Every Stitch an Immigrant Story: Fiber Artist Maria Amalia Wood

Listen to the interview on Apple (opens in new tab), Spotify (opens in new tab), or your listening platform of choice. Captioned interviews are available on YouTube (opens in new tab).

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Trained as a fiber and textile artist, Maria Amalia Wood has in recent years been working with paper, manipulating and dyeing wet wood pulp to build richly layered pieces. As important to Maria’s creativity as her raw materials, however, is the community of Latina immigrants like herself that she has fostered through a series of creative workshops in her hometown of Madison, WI. Her latest communal and artistic enterprise is Unidas por Hilos (opens in new tab) (United by Threads), a monthly gathering of diverse Latina immigrants who embroider their stories, often learning new stitches along the way, in fellowship with one another.

In this interview, Maria shares how her current work is a natural extension of the comfort and energy she found among skilled seamstresses in her native Honduras. She extols the power of embroidery as both a meditative practice and a form of storytelling and reminds us that no matter the activity, homemade food remains the one ingredient guaranteed to bring people together

Pier Carlo Talenti: As you were training yourself as an artist, how did you also develop your interest in working with communities along the way?

Maria Amalia Wood: Since I was little, I've been surrounded by textiles. My grandmother had a boutique that made wedding dresses in Honduras — that's where I'm from; I was born and raised in Honduras — and most of my childhood was spent with my grandmother because she was the one who took care of me while my parents would work. She had this sewing workshop that had about 30 women working for her, making wedding dresses. I grew up surrounded by lots of fabric and just all the cacophony of noises that was made during 30 women talking, 30 women being with each other.

In Honduras — it's similar in other countries too — when you're working, you always have music on, at least in certain workspaces. I remember these women would have these romantic songs, Spanish songs, playing in the background, and there was all this conversation happening. Some of them would teach me how to sew basic stitches —back then, the sewing machines were manual pedal machines — and other women would take me and teach me how to glue beads on the wedding dresses.

It was such a beautiful memory, but what stayed with me from that memory was the community that was happening while they were making something with their hands. And so I always start with that because I believe that my interest in textiles and fiber arts, I think, was born from early on because of those memories. 

When I got my MFA in fiber arts, I was mostly focusing on papermaking, but I was also still very much interested in using art as a way to create community. 

Pier Carlo: At what age did you come to the U.S.?

Maria: It was kind of on and off because I lived in Madison from 10 to 14. Then we went back to Honduras, and I was there until I was 17. Then I came back, and I've been here since I was 17 years old.

Pier Carlo: Oh, OK, so you truly are bi-cultural.

Maria: Yes, I've been here for over 28 years now.

Pier Carlo: At what point did you realize, "Oh, I want to be an artist"?

Maria: [She chuckles.] That's a really good question because I was living in this culture where art is not valued and you're going to schools where art is not even an option. There's no art in schools in Honduras. But because I came to the United States and lived here for four years, I was introduced to art, and I loved it. I fell in love with art.

And so when I went back to Honduras as a teenager, my mom enrolled me in graphic design classes that I loved. I remember when my math teacher asked me what I wanted to major in — I was actually pretty good in math —and I said, "Graphic design," she said, "You can do better than that." [She laughs.]

Pier Carlo: What did she mean by that?

Maria: Well, it's like, “You're going to a really good private school, and if you get the chance to study in the United States, you're not going to waste it on art and design. Only few people in Honduras get to go and study abroad, and why would you spend that opportunity on —"

Pier Carlo: When you could become a doctor or an engineer.

Maria: Exactly. A lawyer. Whatever.

Then she was like, "Why don't you think about architecture? Because architecture kind of merges math and art." That stuck with me and when I applied to colleges, I was applying to go to architecture. My first year in college, I was an architect student, but I kept changing my majors, and I eventually ended up in art because my path just needed to be art. I ended up majoring in general art with a minor in graphic design.

