NEW YORK, NY.- Deanna Evans Projects is currently presenting Dyeing Notes, a solo exhibition of paintings by Caitlin MacBride. The project continues MacBride’s process of investigating American identity via production, labor, and design in her work, and diverges from her earlier focus on Shaker objects and the utopian resistance to industrial manufacturing.

In contrast, this new series takes on objects that defined a crucial moment in the growth of American capital and the cruel structures that built it. The paintings are based on record books from the collection of the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, which contain sample swatches and notes for dyeing textiles at the Pacific Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

The textile samples in these books are from “delaines,” lightweight fabrics that were woven from a combination of wool and cotton. Wool accepted the dyes better, but cotton was the material of the U.S.’s growing empire.




One fiber was the warp, and one was the weft: together, they created a material specific to this transitional time in history. The mills of the north, worked primarily by young women and children, provided a steady need for cotton, while the profits went to the mill owners and those that held the reins of industry. The southern cotton supply was fueled by chattel slavery and forced labor, and with the system’s future in question, the country fell into Civil War. MacBride choose sample books from 1862-1867 to reflect this historical context.

MacBride’s interest in the objects of museum collections comes from an investigation of hierarchical structures of conservation and preservation. Museum collections not only preserve and elevate what their institutions consider valuable but often their acquisition removes the contextual elements of how they were made and their original use value.

Objects become more aligned with art and prestige through the museum acquisition process. The samples in these books echo images of minimalist paintings and the marks of record keeping become indexical nods to the hands that made them, the marks of a factory laborer for the purpose of mass reproduction. In contrast the labor of the artist sits in the details and the touch that are specific to painting. A smaller painting of tools altered by mill workers to make their jobs easier is rendered with the intimacy with which the worker themselves might have known the object. Through this investigation of objecthood MacBride reframes the transitional object as a loaded reflection of history.

Caitlin MacBride is an artist based in Hudson, NY. She has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. She has shown at Fisher Parrish, He- roes, Chapter NY, Real Fine Arts, Greene Naftali, Zach Feuer, Jack Barrett Gallery, Hesse Flatow, and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein among others. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Modern Painters, Art Forum, New York Magazine, and Vogue.com.

Caitlin MacBride
Dyeing Notes
October 28 - December 17, 2022