Artist threads the needle from SoHo to AVL

ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) —

Nava Lubelski is stitching together two worlds.

The first is the competitive art scene of New York City. The other is the traditional craft market of Asheville, N.C.

She and her work are not an exact fit for either. Yet they belong to both.

Lubelski has lived and worked in Asheville since 2006. Her latest art show, “Things We Think We Know,” is on display at the Tracey Morgan Gallery through June 8. Lubelski’s work will next be on display in downtown Asheville at the Center for Craft. The artist is participating in the two-month WNC Artist Residency, which culminates in an open studio show on July 11, 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The walls of “Things We Think We Know” are populated by over a dozen colorful canvases. They didn’t start white, either. Every one of Lubelski’s pieces in the show began life as a stained tablecloth, worn top sheet or old fabric. Lubelski transforms these used, discarded items into ornate kaleidoscopes of thread, paint and history.

“I grew up with the shadow of the men splashing their paint around. So, I was like, what if I splash around? But it’s stitched,” Lubelski said. “That’s how I started. With just making splatters and taking found stained things. Making stains, making a mess and then stitching on them. As, on the one hand, like repair. But also elevating the stitching with this quintessential gesture of modern art, which was the drip or the splash.”

When Lubelski says stitching, it’s “what most people would call embroidery.” However, unlike more traditional approaches to the medium, she uses her elaborate needlework to create abstract shapes and concepts. Her “splashes” are explosions of embroidered thread.

“I did a few early-ish that were linens that had actual stains, so it was a way to then “fix” it. Because of course it’s got this brown stain and it is too “ugly” to use. I’m making air quotes,” Lubelski laughed. “And then if you embroider on or embroider around it, you memorialize it. But also bring this seductive or intricate beauty back to it.”

One of Lubelski’s earliest stitched pieces, in fact, was a tablecloth stained right in front of her.

“I was at this art benefit thing, and it had these dramatic round yellow tablecloths. Someone knocked over a glass of red wine, and it just like covered the thing. And I was like ‘oh my god, oh my god,’” Lubelski said. “So I went in the morning when the catering truck was coming, and I was like ‘there’s this ruined yellow tablecloth. Can I have it?’”

That piece, “Clumsy,” is simple compared to her later work. It features the wine stain outlined with red thread, which Lubelski stitched in several other spots in the cloth like further drips of wine. However, it came at a moment when “embroidery was getting some respect in contemporary art circles,” Lubelski said. “There was still a lot of eyerolling, it was not totally accepted, but it was the beginning of it. And there was a big survey show at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan that was all different takes on embroidery in contemporary art. And they put that tablecloth in it.”

According to Lubelski, there is a fascination in New York with bringing in contemporary artwork from places outside the city. For Lubelski, who was raised in NYC’s SoHo district, that makes things complicated.

“It wasn’t that being in New York would’ve been problematic. But to make it in New York, it’s a big social challenge. It works best for, like, Frenchmen or something,” she joked. “I couldn’t do that kind of schmooze. It was too hard. Even though I grew up in a kind of art world, it wasn’t a successful art world with connections to galleries. It was just people, trying to make it work.”

It would take her move to Asheville to fully break into the New York art scene, and the shows in New York to support her life in Asheville.

“I think moving to Asheville, I didn’t move here with the goal of breaking into the Asheville art. It’s not that I was opposed to it. I just saw that it didn’t fit me,” Lubelski said. “I just continued with trying to break in elsewhere.”

Lubelski found difficulty finding a match for her art with the tastes of Asheville’s galleries. She’d had one-offs with many of the art institutions in Asheville, including the Asheville Art Museum, but their artistic priorities were different. To Lubelski, her stitching is not about the technique. Instead, it is about expression, an abnormal perspective for the traditional art form.

