Fabric of Unknown Lives

by William Doiron , November 30, 2007

Before Estelle Kessler Yarinsky begins work on one of her portrait quilts, she thoroughly familiarizes herself with her subject to see if she likes them. Since a piece of fabric art takes Yarinsky some three to four months to create, it’s in her best interest to care about the people she portrays. “I see if I would really want to live with these people” for that time, she says. This is important, when those who most interest you are the unknown, the anonymous, and the obscure. These are Yarinsky’s heroes and—mostly—heroines.

“Women are often more ignored throughout history,” says the artist, whose subjects hail from the periphery of history and theology. “I want to rescue [them] from obscurity.” These include the spirited Miryam, prophet and sister of Moses, who brought water to the wandering Israelites, and was exiled for questioning Moses’s authority, and Gracia Nasi, a Spanish noblewoman who defied the Inquisition to practice her Jewish faith. There’s Emily Warren Roebling, who supervised construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband, Washington, was incapacitated with the bends. And there’s Rosalind Franklin, the forgotten scientist among the team that discovered the structure of DNA.