Gospel of the Working Class
New work by Tabitha Arnold (American, b. 1995)
January 17-March 8, 2025
Opening events:
Reception: Sat, Jan 18, 5-7pm, Fine Arts Center
Artist Talk: Fri, Jan 24, 12pm in FAC 315
Gospel of the Working Class is a solo exhibition of recent new labor-intensive textiles by Tabitha Arnold, including both archival ephemera and contemporary videos by collections and collaborators that inform Arnold’s studio practice and personal ethos. Relocated back to Chattanooga after the pandemic, Arnold’s new work focuses on both historic and contemporary labor histories unique to our city.
A new digital essay on Arnold’s work is contributed by writer and reporter Sarah Jaffe. Read it here:
Tabitha Arnold (American, b. 1995), These Hands, 2024, wool yarn tufted embroidery on linen cloth, 72 x 56 inches, courtesy and copyright the artist.
Arnold says during a recent studio visit: “I have a romantic idea about Chattanooga.” Arnold’s large tapestries borrow imagery from Bible Belt spirituality, social-realist public art movements, and ancient art motifs to create, what she believes, are new artifacts from a working-class perspective. Her work interweaves contemporary events with images of historical class struggle, with a special focus on the lesser-known history of labor organizing in the South. On view are three new textiles completed in the past year informed by specific labor histories in Chattanooga, titled These Hands, Mill Town, and I Walk.
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Arnold studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and only later transitioned into a self-learned practice of weaving and punch needle embroidery. As a socialist and labor organizer, she’s inspired by her own experience coming of age during a wave of unionization in the United States. Working in the service industry for many years—a marketspace she says has a high physical but low mental load—Arnold began to think about “work” differently, and how this perspective applies to stereotyping art workers or art jobs. For Arnold, tracking her time and effort (the labor of her making—whether physical, intellectual, or emotional) is a critical practice that quantifies the unique resource created.
Arnold hopes that her work can live both as a motivational object and serve a future life as a historic artifact or monument that documents moments from a worker’s perspective. In this way, these textiles serve a function as political education and hopefully speak to our city’s labor histories and events in the context of collective heroism.
Tabitha Arnold (American, b. 1995) makes labor-intensive art.
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and later transitioned into a self-learned practice of weaving and punch needle embroidery. As a socialist and labor organizer, she’s inspired by her own experience coming of age during a wave of unionization in the United States.
Arnold’s large tapestries borrow imagery from Bible Belt spirituality, social-realist public art movements, and ancient art motifs to create new artifacts from a working-class perspective. Her work interweaves contemporary events with images of historical class struggle, with a special focus on the lesser-known history of labor organizing in the South.
Arnold’s textile practice has been profiled in Jacobin Magazine, Hyperallergic, BOMB, and Burnaway. Her work features in print issues of the New York Review of Books and Lux Magazine, as well as on issue covers of Dissent Magazine. She is a 2023 MacDowell Fellow and was included in the American Craft Council's 2022 Emerging Artist Cohort. Her work has been acquired by international collectors as well as the Boston Museum of Fine Art. She lives and works in Chattanooga.
Sarah Jaffe, photo by Salam Rizk.
Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and the forthcoming From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books.
Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and a contributing writer at In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today’s labor movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism.