Sampler (I Cannot)

Artist Elaine Reichek (American, born 1943)

Date2000

MediumEmbroidery on linen

DimensionsFramed: 56 1/2 x 12 1/16in. (143.5 x 30.6cm)
Image: 56 1/2 x 12 1/16in. (143.5 x 30.6cm)

ClassificationsTEXTILES

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number2002.19

DescriptionA sampler with an image from Minerva Britannia, by Henry Peacham, 1612, and an Emily Dickinson poem, #640, c. 1862, "I cannot live with you"

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Label TextUpdated Version: Elaine Reichek works in embroidery as a art medium to underline perceptions between craft and art, women’s traditional art forms and artistic expression, and the changing modes of communication in modern Western culture. Sampler (I Cannot) contains a twelve-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson in its entirety. The poem, which is about the impossibility of two people coming together, is both intimate and candid. Reichek emphasizes this by using the color white to symbolize emptiness within the picture of a weeping eye, an image that she appropriated that was made several hundred years ago, one that could have been created by a 20th-century surrealist. It creates a haunting image similar to the effect that Reichek wanted to create. The illustration in her embroidery gives context to the viewer before they delve into the poem: “Because you saturated sight - / And I had no more eyes…” Charlotte Zee Hamilton College Intern, summer 2016 "I Cannot Live with You" is considered one of Emily Dickinson's best-known love poems, albeit one of disavowal and despair. Elaine Reichek unites Dickinson's text with an image she had found earlier in a book of Elizabethan emblems, Minerva Britannia. The 17th-century picture of a floating, weeping eye is surprisingly modern, even surrealistic, but it pairs well with Dickinson's words-"Because you saturated sight - / And I had no more eyes…" The union of image and text to illustrate non-union is, finally, heart-rending. An artist with a conceptual bent, Reichek began creating works of art with needle crafts in the 1990s. In choosing her medium, Reichek comments on the history of young women's education through making samplers; celebrates traditional women's arts; and unveils biases in art-making that privilege heroic painting and sculpture over more "feminine" pursuits. MEM 2002