As a response to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, on Inauguration Day (January 20, 2017) I began a small practice of daily resistance: every day for four years, I stitched the words THIS IS NOT NORMAL. For the first 100 days of the current administration, this took the form of small, themed pieces which I later assembled into the First and Second Cloths of Resistance, each comprising 50 days. Since day 101 (April 30, 2017), in addition to the occasional small themed piece and larger politically oriented artwork, I stitched Flags of Resistance, adding one iteration of THIS IS NOT NORMAL every day. I completed the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Flags of Resistance, and on September 27, 2020, I began the Fifth Flag. The point of this resistance practice was not to suggest that there is some magical "normal" from which we had deviated and to which we should return, but rather to remind myself every day that we must not allow the situation under the Trump Administration to become accepted as normal.
Election Day occurred on November 3, 2020. Four days later, on November 7, Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris were declared the winners. I continued to stitch the Fifth Flag until Inauguration Day 2021, because there was still quite a lot of NOT NORMAL happening in those interim days. Although I hope that President Biden and Vice President Harris will head us back toward some kind of “normal,” we cannot forget that nearly 50% of the votes cast went to Donald Trump.
After Biden and Harris were inaugurated on January 20, 2021, I transitioned my resistance stitching to the Calendar Project for 2021. In my kitchen, I keep a large wall calendar on which I note the important domestic items for each day and each week: dentist appointments, meetings, birthdays, and so on. For my stitched version, I made a “page” for each month, but instead of stitching the little details of daily life, I stitched what struck me as the most important headline for that day. Though my primary focus was the United States, I kept an eye on what happened in the rest of the world, too. I stitched plenty of bad news but also, sometimes, some good news. It is so easy to forget what happened just yesterday, let alone last week or last month or six months ago. This project is my way of bearing witness to the events that shaped 2021. Calendars, nice big wall calendars, also have art, and so each page also features some kind of more traditional stitched art.
