Art for the working class
Tabitha Arnold's tapestries are a beautiful tribute to the labor movement.
The crowd lining up to get into Tabitha Arnold’s exhibition in New York City last fall wasn’t full of the older, moneyed types one might expect to find at a Chelsea gallery opening. Instead, the small space was packed with twenty- and thirtysomethings wearing Zohran Mamdani pins, Democratic Socialists of America hats and SEIU T-shirts.
If the crowd might have seemed unusual in the context of the city’s fancy gallery district, they looked right at home next to the art that had drawn them there. The exhibition on display, called Gospel of the Working Class, featured monumental handmade tapestries highlighting working-class struggles from both recent and distant history. In one, textile workers carry bolts of fabric and wield scissors, while people dodge bullets from strike-breakers outside the factory. In another, angels walk behind autoworkers carrying picket signs above a row of hands holding drills and other tools.
The Chattanooga, Tennessee-based artist behind it all, Tabitha Arnold, says her goal is to create art that reflects and inspires organizers and workers. In a pop culture and media landscape littered with stories about the uber-wealthy, Arnold’s pieces focus instead on the working people who make up the 99%. In doing so, she’s garnered plenty of recognition: she was awarded the 2025 Southern prize for visual art, received a prestigious MacDowell fellowship in 2023 and has exhibited her art all over the world.
But what she wants more than anything is for her work to be useful to the people it’s meant to portray. “I think of my work as being for labor organizers,” she said. “I see it as being a source of encouragement for organizers, reflecting and validating what they’re doing back to them.”
My latest piece for the Guardian profiles Arnold, whose work I was put onto by another textile whiz I admire (that would be Emily Fischer of Haptic Lab, maker of a quilt coat that I’ve treasured for years). I’ll tell you something here that I didn’t say in the Guardian: The first time I encountered Arnold’s tapestries, I cried.
I didn’t know much about Arnold before I showed up, but there on the wall was a giant tapestry Arnold had made about a textile workers’ strike. This moved me because the work was incredibly beautiful — calling to mind greats like Diego Rivera and Faith Ringgold — but also because most of my early career in journalism was spent writing about garment workers and their labor conditions. In many ways, garment workers are the reason I became a journalist. The devastating Rana Plaza collapse happened just as I was starting to write about fashion publicly and my desire to see the industry change so something like that never happened again is a big part of why I became a journalist at all.
The garment workers I interviewed over the subsequent years also laid the groundwork for my political education, though neither I nor they necessarily knew that’s what was happening at the time. But you can only be told so many times by a woman in a sweatshop in Los Angeles, USA or Dhaka, Bangladesh that unionizing is the best thing that ever happened to her at work before you start to take unions seriously as an engine for positive change in toxic and dangerous workplaces.
In reporting this story on Tabitha Arnold’s work all these years later, I was reminded that my story — political education and awareness that started with seeing abuses in the garment industry — isn’t unusual. “Textiles are uniquely suited to make comments about labor because textiles were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and all of the many issues that arose with exploited bodies in systems of mass manufacturing,” professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University Julia Bryan-Wilson told me. The connection between textile work and radical politics runs deep, she noted: Friedrich Engels, who co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, was politicized in part by seeing what happened in textile mills in Manchester, England.
The other most moving part of the exhibition was tapestry focused on a recent labor fight at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. Arnold was supposed to reveal the tapestry at a rally of about 200 Volkswagen workers and their family members before a much-anticipated vote on whether or not to form a union. “I didn’t know what the workers would think about it, and I was kind of scared that they might think I was hijacking their really important moment,” she told me later.
It was a “really important moment” in part because two previous attempts to unionize the Tennessee plant had failed – and the stakes for workers were high. According to Caleb Michalski, an employee at the plant, employees were pushed to keep to strict timelines, even to the detriment of their health, safety and dignity. He’d seen coworkers literally pee on themselves on the line because supervisors wouldn’t let them take a bathroom break.
He and many other coworkers got injured on the job, and when they tried to go to the medical team at the plant they were told their injuries were because of pre-existing conditions. (One coworker was told that he had developed carpal tunnel not because he had to use a repetitive motion to install car door seals for 60 hours a week, but “because he played tennis in high school,” for example.) Some, dealing with bulging disks and torn rotator cuffs, found themselves drowning in medical bills; one worker filed for bankruptcy because her medical debt became so insurmountable.
“I’ve seen people cut and bleed and get yelled at by the supervisor for stopping their line,” Michalski said. “I’ve heard of people collapsing on the line, and the supervisor pushing their body out of the way so the line could keep running. That’s our reality.”
It was against this backdrop in the spring of 2024 that Arnold first shared her tapestry These Hands at the IBEW Local 175 union hall. Despite her fears, the tapestry was a hit. “All these people just kept grabbing me and wanting to tell me how much they loved it and how meaningful it was to them,” she said.
Less than a month after Arnold unveiled her tapestry, Volkswagen Tennessee workers made history by officially voting to join the UAW. In February, two years after that initial union vote and Arnold’s tapestry unveiling, that same group of workers notched another win: they reached a tentative agreement with Volkswagen that will secure 20% across-the-board wage increases, affordable healthcare and real job security for workers. On February 19, workers voted to officially ratify the contract.
Michalski, now a member of the UAW-Volkswagen bargaining committee, is relieved. He’s already dreaming of a future where the union can build their own union hall. And when they do, Arnold’s tapestry will be hanging somewhere where workers can continue to draw strength from it for years to come.
Read my full story for the Guardian here.
For more on Tabitha Arnold, peruse her sharp, thoughtful newsletter.
I’ll leave you with “Bread and Roses,” that old union classic written by James Oppenheim and adopted across the labor movement, about how “hearts starve as well as bodies,” and both need to be fed.
Wishing you bread and roses,
Whitney