Sasha Chavchavadze

Margaret Fuller: Disrupting the Fabric is a multimedia body of work that reactivates the life of the American writer Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850), whose radical voice, erased over time, speaks volumes to the present. As I research Fuller’s life, I create mixed media paintings, assemblages, digital prints and publications - ecosystems of art, artifact and text - that express the pathos and power of Fuller’s life and work. The project enables me to draw parallels between past and present, and to express themes of loss, survival and agency in my own life, as I create an elegy to a lost (and now found) mentor.

Antique fabric is a central medium in my mixed media paintings and digital work; as I paint, cut and collage delicate antique lace and linens to create something new, I am disrupting social hierarchies of gender and class embodied in the fabric, just as Fuller disrupted the social fabric of her day. I apply text from Fuller’s life to the warp and weft of the fabric; Fuller’s words speak intensely to contemporary issues of women’s agency.

Margaret Fuller was Henry David Thoreau’s editor, and a respected friend and colleague of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and many others. Her book “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” (1845) was the first American book on women’s rights, and a catalyst of the American Suffrage movement.

Fuller, who spoke out against slavery and advocated for prison reform, was hired as a foreign correspondent by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune to cover the 1849 Roman Republican Revolution. She became an active participant in the revolution, sending weekly articles to the U.S. which were read widely.

On her way home from Rome, Fuller, her Roman husband and infant son died in a shipwreck off Fire Island. Thoreau traveled to Fire Island to collect Fuller’s Rome diary, washed ashore in her steamer trunk. A posthumous memoir written by Emerson and others, distorted Fuller’s life, leaving her legacy in the shadows.

My research on Fuller has taken me to archives in the U.S. and abroad: the Concord Museum and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA, where Fuller spent her childhood and early life as part of a close knit group of intellectuals and writers; the Margaret Fuller Archive at the Houghton Library in Boston; the American Academy in Rome, where as a 2018 Visiting Artist I researched and documented Fuller’s final year, retracing her footsteps in the city where she was able to achieve autonomy in both her life and work.

Crosswords/Crewel Work is a series of mixed-media paintings and drawings that mine the past for truths about the complex present. “Crewel Work” refers to the ancient embroidery technique; the interplay of “textile” and “text” suggests embroidered samplers. Words are often “crossed” as they would be in a crossword puzzle, visually aligning with the warp and weft of the fabric. My process of building up surfaces using painted fabric and watercolor/ink drawings on paper creates shallow ecosystems that suggest disappearance, loss and change. My process of destroying and repurposing delicate vintage fabrics suggests the disruption of artificial and systemic social hierarchies of class and gender that still exist today, while paying homage to the pain and beauty of women’s labor past and present. The pathos and power of the words of forgotten women mentors and of neglected amendments to the U.S. Constitution (Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Act) are “woven” into the work.

My FOOTNOTES editions reactivate forgotten history in the public memory as a catalyst for change. As I excavate the past, I create assemblages of mixed media art, artifacts and archival material that express the pathos and power of lost or erased narratives. I photograph these interdisciplinary ecosystems, creating archival pigment prints and digital publications, sometimes revisiting themes in my work of the last thirty years to add a footnote.

My interest in forgotten women mentors has led me to create a series of FOOTNOTES inspired by historical women whose lives have been marginalized or erased, including my four-year focus on the life and work of Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850). These lost voices speak intensely to my own life, and to contemporary themes.

View two FOOTNOTE digital publications below:

FOOTNOTE: Museum of Matches (The Match Game)

FOOTNOTE: Lucretia Mott

In 2011, I was commissioned by the NYC Department of Transportation Urban Art Program to create Battle Pass: Revolution II, a public art installation located at the corner of Smith and Bergen Streets in Brooklyn, NY.  The installation was inspired by Liberty Poles, ship masts that were planted in the ground in 1776 by American revolutionaries as a symbol of resistance. The installation was deinstalled in 2020.

The installation explored ideas of conflict and memory by marking sites of the Battle of Brooklyn, the first and largest confrontation of the American Revolutionary War.  The Battle, which Walt Whitman described as a “resolute defeat,” is sometimes forgotten in the very neighborhoods where it occurred; the fields and marshes of 1776 are now a post-industrial urban landscape that is experiencing dramatic change due to rezoning. The installation expresses resilience and survival in times of social upheaval, whether it be shifting governments, dissolution of empire, or the results of urban planning.

The sixteen-foot mahogany pole at the corner of Smith and Bergen Streets had a metal weathervane affixed to the top; beneath the weathervane were three wooden directional signs pointing toward where the Battle took place. Text from Walt Whitman’s poem, about the battle, “The Centenarian’s Story,” was burned onto the wooden signs: Do you hear the clank of the muskets?; in the midst of you; pavements and stately houses disappear; the years recede; pouring about me here on every side;  an encampment very old.

