An Interview with Jessica Wohl
Aimee Resnick (she/her) - February 12, 2023
Jessica Wohl is a Tennessee-based artist originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Wohl’s work focuses on the domestic: drawing comfort from the timeless, she questions femininity and the notion of debris. Recycling found materials, Wohl promotes social unity and justice. Above all, an obsession with the American Dream drives her work into a biting critique of contemporary culture. Today, she serves as an Associate Professor of Art at the University of the South, teaching Drawing and Painting. This week, we sat down to discuss America’s domestic culture, materiality’s significance, and youth’s unique ability to promote change.
NAR: To start us off, can you elaborate on your definition of domestic culture? How does this phenomenon inform your work?
Wohl: When I think about domestic culture, I think about life in the home, the kinds of materials we find in the home, and the processes people use in the home. Sewing is obvious, but I think of things like list-making, cleaning, re-reusing things, even the generational passing down of clothes or garments or heirlooms.
There’s all these kinds of exchanges that happen in the home between the people who live there, through relationships and materials and routines. This is what I would consider the domestic culture that I draw from in my work.
And this goes alongside history. You can trace it all the way back to our beginnings: women have been affiliated with domesticity and homemaking forever, and this is really important to my work as well.
NAR: Can you walk our readers through your process of selection for the materials comprising your work? What is the significance of found fabric?
Wohl: On a personal level, I have a background in drawing and painting. I've always found plain, white canvas to be uninspiring. For me, I work best when collaborating with something that already exists; I like to be inspired by materials, to collaborate with them and see what they give me so I can reciprocate. Then, the materials and I go back-and-forth as I respond to what they offer me. That’s why I choose to work with found materials so often.
But I think logistically, or even in terms of content, what I love about using found fabrics in my quilting, is that most of them are found. They're hand-me-downs from friends and family, or I find them at thrift stores and yard sales.And that brings up two things that I truly love:
First, the fabrics are like stand-ins for the previous owners. They represent disparate households of people with different cultures, different beliefs, different life experiences, different classes, that I can unify into one quilt. There's a kind of naive idealism about bringing people together in a time when our American citizenry is really polarized and torn-apart. I love the gesture of taking these surrogates and putting them together in one form that provides comfort and warmth and has the history of a quilt.
Second, I'm really fascinated with the way that these materials hold onto the energetic residue of the people that lived in them before. They could be sheets that have been slept on, dreamed in, made love in, fought in, or clothes that have been worn for any number of different reasons: that energy is embedded in the fabric. It's embedded in the material, and that becomes part of my work. It's something that paint can't offer. I can't get that history and energy out of a tube of paint. The fabrics give me a platform to respond to.
NAR: Quilts hold a ubiquitous history in the American South. Does this heritage impact your creation?
Wohl: I actually come from a family that did not have quilt-making in its history. I'm from Minnesota, my family is Jewish, and there's not a lot of quilting in the Jewish community. Since I've been in the South, I’ve found some connections to the history of black quilting, but it's more that I'm learning from it as opposed to it having a direct impact on my work. I feel like the southern tradition is really different from mine because I approach this as a painter who has an interest in these materials and in domestic culture. I might be living in the south where that tradition is alive, but it's not really my tradition, if that makes any sense.
My mom was big into crochet and needlepoint. I feel like in the Jewish community, needlework is more prevalent. Needlepoint is something that people with a lot of free time can do: it's more decorative.There’s less sense of need than a quilt.
When I moved to the South and I started quilting, so many people started asking me what my relationship to quilting was. They had all grown up with quilts around them, with the stories of their grandmothers quilting. And that just wasn't my deal, you know?
I started thinking about it and I realized that I don't know anybody in the Jewish community who grew up with quilts in that way. We grew up with down comforters. I think that a lot of Ashkenazi people had geese. They kept geese in their homes, and they would use the feathers to make their blankets. I have a document in my family history that talks about the goose that they kept in their attic. I think they would make blankets with the goose down to stay warm.
A lot of our [Jewish] families didn't come to America until the early 1900s or later. Some of my family came through New York City, and cotton wasn't cultural the way it was in the South.
So that’s my layman's knowledge of American Jewish history and quilting.
NAR: You have previously equated the assemblage of your quilt works to the piecemeal nature of activism. Can you expand on this notion?
Wohl: I really like the accessibility of quilt-making. Beyond a needle and thread, you don't need much else besides time. Traditionally, you know, women would gather and quilt together. There's an embedded sense of community engagement in this connection.
And, again, anybody can quilt. So many people have sewing machines now – still, in the Modern quilting world, you might see that many quilters are now retired women of means. They can afford to buy new fabrics, they have a lot of time on their hands, and they don't need to make money, and they can afford to take expensive classes. There are, however, certainly many exceptions to this.
The true spirit of quilting, though, is that anybody can make it happen, you know? I like that connection to grassroots mobilization.
While quilters have done so for generations, there’s also a growing movement within the contemporary quilting world where women use their quilts as a form of activism. There are many quilts with all kinds of political messaging, so I think conceptually it has those ties, but also it’s simply a medium that women are using to express themselves.
NAR: Recently, you were featured on the Artist/Mother podcast. How has motherhood shaped your creative practice?
Wohl: It’s impacted my practice significantly, especially since I've had my second child. I have a drastically reduced amount of time in the studio, without question; I can go about two weeks without doing anything before I get a little cranky. I used to think it was just because the studio calmed me down and helped get me centered when I was doing all this mothering.
But the more I’ve thought about it, I think it’s less a pure need to be in the studio and more that I need time that's not interrupted. I feel like motherhood has introduced interruption into my life and into my studio practice at a level that was non-existent before. There’s just constant interruption and then having to refocus, and then getting interrupted and then having to refocus. It zaps your energy to do anything.
