By Kathleen Stone

This show uses an impressively clever use of technology to create sign posts on a path through labor history, psychiatry, and textile design.

Cat Mazza: Network, on view at Northeastern University’s Gallery 360 through April 12, 2025

The knit pieces in Cat Mazza: Network are a far cry from the hand-knit sweaters of yesteryear. They are very much of today, derived from digitized images, many machine knit. The artist Cat Mazza is a professor of art at UMass Boston who has taken a particular interest in digital media. Here, she links that interest to the age-old craft of knitting in an exploration of three themes — women’s labor history, the practice of psychiatry and elements of needlework design.

The largest piece in the exhibit is Labor Sister Sampler, which documents women’s role in labor history. The sampler is a ten-foot wide map of the United States, fifty individual pieces knit and stitched together. Within the borders of each state is an image that commemorates a significant moment in labor history. Rhode Island has the distinction of being home to the earliest event. There, in 1824, the country’s first labor strike took place when women workers walked out of a textile mill in Pawtucket. A rudimentary image of the mill marks the event on the sampler. Mazza developed the image from an antique rendering which was scanned and translated into a stitchable pattern using KnitPro, a freeware application co-created by Mazza. A similar process was used for every state.

The images on the map represent events and supplemental information is provided to understand what actually happened. The viewer is asked to consult an iPad installed next to the sampler. There, archival source material is shown – old photos, vintage postcards, newspaper clippings and the like – along with a short explanation of the memorialized event. For instance, a female figure based on a photograph of Dolores Huerta, the labor leader who helped organize a 1965 boycott to support the United Farm Workers, represents California. In Oklahoma, stacks of books symbolize a 1918 agreement that raised the wages of women book binders, a step on the road to erasing the wage gender gap. Mississippi is represented by a piece of fabric that commemorates Black laundresses who formed a union and went on strike in 1866, just one year after having been freed from slavery.

The sampler’s use of digital images and a knitting program is inventive but, unfortunately, the approach leaves a lot out. Take Rhode Island, for instance. An image of the Old Slater Mill is pictured on the sampler. That is where the Industrial Revolution began in this country. The mill began operating in 1790, using the adjacent Blackstone River to power a spinning frame that turned raw cotton into yarn. Women, working at home with hand looms, wove the yarn into fabric. The spinning frame was designed by Samuel Slater, who worked with similar machines in England for a decade and brought a memory of their design with him when he emigrated. The Pawtucket mill’s first laborers were children, including Ann Arnold, then 10 years-old, who is generally credited as the mill’s first employee. Because families lived nearby, Pawtucket was the quintessential mill village, a living arrangement that spread throughout New England. Thirty-four years after the mill opened, the owners were confronted with an increasingly competitive market. They responded by demanding longer hours from their workers while simultaneously reducing their wages, which led to the women’s strike. This history of conflict set the stage for more industrialization, bolder moves by capitalism and further labor unrest. The knit square, with its image of a building, does not evoke the personal struggle in the past or suggest the economic pressures. Nor, I suppose, can we expect it to.

One of the most infamous events represented on the sampler is New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. Factory workers, mostly women and many of them immigrants, were trapped inside the burning building by locked doors and blocked stairwells. Some workers jumped to their deaths on the pavement; many others perished in the smoke and flames. The iPad next to the sampler tells us that, after the fire, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union became more involved in electoral politics. True — but much more could be said. Subjects also worthy of our attention: details of the workers’ lives, the manner of their deaths, reforms enacted by the city and state, and the fact that Frances Perkins, who witnessed the fire, was galvanized into more concerted labor activity and eventually became Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Women have played a large and often ignored part in labor history, as the sampler illustrates. But the premise of the exhibit – showcasing the use of computer-scanned images, computer-created knitting patterns, and knit squares with simple images – allows for frustratingly little of that past to be explored. It’s best to think of the sampler as a reference tool that suggests starting points for further viewing and the kind of reading necessary to bring the personal stories and sociopolitical context to life.

A second theme covered in this exhibit is psychiatry, particularly challenges to traditional practices. Mazza has created knit balaclavas with images representing four individuals who challenged the status quo: Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, Scottish psychiatrist and poet R.D. Laing and American clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison. She has also taken excerpts from their writings, translated them into Morse code, then a senary code, and transformed that into visually appealing knitted motifs. As with the Labor Sister Sampler, the viewer must engage in a two-step process — examine what is mounted on the wall and read about what it is and how the design was created — in order to appreciate what’s on view.

A very different piece in the show is an animated video that depicts the failures of inpatient psychiatric treatment. It uses software called Knitoscope that transforms digital video into animation that appears to be knitted. Its bright colors, stylized forms, and musical loop are effective in drawing the viewer in and heightening understanding of the issue.

The third section of the exhibit shows needlework designs that have been passed from one generation to another,  often around the globe Many of the designs are traditional, some centuries old, but the computerized process used to produce samples is contemporary. Today’s designs, including X’s and O’s, find their roots in the oldest of traditions.

I initially approached Cat Mazza: Network as I would a more traditional art exhibit. I expected to receive visual stimulation, a feeling of connection with the artist and, hopefully, emotional insight into the subject matter. But I found something different – an impressively clever use of technology to create sign posts on a path through labor history, psychiatry, and textile design.

---

Kathleen Stone is the author of They Called Us Girls: Stories of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men, an exploration of the lives and careers of women who defied narrow, gender-based expectations in the mid-20th century. Her website is kathleencstone.com.