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If Schnitger’s work sometimes feels a little too punchy, a little too meme-able, it arguably is so by design. Many artworks on view in Stitch Witch are created for protests, where the artist disseminates her message to a broader public beyond the museum’s walls. As such, her artistic language is explicit and direct. With the exhibition relocating Schnitger’s artworks from the street to the gallery, their aesthetic impact becomes a more central focus. A series of vertical wooden sculptures Schnitger calls Slut-Sticks respond to the humiliating ‘slut shaming’ that women, and particularly survivors of sexual assault, routinely face, which has led advocates to organize ‘slut walks’ protesting stigmatization. Schnitger dresses these totemic assemblages in mass-produced garments like lacy underwear and bondage lingerie, familiar materials with the potential to titillate or disgust. They serve as humorous visual double entendres—one slut stick is adorned with two evil eyes that recall breasts, while another features cats surrounded by patches of fur, a winking reference to the euphemism for vulvas appropriated by feminists like Pussy Riot and Women’s March participants who knit ‘pussy hats.’

Since 2015, Schnitger has incorporated the Slut-Sticks and a series of quilted protest banners, also on view in Stitch Witch, into a recurring performative manifestation titled Suffragette City, which has taken place in cities including Los Angeles, New York, Basel, Berlin, Paris, and Sydney. A montage of edited video documentation brings these ephemeral events into the gallery. Groups of participants dressed in utility jumpsuits and ceremonial gowns cart Schnitger’s creations through busy city streets, while chanting phrases like ‘a dress is not a yes!’ The textile-based works included in these activations reference the handcrafted pennants and banners carried by suffragettes in cities around the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. These nods to past resistance movements situate Schnitger’s practice within a longer, ongoing history of feminist struggle.

Due to its intersection with protest, Schnitger’s language and motifs are clear and confrontational, intended to draw the interest of passersby in the streets. Pithy phrases—like ‘green not greed’ and ‘never alone’—adorn her quilts and the walls of her room-size participatory installation House of Heroines, a ‘fabric temple’ composed of sequined panels museum visitors can draw on. The artist’s own markings and messages, combined with contributions from her audience, create a communal space of feminist conversation. This intervention activates the gallery space, imbuing the exhibition with a performativity that echoes her protest marches.

Schnitger’s exhibition arrives amid a surge of interest in politicized textile art, evidenced by recent exhibitions including Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles at Hayward Gallery and Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, which later travelled to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Textile art presents opportunities to contest the gendered hierarchy separating fine art from craft, while also acknowledging the undervalued household labour performed disproportionately by women, including practices like sewing, knitting, quilting, and mending. Schnitger’s work echoes the question art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson asks in her influential 2017 book Fray: Art and Textile Politics: ‘What does it mean to imagine the sewing needle as a dangerous tool and to envision female collective textile making as a process that might upend conventions, threaten state structures, or wreak political havoc?’[2]

Populated with fantastical, otherworldly forms, Schnitger’s work offers speculative visions of how the world might be imagined anew. In Who Saves Who?, perhaps her most impressive artwork, the artist has constructed a towering primordial figure with a series of fabric-covered babies hanging from her breasts. Taking up the full height of the gallery, the sculpture evokes surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s painting The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg), which depicts a gargantuan golden-maned woman clutching a tiny egg, encircled by birds. Like Carrington’s subject, Schnitger’s giantess can be interpreted as an ambivalent mother, perhaps reluctant or unable to provide. Imposing in scale, she simultaneously conjures the monstrous, child-eating witch of fairytales and the bountiful and benevolent Mother Earth. Schnitger is frequently labelled an ecofeminist, and the work seems to highlight the precarity of kinship and care on a devastated planet, heightened by the piece’s continuation outdoors, where the infant sculptures embrace trees. While cognizant of constant threats to equity and environmental renewal, Schnitger’s work makes the case that ours is a world worth fighting for, through collective action and utopian thinking.