Sew Her Name Dress, 2020–21
Kate Sekules (b. 1961)
Linen with mercerized cotton floss, 60 × 35 in. (152.4 × 88.9 cm)
Courtesy the artist

Visible mending practices conceived as a vernacular form of textile conservation highlight the potential for repair to be used as a form of protest against issues of overproduction, pollution, and labor insecurity in the fashion industry. Through embroidered mends on a dress that is worn from use, Sew Her Name represents the names and words of state-murdered Black women, serving as a memorial to lesser-known stories from the Black Lives Matter movement. Here, repairs made intentionally visible as a form of embellishment draw attention to the embodied actions of mending and the meditative connections between material repair and processes of reparation.