embroideries--even a golden acorn!

What has been your hardest community lesson?

Handling group dynamics in social practice. I didn’t realize that leading socially engaged projects would involve navigating the complexities of interpersonal communication in a small group. It was challenging to direct meaningful conversations during the sessions that were calm, focused, and flexible to the needs of the participants.

What has been your most fulfilling community moment?

For me, it has been reading and hearing participants thoughts and reflections of the question, “How do you MEND your community?”

“Recognize that mending is not making something as it was before, rather mending is taking something that has been broken and making it useful again. So in order to mend a community implies that it is broken. And if it is broken, then only parts need to be removed, and replaced with something new, woven in with the old to create something whole again.” - Workshop Collaborator, ISU Design on Main Gallery

Image shows 2020 - 2021 [Virtual] Mending Sessions Co-hort due to the Corona virus pandemic, October 2020, Image courtesy of the artist.

What tips might you have for artists who want to dive into community work?

Start here - Good Practice Guidelines from the Stitching Together Network.

The Stitching Together Good Practice Guidelines provide advice for facilitators of participatory textile making workshops and projects, including professional textile practitioners, artists, academic researchers, people working within museums and galleries, community activists and amateur enthusiasts.

Structured via four principles and eight sections of guidance, the publication aims to highlight all the aspects of a participatory textile making project that need to be considered in order for it to work well from the point of view of the participants, the facilitator and any partner organisation or funder.

The online launch event for this project is Friday November 27th, at 4pm GMT. All are welcome! Please book your free place via Eventbrite. Incidentally, the cover image of Good Practice Guidelines is from Mended I, the quilt created during the first round of The Collective Mending Sessions. I will also be briefly talking about my project at the launch event.

Also, Ellen Mueller’s book Some Social Practice is a great resource that is compiled from her series of zines about all things social practice, including theory, a reading list, discussion questions… and The Collective Mending Sessions is featured in there!

Image shows detail of Mended I, quilt completed during the first round of mending sessions from 2018 - 2020,  Image courtesy of the artist. — Image shows detail of *Mended I,* quilt completed during the first round of mending sessions from 2018 - 2020, Image courtesy of the artist.

What tips might you have for communities to support artists?

Pay them! :)

But seriously, lots of artists I know could benefit from business advisement, space to display or show work, and cheap , studio spaces for rent. Artists are frontline workers: Give artists $1.00; we will turn it into $9.00. Art is necessary for vibrant communities. Artwork is work, and artists are some of the hardest working folks I know.

I also have a heart to encourage my community to help artist mothers. I have never not been an artist/mother, and it is extremely difficult to make work while raising good little humans. The effects of this pandemic have fully exposed our society’s unhealthy (or non-existent) support of women. Motherhood and the domestic life are rich with new forms of art practice. Sadly, most artist/mothers, and artist parents in general, do not have the capacity or support to make work about these experiences while in the thick of them. So, we don’t see these stories represented in contemporary art, in our galleries, or in our museums.

Art is necessary for vibrant communities. So community, step up! Buy artwork. Just give people money - Art Tithe, anyone? Donate your vacant space, or advocate that artists be in civic spaces, solving real world problems with their creative, problem-solving brains. Volunteer to watch their kids (after the pandemic eases). Just ask them about what they make. And of course...buy them lots of coffee.

What motto or creed do you live by?

My motto for living comes from Proverbs 30: 7 & 8

“Two things I ask of you;

deny them not to me before I die:

Remove far from me my falsehood and lying;

Give me neither poverty nor riches;

feed me with the food that is needful for me.”

To learn more about Catherine and her work, check out:

www.collectivemendingsessions.com

www.catherinereinhart.com

Instagram

@collectivemendingsessions