“You see work here where they are doing incredibly skilled work, maybe nudging form or the idea slightly. But it’s really about understanding materials and having built up skills in working with those materials,” Lubelski explained. “In that world, I would be called a fiber artist or a textile artist. For me, the materials aren’t even the significant piece. Definitely the materials I use matter, and there’s meaning in stitching that is different from the meaning in painting. But the bigger art world really is about ideas.”

The big ideas of “Things We Think We Know,” Lubelski said, are chaos and repair. Her work often features large holes, stitched across with spiderweb colors. Other times, she uses the unusable to create something new. Several of the canvases on display at the gallery incorporate “snarls,” or tangled masses of knotted thread. Where a more traditional stitcher may throw away the chaotic mess of a snarl, Lubelski makes it a focal point of her work.

Close-up look at Lubelski’s 2024 piece “Bubby’s Bed Sheet”

“I looked at them, and they’re so intricate, these little tangles. Why is that less than beautiful, handmade lace?” Lubelski said. “It’s less in our minds because it’s chaotic, it’s not organized, it’s not intentional. So I set about how can I kinda repair this? Redeem these ruined things, and kinda lay them in, stitch them down, organize them so they have enough of that feeling of beautiful intricacy that they’ll be accepted.”

“And that’s where you get this kind of world of, just, things that can be much more raw and edgy and delicate and not craft. It’s almost like the not being skillfully crafted,” said Lubelski. “It’s really about the ideas and the world of art from all over, not just regionally focused. It has room to be a lot more raw, chaotic, weird, ugly, which are things that I use.”

It took Tracey Morgan’s help for Lubelski to bring her raw, weird work back to the region. The curator’s gallery was a perfect match for Lubelski’s oddball aesthetic.

“Right before Covid, I was doing a show on all women artists that focus on stitching and embroidery. Kind of more in a contemporary way, and not in a traditional handicraft way. And obviously Nava was one of the first persons I contacted,” Morgan said. “That was the first time we sort of worked together. And we’ve been talking since that, since the pandemic on doing a show together.”

It took four years, but “Things We Think We Know” debuted as Lubelski’s first solo exhibition at the Tracey Morgan Gallery. The curator was very pleased.

“She’s a fantastic artist. As soon as I saw the first one, I was like ‘oh my gosh,’” Morgan said.

“Until Tracey, there hasn’t been a gallery that was a good fit for me,” Lubelski said. “As far as I can tell, Tracey’s really the only gallery that’s part of the bigger contemporary art world. Which means I can have a sculpture made of cardboard in there.”

Despite that, the people of Asheville have embraced Lubelski’s work for what it is.

“That’s honestly something I should mention,” Lubelski said. “There’s a genuineness that’s really hard to find in New York.”

In Asheville, Lubelski said, “people would come in and be like ‘wow, so cool. How did you come up with- you know, like incredible enthusiasm. And it was, like, really kinda healing in a way.”

That enthusiasm for art is something Lubelski tried to share with her young son in “Things We Think We Know.” For several of the pieces, Lubelski handed him a brush and let him paint. According to her, the chaos that ensued was the impetus for much of her show.

“When I would try to paint when he was younger, you know he wanted to be part of everything,” Lubelski said. “I kind of happened on this idea of, like, giving him a paintbrush. And I would choose the color, I’d be like ‘you can paint white on here, go for it, do whatever you want. Because, anyway, my work had been about repair and damage, and kind of responding to these sort of unexpected or chaotic inputs and so I let him, like, paint.”

Lubelski would stitch on top of and around her son’s painting, bringing an order to his painted chaos through collaboration.

“I wanted to give him that gift,” Lubelski said.

Lubelski’s work will next be on display in downtown Asheville at the Center for Craft. The artist is participating in the two-month WNC Artist Residency, which culminates in an open studio show on July 11, 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Her next piece is a planned triptych, combining multiple layers, stitching, paint, paper collage and, yes, old sheets.

“Taking something that was so unwanted, but you could see was beautiful at one time?” Lubelski said. “I love that.”