Catherine Reinhart

Contact: catherine@catherinereinhart.com

I am an interdisciplinary artist who makes fiber art and sculpture and conducts socially engaged projects with abandoned textiles. These works center on themes of labor, connection, and care. My primary goal is to increase the visibility of women in contemporary art, emphasizing artist-mothers. Caregiving girds up our society and is based mainly on the undervalued labor of women. This vital tending work is built on consistent, repetitive actions that provide comfort, ease suffering, and connect us with our fellow man.

 Mending and stitching by hand parallel these humane actions. By using them, I join the discourse on the unseen contributions of women and mothers to our social fabric and the contemporary art world. By reusing found textiles and ritualistic processes, I communicate the transformative power of caregiving, specifically in the areas where I have labored--childcare, care for older adults, and as a maker.

 As artist and mother, I am both archivist and field hand, creating studies in the accretion of domestic life and cataloging its labors. I disassemble, reconfigure, and alter abandoned textiles in works honoring motherhood and unseen labor. Stratums of fiber in my sculptures reference sedimentary layers and the state of my laundry pile. I map the territory of my home place with the visual language of topographic maps.

These works challenge assumptions about the domestic landscape as an impediment to artistic excellence--situating it instead as a site and seedbed for new forms. With these works, I join the growing ranks of a constellation of artist-mothers, giving voice to the maternal and domestic experience.

I am interested in the point at which labor becomes untenable, where grief and calamity take hold. I mark the passage of time, invisible labor, and small accumulations of loss that gather in the maternal experience through durational performance and installation.

Using worn workwear and hi-vis clothing collected from manual laborers and artists, I make modern relics venerating these discarded textiles. In doing so, I am expanding upon ideas of unseen labor, moving from the underappreciated efforts of motherhood to other laborers neglected by our society - artists, migrant and farm laborers, and home health caregivers.

With my work, I contribute to relevant and timely discussions reframing the value of care and connection to our neighbors and our possessions. Navigating the changing landscape of the home-place, with all its triumphs, failures, and interruptions, I give voice and hold space for stories of repair, loss, and kinship.

Artist Biography

Catherine Reinhart is an interdisciplinary artist from Ames, IA.  Reinhart creates fiber work and conducts social practice with abandoned textiles around themes of domestic labor, connection, and care. She received her MFA - Textiles from the University of Kansas and a BFA - Integrated Studio Arts at Iowa State University.

Reinhart exhibits locally, nationally and internationally. She has exhibited at the Department of Land Economy, Cambridge University and Cambridge Artworks, Cambridge, UK, and the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS. Reinhart has been selected as a presenter at “Mending and Making Workshop” organized by the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme at the British Museum.

Her works are in collections at the University of Mississippi and Kyoto Keika University, Kyoto, Japan. Reinhart is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies, including the Iowa Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, and Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts. Reinhart was recently honored as an Iowa Artist Fellow (2020), a  Terrain Exhibitions Artist-in-Residence in Springfield, IL (2021), a recipient of the Alex Brown Foundation’s Artist-in-Residence in Des Moines, IA (2022), and an Artist-in-Residence at the West Cork Arts Center in Ireland (2023/2024).

Social Practice - The Collective Mending Sessions: www.collectivemendingsessions.com