Incollect Magazine - Issue 10

32 www.incollect.com Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled, 1969–1976. Wool on burlap, 32⅞ x 40½ in. Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil, gift of Edmar Pinto Costa, 2021. The Embroideries of Madalena Santos Reinbolt Drawing with Needles The American Folk Art Museum is dedicated to folk and self-taught artists, and this spring is presenting the first museum survey of self- taught Brazilian artist Madalena Santos Reinbolt, maker of vibrant embroideries dealing with social issues from race and gender to poverty and inequality. Her embroideries are meticulously crafted and extraordinarily beautiful — each is made from vibrant colored threads woven together to create expressive, rhythmic imagery. They are part poetry and also part lived history, tracing the remarkable arc of her life from growing up on a small farm in rural Brazil (where her mother taught her to make pottery, blankets, linens, and lace) to a lifetime in domestic service in the homes of the wealthy in the 1950s until her death in 1977. Reinbolt began painting in the 1950s, creating expressive oil on canvas and paper paintings. She started to make embroidery in the mid-1960s, creating many of the works for which she is known today and which have remarkable tactility and luminescence. “I work everything out in my head. I can picture it all even with my eyes closed,” she said about her embroideries. “Really, it’s the needles that are doing the drawing.” Reinbolt’s work in embroidery is mostly figurative. “She would begin embroidery by threading upwards of 150 needles with different colors of wool yarn or oakum fibers to create a textile version of a painter’s palette,” the exhibition press materials note. “While she was initially encouraged to make her embroideries on fabric, she quickly switched to burlap, cut out from sacks that she and her husband collected from local warehouses — a choice of material that affected the scale of her work.“ The irregular and flexible mesh gave Reinbolt the ability to ‘draw’ with great expressiveness, giving her compositions great vibrancy, the foregrounds and backgrounds gently blending into each other. Her works were created from memory, rather than by Benjamin Genocchio Madalena Santos Reinbolt.