Elaine Reichek


Elaine Reichek is a New York-based visual artist. Much of her work concerns the history of the embroidered sampler. Through her pieces of hand and machine embroidery and digital sewing machine, she addresses issues such as the craft/art and the old/new divide, the nature of women's work, and the interplay of text and image. The connection between the pixel and the stitch, as differently gendered types of mark-making, is a continuing theme in her work.

Life and work

Elaine Reichek was born in New York, New York in 1943. She received a BA from Brooklyn College in 1963 and BFA from Yale University in 1964, where she studied painting with Ad Reinhardt. She has created a wide body of work, including thread-based drawings, knitted pieces, and installations. In the 1990s she began to focus on needlework samplers, an object which combines image and text. Several of her series, including MADAMI'MADAM and Ariadne's Thread, juxtapose famous quotes and lines of literature with hand- or digitally-embroidered images. The text relates narrative, drawing, and thread as parallel instances of linear structure.
Reichek's work is held in the collections of the MoMA, The Jewish Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, among others.

Exhibitions