So what I try to do now is set time aside in my schedule to be in the studio. The most I can get is usually about four to six hours once a week. It’s really hard. I’ve turned to hand-quilting and hand-piecing to fit my studio practice into my life as a parent. When I’m hand-quilting, I can be on the couch with my children. I think there's an image on my Instagram where I’m quilting with my son in my lap as a one-month-old baby.
And so even though the work was slower, the amount of time that I could be doing it increased because it was more portable. I could take it with me in the car or be with my family and still be really productive.
But I also feel like I have a little bit of a problem with productivity and that we feel the need to be so productive. Have you ever heard of the Nap Ministry? Tricia Hersey is an activist who really questions productivity and capitalism as a form of exploitation, white supremacy and oppression. Her ideas have shaped the way that I reframe my studio practice as a parent. You know, why can't I just be a mom for a while? Why do I feel so driven to be in the studio and be a professor and a department chair? This level of forced productivity is not healthy for anybody.
Somewhere along the line I learned that sitting on the couch with my children may be great parenting, but it’s bad because I need to be economically productive. I'm skeptical of that idea. So on one hand, I try to fit [my studio practice] into my life, but I also question the drive to be so productive all of the time.
NAR: Tell us about The Free Patch Work Project. What was the spark behind the project? What is the power held in mending?
Wohl: With my last show, Imagining Matriarchy, I imagined what the world might feel like if it had always been led by women. Like, from the beginning of time. What I was imagining was such an abstract concept, but I knew that I wanted there to be gift-giving in the context of care, where I didn't expect anything in return. Repairing the world with the gift of loving kindness was truly the spirit of it, and this project was the perfect opportunity for me to learn more about this concept.
I used the remnants of the quilts in the show, cut them into scraps and put them on the wall with little push-pins. Then, I invited people to bring in garments that needed mending and select a patch from the wall. When they filled out a request form, they could tell me a story about their garment and they could pick the kind of repair that they were interested in. Then they left the garment with me.
It took me almost the entire academic year to actually mend all of them. I think there were about 30 or something like that. I just did them during my free time. And as I think more and more about sustainability and the textile industry’s pollution of resources and clean water, I certainly want to help. I love the idea of helping people continue to use a garment that means a lot to them by giving it an extended life.
One thing that surprised me about that project was how different it felt from the quilts. I mentioned earlier that my quilting materials come to me with the energy of the person who owned them before. In a way, that garment's life has ended, and now it's becoming this new thing in my studio.
The first garment that I mended was a pair of pants belonging to our university chaplain, who I know well and who holds an important position of leadership on campus. It sounds so funny – he picked up this patch and I heard the story about how much he loves these pants and then when I’m mending them, I’m sticking my hands right where his legs go. Like literally in the chaplain’s pants. It sounds ridiculous, but there was this charge that was so different from the garments I use in my quilts.
This garment is alive, and it's going back home. I'm just mending it so it can go back and do its thing. It made me feel a lot of respect for the garment for the people who loaned me their clothes. I could smell their different laundry detergent.
Another surprise was seeing the garments on the street. One time I saw a guy riding his bike down the street and I had mended the tush of his pants. I hadn't met him before, but I pulled up next to him with my car and was like, “I hope I'm not scaring you, but I'm the person who mended your pants and I'm so excited to see you wearing them!”
It gives you these moments to reconnect in the community. It was lovely. I hope that I can do it again in conjunction with another show.
NAR: Your work has a strong emphasis on the American Dream: do you feel this ideal has changed over time? Is the American Dream still achievable, if it ever was?
Wohl: I feel like it has changed over time and it's not achievable anymore. I mean, I don't want to say it's not achievable, but I really sense the adversity that our younger generation is up against. There’s the inability of home ownership. And, I live in Tennessee: the thought of getting pregnant in my state is terrifying to me. I'm so grateful that I've already had two children before our laws kicked into place.
It's sad to me, because I think a lot of it is this capitalistic sense of profit over people and money making and exploitation. I'm really bothered by that. I really believe that Gen Z is fed up; the adults in their lives have not taken care of them nor set them up for success. I think they're really mad.
I've been teaching at the college level for 16 years, and the students have changed. The students I'm teaching now are more engaged and more proactive than I've ever seen. I'm optimistic that they will change things.
I don't know if they'll reclaim the American Dream the way it was, or if it will be reinvented. I think it's great that young people don't want to get married as early as my parents did. Maybe a new American Dream would be great. One that allows people to be independent longer and allows women a chance to achieve more. That's exciting.
So yeah. I mean, I'm disappointed, but I’m also optimistic. These kids are really upset. I think they're ready. I think they're gonna save us. . . I hope they do. I hope they do. I really hope they do.
NAR: Is there anything else you want our readership to know?
Wohl: I would want them to know how much power they have. The tools that young people have with social media and networking are powerful. I want students to know that they have the ability to be agents of change.
I don't normally like to get too political, but I think the writing is on the wall for the Boomer political leadership. There’s this big population of diverse, progressive, pissed-off young people who are going to take positions of leadership. I think [the older generation] is trying to do as much as they can to prevent young people’s access to leadership positions. It's inevitable that when our young people become leaders, our world is gonna change pretty drastically.
A lot of young people think, “I shouldn't vote. It's so hard. I'm out of state.” All those obstacles to voting were created for a reason. When I was younger, nobody told me. I was not politically engaged at all. I didn’t even know the difference between a Democrat and a Republican. Our students are much more educated and tuned-in. They have so much potential to use their leadership for change.
Please note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
