# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BcczJj-BUtg
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16046303-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/2efb05143f.jpg
- **Posted:** 2017-12-08T17:40:58.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

Artists have a variety of methods to make their mark. Every Friday we will share a photograph of an #ArtistInAction. 〰〰〰〰〰〰〰
Ghada Amer (b. 1963) is an Egyptian artist based in New York and a key figure in contemporary feminist art with her bold paintings that use embroidery as their medium. Amer identifies as a painter, but instead of applying pigment, she stitches threads on the canvas to create embroidered paintings. Historically, painting has been a masculine pursuit and its high status as a medium was reserved for men. “For me, the choice to be mainly a painter...is not only an artistic challenge: its main meaning is occupying a territory that has been denied to women historically,” Amer explains. “I occupy this territory aesthetically and politically because I create materially abstract paintings, but I integrate in this male field a feminine universe: that of sewing and embroidery. By hybridizing those worlds, the canvas becomes a new territory where the feminine has its own place in a field dominated by men, and from where, I hope, we won’t be removed again.” Inserting the feminine practice of embroidery in a canvas by piercing it with the pinpoint of her needle is a powerful artistic act. Amer takes her paintings even further by appropriating pornographic images of women. Her gestural stitches erase their objectifying power through the personalized action of sewing. Amer’s singular take on the source material invokes an individuality that reclaims the sexuality of women as personal and wholly their own. 〰
#GhadaAmer
Photo: Alec Bastian, 2013

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## Tags

artistinaction, ghadaamer

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