In 2021, to mark its deinstallation after eight years, I created an eponymous artist’s book, that included twelve lithographed pages incorporating text from Whitman’s poem.

Battle Pass: Revolution II was created while I was a member of the Battle Pass Collective, a group of artists who marked sites of the Battle of Brooklyn with exhibitions, installations, and performances, which I described in a 2014 TedxGowanus talk.

In 2014 I invited people to lend me their useful objects, bought for under $5, so that I could document them in mixed-media paintings incorporating watercolor/ink collage and "burn" drawing on wood panels. Though hand-held useful objects are disappearing in the digital age, surprisingly there are many that can still be bought for under $5, and people are very attached to them.

The project was inspired by a series of exhibitions in the 1930s and 40s at the Museum of Modern Art called "Useful Objects Under $5." The exhibitions, which traveled to hundreds of museums, schools, libraries and community centers around the U.S., had the democratic aim of bringing art and design into the home of Americans of all economic means.

I learned of the MoMA exhibitions while working with the D’Amico Gowanus Laboratory (DGLC), a collective of artists, educators and performers, who study the work of Victor D’Amico, an often forgotten visionary art educator at MoMA. In 2015, DGLC organized an installation of art, documents and objects called "Useful Objects" at the bkbx gallery in Brooklyn.

 

 In 2012, I initiated the Battle Pass Collective, a group of artists, educators and performers who explored conflict, forgotten history and memory by marking sites of the Revolutionary Battle of Brooklyn with public exhibitions, installations, workshops and performances. Sites included: the Brooklyn Historical Society (diorama workshop), the Museum of Modern Art (BP Workshop), the Old Stone House (BP Installation), Gridspace (BP Installation), the Waterfront Barge (ship workshop), Proteus Gowanus (BP Exhibition and workshop), and the site of Battle Pass: Revolution II, my public art installation.

In 2014, I presented a Battle Pass Ted Talk and related installation at TedxGowanus. In 2015, the Battle Pass Collective was invited to teach a workshop at the Museum of Modern Art, including: hands on art projects, a presentation on Battle history; a culminating procession and performance through the MoMA building.

Battle Pass Artists and Educators:
Paul Benney (Battle Pass performances/Battle on Bergen), Robyn Love (cockade workshops, BP exhibitions), Eva Melas (Ship-making workshops, BP exhibitions), Christina Kelley (TedxGowanus installation), Angela Kramer (BP Educator, diorama workshop, TedxGowanus talk), Sasha Chavchavadze (Revolution II public art installation, TedxGowanus installation and talk, BP exhibitions), Diane Bertolo (BP exhibitions), Lance Rutledge (BP exhibitions), Robert Gould (BP exhibitions)
 

Matchwork is a body of mixed-media drawings and assemblages that incorporate wooden matches as medium and metaphor. The work grew out of my eight-year project, Museum of Matches, that translated the Cold War and its legacy into visual forms. Inspired by a match game played by my father as a Cold War CIA operative,  Matchwork has been exhibited in installations at the Cooper Union Gallery in NYC; Kentler International Drawing Space and the Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn; the Museum of Literature in Tbilisi, Georgia; as publications in Cabinet, Bomb, Marginalia and NYFA Current magazines; and as a book (Museum of Matches, Proteotypes, 2011).

From 2005 – 2011, my installation, Museum of Matches, was open to the public as a “one-room Cold War museum” in Brooklyn. The installation was modeled after one-room museums founded by an individual compelled to better understand an historical moment. The project matched Cold War history with personal history, incorporating mixed-media works on paper made with wooden matches (Matchwork); an archive of Cold War documents, photographs and memorabilia; a library of Cold War books; and my table-top recreation of a “Match Game” played by my father, a former Cold War CIA operative.   Visitors were encouraged to contribute their Cold War stories and memorabilia to be displayed in the museum, and in an online archive. Artists were invited to contribute work in response to the museum’s collection. In 2011 a collaborative group of artists created the Berlin Tunnel Project , an installation responding to a declassified CIA document.

Excerpts and images from the Museum of Matches project were exhibited at the Kentler International Drawing Space and Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn; published in Cabinet, Bomb, Marginalia, and NYFA Current magazines; and as a book (Museum of Matches, 2011 Proteotypes). The project was described in a New York Times article, chosen as a finalist in the International Cold War Monument competition,  and included in the exhibition "Monument to Cold War Victory"  at the Cooper Union gallery in NY. 
 

Highlights from a twenty-five year body work. Selected drawings and paintings were exhibited in galleries and museums, including: the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; Luise Ross Gallery, NYC; Cooper Union Gallery, NYC; Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn; the Museum of Literature, Tbilisi, Georgia;  Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn; Brooklyn Botanic Gardens administrative offices.