Catherine Reinhart
The Mother Rubbings
Performance | Drawings
2020
This scroll measuring 150 feet long is a performance object of grave rubbings labeled “mother”. This performance was a personal and collective means of expressing grief over the deaths of millions of women and mothers due to COVID - 19. The Mother Rubbings asks: How can art objects facilitate the communal grieving process?
We tend to our families and communities by providing comfort and care through consistent and repetitive actions. Through fiber art, sculpture, and socially engaged projects with abandoned textiles, I draw parallels between mending and stitching by hand, and the repetitive nature of domestic and community care.
Catherine Reinhart is an interdisciplinary artist living in Ames, IA, U.S.A. Reinhart creates fiber work and conducts social practice with abandoned textiles around themes of domestic labor, connection, and care. She received her BFA in Integrated Studio Arts in 2008 from Iowa State University. In 2012, she completed her MFA in Textiles from the University of Kansas. Her works have been exhibited locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Catherine is the recipient of numerous grants and residencies. She was recently honored as a 2020 Iowa Artist Fellow, a 2021 Artist-in-Residence at the Terrain Residency in Springfield, IL, and an inaugural recipient of the Alex Brown Foundation’s Artist-in-Residence in Des Moines, IA (2022).
