“The garden is a metaphor – the garden brings hope, life, dreams met, dreams lost…essentially transcendence” MayerWasner will host a group show, over the course of the festival of three remarkable textile artists; Rebecca Levi, Jann Chefitz and Christi Johnson, curated by Pam Mayer.
Jann Cheifitz found salvation during covid when the world was unraveling by stitching together loose threads into fantastical security blankets, to ward of despair, offer a sense of perseverance and hope. Christi Johnson is a stitch sorceress, imbuing her work with symbolism and meaning, turning to the celestial bodies for inspiration and as a partner in the creative process. Rebecca Levi’s Flower Beards series uses traditional flower motifs of embroidery, knotted with blooms, colors and petals to create utopian stitched portraits that explore queer identity and gender expression.
The show will run all weekend, with a cocktail viewing on Friday 6/21 from 5pm.
Date
Jun 21, 2024 to Jun 23, 2024
Cocktail viewing on Friday 6/21 from 5pm
Featuring
Jann Cheifitz
Jann Cheifitz grew up in South Africa, and worked in an anti-apartheid art collective. Her personal work expressed a joy, humor, curiosity and playful engagement with nature and popular culture. She moved to New York in 1994, where she built Lucky Fish, a business producing hand-printed textiles. Her new body of work began during Covid: When everything seemed to be unraveling, she began stitching loose threads into fantastical security blankets warding against despair and summoning hope. Embroidered onto her screen-printed fabrics, a kaleidoscope of ideas – life cycles, fecundity, fallow times, loam and compost – degeneration producing regeneration – takes the garden as inspiration.
Rebecca Levi
Rebecca Levi is a fiber, pen and ink, and collage artist. Her embroidery work explores queer gender performativity, subverting the norm with the unexpected as it invites a collision between traditional handicrafts and unexpected sources like vintage physique magazines, pin-ups, comic books, and internet memes. A native New Yorker and resident of Brooklyn, her work has been exhibited in individual and group shows at venues including at Textile Center (Minneapolis), Society of Arts + Crafts (Boston), and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (NYC). In print, her work appears in the “Queer Threads” book edited by Todd Oldham and John Chaich and the “Play Smart” playing card series from Visual AIDS.
Christi Johnson
Artist, author, and teacher Christi Johnson combines cosmic iconography and botanicals in her textiles, and is the author of Mystical Stitches: Embroidery for Personal Empowerment and Magical Embellishment (Storey, 2021) and The Art of Embroidery Design (Storey, 2025). She is the owner of Mixed Color; a Catskills based textile studio which produces original garments in very limited editions, and offers online workshops and classes so that others may revel in practicing these ancient skills themselves.
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