LaThoriel Badenhausen
Reader’s Art 12: Longing for Home New York artist LaThoriel Badenhausen wrote: “Paper dolls! Growing up poor in rural Minnesota, my paper dolls were wrinkled, faded dolls culled and cut from the Christmas Sears Roebuck catalog. Every year, I received a bounty of new paper dolls in the mail. (Montgomery Ward’s “dolls” were inferior).
My paper dolls were constant friends during days spent indoors waiting out a blizzard. Schiaparelli Fashion Paper Dolls remind me of that place, those days. Just as a child I pasted new dresses to a doll when I became bored with her fashion presence or posture, I have transformed the dated Schiaparelli paper dolls by giving each doll a face evident in the currently fashionable art context. Yoko Ono, Pamela Lehman, Nara, Cattelan, Warhol, Jesus and his disciples and McCarthy’s “Tomato Head”.”
Textile Art by Susan Hensel
Discover the transforming textile art by Susan Hensel. Susan Hensel is a multidisciplinary artist, with a 50+ year career. She combines a mixed media practice with embroidery across digital and manual platforms. She also makes sculptures and wall art using the colors and techniques of commercial embroidery.
These artworks are designed in the computer and stitched out on the computer-aided embroidery machine. The goal is to create an experience for the people that overwhelms with color and transcends the quotidian, Encouraging one, for even a few seconds, to step outside the narrative of the ego into a place of pure sensation.
Hensel’s artwork is known and collected nationwide. It is represented in collecting libraries and museums as disparate as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Getty Research Institute. There are major holdings at Minnesota Center for Book Arts. The University of Washington, Baylor University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Archives pertaining to her artist’s books are available for study at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle. Hensel’s work began in 2000 in East Lansing, Michigan with the Art Apartment and deepened with ownership of the Susan Hensel Gallery.
