From Craft to Fine Art: The Radical Reclamation of Embroidery

The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago

For centuries, embroidery was dismissed as decorative, domestic, and distinctly female—more of a hobby than an art form, more of a task than a form of expression. While painting, sculpture, and even textiles like weaving found their place in art history, embroidery remained trapped in the realm of “craft.”

That’s changed. And not subtly. The last few decades have seen embroidery dragged out of the domestic sphere and into the contemporary art world with an energy that is both disruptive and deeply intentional. Artists have reclaimed the medium as a tool for critique, protest, and storytelling. The history of embroidery, with all of its connotations of patience, discipline, and femininity, has been flipped on its head. What was once dismissed as delicate is now defiant.

The Long History of Dismissal

Embroidery has existed in nearly every culture for centuries, yet in the Western world, it was often viewed as a lesser practice. Unlike painting, which was taught in academies and glorified for its ability to capture light, emotion, and power, embroidery was categorized as a domestic skill, something girls learned as part of their moral education. They stitched samplers, monograms, and elaborate decorative patterns—not because they were encouraged to pursue creative ambition, but because needlework was tied to ideas of refinement and womanhood.

Even as fiber art gained momentum in the mid-20th century, embroidery still lagged behind. The textile works of Anni Albers were celebrated for their modernist rigor, yet embroidery was still largely left out of the conversation. It was too ornate, too personal, too feminine. The distinction between “craft” and “fine art” wasn’t about skill or complexity—it was about power.

Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1993, Tracey Erin

How Artists Took It Back

The shift began in the 1960s and ‘70s, when feminist artists actively reclaimed embroidery as a form of resistance. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979) remains one of the most famous examples—a massive triangular table featuring embroidered place settings dedicated to historical female figures. It was a direct challenge to the exclusion of women from art history, turning embroidery into a medium of both tribute and protest. (BTW, The Dinner Party is part of The Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection and it’s been on view for years.)

But the shift didn’t stop there. Artists began using embroidery to push the medium itself into new conceptual territory.

Tracey Emin, best known for her confessional, raw works, has used embroidery as a form of self-exposure. Her stitched text pieces, like Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, blur the line between vulnerability and confrontation, using fabric as a way to tell stories about intimacy, trauma, and personal history.

Then there’s Louise Bourgeois, who turned to textiles in her later years, creating ghostly, stitched portraits and figures that felt fragile yet deeply unsettling. Her use of embroidery, particularly in pieces like Ode à l’Oubli, was tied to memory, motherhood, and the passage of time. For Bourgeois, stitching was both an act of repair and a way to unravel buried emotions.

Contemporary artists continue to push embroidery into new directions. Sophia Narrett, for instance, creates hyper-detailed embroidered narratives that look almost like paintings. Her work, full of tangled, intimate figures, often feels like stepping into a surreal fever dream.

And then there’s Bisa Butler, who uses thread and fabric to create monumental portraits of Black figures, drawing on both African textile traditions and the legacy of quilting to reclaim historical narratives. Her work is a testament to the fact that embroidery—and textiles more broadly—can be powerful vehicles for cultural storytelling.

I Have Been to Hell and Back, Louise Bourgeois

Why Embroidery Feels Radical Now

So why does embroidery feel so urgent and radical in contemporary art? Part of it is its inherent slowness. Unlike digital media or even painting, embroidery is time-consuming. It demands patience, repetition, and a deep physical engagement. In a world of instant gratification, the act of stitching is almost an act of defiance, a refusal to rush.

There’s also something about the way embroidery exists between disciplines. It is both a drawing and an object, both image and material. It carries a history of labor, of storytelling, of intimacy.

For centuries, embroidery was undervalued precisely because it was associated with women’s hands. Now, those same hands are using it to disrupt, to expose, to reframe the conversation.