Women’s Work

I created Women’s Work as a reaction to the discrimination that women, notably women of color, continue to face in the workforce. The medium of cross stitch, a form of art that tends to be labeled as kitsch and a women’s hobby craft, was intentionally utilized to emphasize the fact that women’s labor is routinely dismissed and undervalued.—Olivia Johnson 

Graphic artist Olivia Johnson uses a standard cross-stitch to visualize data on women’s representation in the workplace. Not only do cross-stitches resemble pixels, but they also call on centuries of embroidered history, rendering women and their labor visible in a familiar form. —Laura Johnson