Rebecca Ringquist is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and designer. Her stitched drawings on fabric explore issues of identity through thinly veiled metaphors utilizing old fashioned imagery and double entendres. She learned how to embroider in college in a feminist art history class, and has been inspired by the history of American needlework ever since. Approaching the technique of embroidery as a way of drawing, Ringquist has taught hundreds of people new ways of making marks on fabric through classes and workshops around the country.
Her design company, Dropcloth, sells Ringquist’s hand drawn designs that are printed as embroidery patterns, all ready to hoop and sew.
Rebecca says, “I tell love stories and create veiled fractured narratives full of double entendre. My work has been inspired of late by the fictional relocation story of the Swiss Family Robinson and my own cross-country move to Brooklyn.”
In 2005, Rebecca was awarded an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Her work has since been exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center, The California Polytechnic University, ARC Gallery, Fraction Workspace, Northern Illinois University, The Textile Art Center in Brooklyn, Packer Schopf Gallery, Pop tArt Gallery, and the Museum of Art and Design in NYC.
Ringquist earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Fiber and Material Studies department where she subsequently taught for seven years before moving to Brooklyn in 2011. She teaches, lectures and exhibits nationally.
On her techniques Rebecca says, “I alternate between hand embroidery and machine stitching. The harsh difference between the rates of speed with which I work conveys a complicated message. Although the machine stitching is very labor intensive, it also carries with it a sense of violence and aggression, reflecting the tangled messy nature of relationships. The thick orange flames, which lick up at the bed suggestively, are quite different from the sweet daisy imagery that lies beneath.”
