About the Artist
Geneva, New York
Kirin Joya Makker is professor of American Studies at Hobart William Smith Colleges. An artist trained as an architect, and a scholar in critical space theory, Makker works to bridge disciplines and their methods of producing knowledge. At her institution, she teaches courses which investigate social power and architectural spaces. She combines traditional scholarship with creative practice in hand drawing, sewing, and installation art. Her research on these topics takes several forms, including designing and leading participatory art projects, exhibiting solo artworks, and producing scholarly writing on women’s history and black history in design and urban planning.
Website: WombChairSpeaks.net
Social Media: @KirinMakker
Artist Statement
Dubbed the “Womb” chair at a 1948 press event after a journalist spotted a pregnant woman sitting in it, the Knoll Womb Chair was gendered, racialized, and sexualized from its public debut. In the decades that followed, it appeared regularly in corporate office and bachelor pad plans and was uniquely promoted by Playboy magazine as a signature prop in objectifying women, emphasizing male fantasies of compliance, titillation, and repose. The Womb Chair Speaks project works to resist this context of constraint, its cultural history, and characterization of the womb by placing a manufactured Womb Chair into community sewing circles for regular stitching sessions. By (re)establishing a connection to women’s domestic labor history, this project repositions the Womb Chair away from conventional male space and into a subjective and shared learning space, where folks engage in kinetic dialogue, personal narrative, and collaborative labor. The project politicizes the medium of upholstery, the act of stitching, and the traditional forum of the sewing bee in feminist community work. In this form, the Womb Chair (and womb) may resist patriarchal constraint and speak.