Angela Fraleigh’s paintings retrieve women from the margins of history, offering alternative, empowering visual narratives. Plucking figures from the art-historical canon and placing them in new, dreamlike compositions, she creates space for female agency and subversion.
In Threaded with moonlight, a new body of work created for this exhibition, Fraleigh explores textile-making as an act of power. Her paintings depict women holding distaffs plump with unspun fiber, manipulating thread into cloth and lace, and wielding shears—mundane tasks that could potentially invoke potent forces. In folk religions across Europe, goddesses spin, measure, and cut thread to determine the span of a human life, while cultures worldwide draw parallels between female deities making textiles, the creation of the universe, and destiny.
Fraleigh also considers portrayals of witches, spinners, and weavers in mythology and fairy tales, and their access to temporal or supernatural power through textiles.
Drawing inspiration from the Museum’s rich holdings, Fraleigh situates her female protagonists amidst textile motifs traditionally used to invite abundance, blessings, and protection. Her monumental paintings envision a lush landscape ripe with magical potential, while the silk drape behind them riffs on the tree of life, an ancient symbol of fecundity. Fraleigh positions these varied motifs as not only a complex, subversive language that might covertly express dangerous dreams and desires, but also as talismans, protective charms that could imbue everyday textiles with intention and power. The exhibition also presents select textiles from the Museum collection that inspired Fraleigh’s work, inviting a chorus of makers’ voices into the gallery.
Informed by folklore, diverse spiritual practices, and textile traditions from across four continents and sixteen centuries, Threaded with moonlight disrupts the docile femininity usually associated with textile work. Fraleigh’s women seize the everyday rhythms of spinning, stitching, and weaving as ritual and incantation—transforming their work into a space for communication, harnessing power, and forging new possibilities
The female figures in this trio of paintings evoke the Fates or Norns, the goddesses who spin to determine destiny in Greek and Norse tradition. Yet these figures might also be human women, engaged in the everyday work of textile production—labor that, with its divine associations, offered opportunity to harness supernatural power.
Fraleigh creates an environment for these figures that brims with magical possibilities, employing varied imagery from the Museum’s textile collection. She selected textile motifs based on their traditional meanings and invocations: for instance, flowers, woven and embroidered worldwide to invite fertility and abundance; and stars, a symbol of celestial harmony and the passage of time. Other textile designs used here include labyrinthine patterns intended to confuse evil spirits, and geometric motifs used to offer strength and protection.
Building on the layers of meaning embedded in her work, Fraleigh also incorporated moonwater, ground crystals, and paint made from gemstones that hold supernatural significance in various traditions.
