As a child in Nantes, France, the 26-year-old artist Victor Siret would often lose himself in the gothic foliage of a six-foot-long needlepoint canvas made by his grandmother, who started teaching him needlework when he was 10. When Siret went to art school in 2016, he kept up the practice, even as his professors told him “this was work for housewives,” he says. Drawing on a deep visual knowledge of American mass media, he filled tightly composed canvases with buildings shaped like cheeseburgers and packs of cigarettes, set against radioactive shades of yellow and pink. A suited corpse floats in a Hockneyesque swimming pool, and winking emblems of gay culture — a cowboy boot, a sauna sign — crowd the edges of strip malls. Through cross-stitch, Siret says, he could “digest the flow of digital images and materialize the pixel” and “explore bad taste.”
Ancient civilizations from western China to eastern Europe to coastal Peru developed distinctive embroidery traditions as much as 2,500 years ago; threadwork exists across the globe. But over the past 50 years, queer and feminist artists in the West started employing those techniques, in part to challenge the (often straight male) art world establishment. Queer men in particular have relished the provocation of working in a craft almost universally coded as feminine, taking the prim Victorian sampler and subverting it.
From the 1970s until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1985, the Lebanese artist Nicolas Moufarrege made sprawling tapestries in which Greco-Roman wrestlers shared space with Spider-Man and Santa Claus. In the early 1990s, the now-59-year-old Mexican Chilean artist Carlos Arias traded realist oils for slow, laborious embroidery, a process through which, he says, “you lose the romantic idea of the action of the artist’s hand.” Around the same time, the Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión, who died at 34 in 1996 of complications from AIDS, embroidered blankets and pillowcases with defiant aphorisms: “I am reborn at every moment” or “My blood will clean their memory.”
Today, queer fiber art is flourishing again — in group shows like the curator Ellen Schinderman’s Los Angeles pop-ups, “Stitch Fetish,” and in solo exhibitions like Club Rhubarb’s 2023 show in Manhattan’s Chinatown of “thread paintings” by the 79-year-old former hairdresser Sal Salandra. Having grown up in New Jersey, where he was raised in a strict Roman Catholic household, Salandra has spent decades developing elaborate techniques of layered stitching through which he depicts, with uncanny precision, bulging blue jeans and six-pack torsos. His teeming, colorful canvases — as funny as they are sexy — feature Edenic orgies and infernal dark rooms as densely composed as medieval altarpieces, where tumescent demons subject smiling mortals to vivid acts of bondage and bearded angels have sex on the stairway to paradise.
Then there’s the 31-year-old weaver Jaime Antonio Ferreira Medina, who works under the name Puki and uses textiles to explore the complexities of being gay in rural Mexico. In his most recent works, he’s returned to embroidery, a childhood hobby that he hid from his parents while growing up in Michoacán. Using an old Ambassador sewing machine, he quilts garments and wall hangings with freehand sketches of graffiti lifted from public cruising grounds — pornographic drawings, half-ironic slurs and scrawled sexual entreaties that many queer people still use “to take our sexuality into the realm of the clandestine,” he says.
Through the internet and national craft competitions, Puki has connected with other young queer weavers. Siret’s decision to focus on cross-stitch was encouraged by Salandra, whom he met on Instagram a few years ago. For Salandra, who spends up to 14 hours a day bent over his canvases, embroidery, like sex itself, is a form of meditation as much as communion. “When you’re going through some of the acts in my paintings, your mind, if you let it, will buzz out into the universe,” he says. “Through sexuality, you can become the person you should be.” The same, of course, is true of making art.
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