It was interesting because right when I graduated from college, I was hired by a company called Book Thongs that made beaded products in Nicaragua. The reason I was hired is because the owner of that company came to my art exhibition, my senior art show, and he loved my work. When he saw that I was from Honduras and I spoke Spanish fluently, he wanted me to go work for him so I could manage the beaded production in Nicaragua.

Pier Carlo: That’s so counter to what that teacher told you! You immediately got a job straight out of college because of your art.

Maria: [Laughing] I know!

Pier Carlo: That's amazing.

Maria: It was such an amazing opportunity because I would be traveling to Nicaragua every two or three months. There were over 100 women making these beaded products, but it was also very similar to my early childhood memory of all these women working together. It was the exact same scenario. There's music playing in the background; they're all talking and gossiping. And I just love that. I love that atmosphere that in the midst of making something with their hands, they're also creating community.

That job led to an invitation from the wife of the President of the Congress in Honduras at the time to come and visit craft communities in a very impoverished area in Honduras. I was able to go visit to see if what they made, the craft that they made, had any potential to be sold in the North American marketplace. It was such an economically poor environment.

Pier Carlo: What types of crafts were they making?

Maria: They were making things with pine needles, they were making beaded products, but most of them were making embroidery products. I remember being invited at the end of the trip to the house of the President of the Congress, and he asked me, “Do you think there's potential for them to export their products?" And there wasn't, there wasn't, because it was not there yet, the quality of the products. And so, I said, "It's not there yet, but what if we do a community-art fiber project with them so that they can learn more skills and they can use the skills to add to their craft and I can teach them how to prepare something to be exported to the United States?" He loved the idea, and so they gave me funding to do this fiber-arts project with 52 Indigenous women, Lenca women.

I created this whole project, but I invited an artist from Chicago, a fiber artist who was my weaving teacher at the time. I asked her if she could be the lead artist for the project. She came with me to Honduras, and we taught these women how to use natural dyes to dye their fabric, and we taught them how to embroider more stitches, not just the same one that they were using, so that we taught them new embroidery stitches.

I remember being in a car where we were driving through all these winding dirt roads through a mountain in Honduras and feeling so happy and saying in my mind, "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life." Which is working with women and collaborating and making art together. I just loved it so much that when I returned to Madison, I decided to apply and work at SERRV International, which works with artisans from all over the world. I worked there for about four years, working with artisans from Latin America primarily, and I would be visiting these artisans in their countries and training them.

Pier Carlo: How did you take all this experience and this passion of yours to create your current organization, Unidas por Hilos?

Maria: Well, one thing has led to the other. After SERRV, I ended up going to get my MFA in design studies. I focused in fiber arts, and for my thesis project, I was still very much interested in working with communities, and so I ended up with another artist friend. We both did a project called Soñé Una Milpa, where we interviewed 10 Latina immigrant women from my community about their immigration journeys. These women were just going to come to my house, and we were going to ask them questions, but then they came with the initiative of like, "Why don't you come to my house, and I'm going to cook for you a meal from my country, and over that meal, we'll discuss the questions." This was something that came from them, and we were really excited about that.

So we went to all of these women's homes. They made a meal for us from their country, and that was very beautiful because it served as an icebreaker to share a very vulnerable story, because they were sharing very vulnerable stories with us. I fell in love with that project, and I wanted to continue to do projects that focused on the Latina immigrant experience.

After that project, I was given the opportunity to do an art residency in a library called Pinney Library. I focused that residency on papermaking, and I invited the community to make paper with me and pulp-paint the paper to create a sunset that was informed by our journeys. Regardless of where you came from, we could find common ground through the sharing of our journeys. When all these people made all these paper squares, I ended up bringing them home, and I collaged them. Then I invited a group of Latina immigrants to come to my house — these are women who I know from my own community — and I asked them, "Do you want to help me embellish this piece that I'm working on, which is about journeys? I would love to continue to talk about our journeys as immigrants."

Pier Carlo: How big was the piece at this point?

Maria: It was five feet by five feet. Well, before I assembled it into the five-by-five piece, I gave the women smaller pieces so it would be easier to embroider.

These women would come to my house, and we would just sit in my living room and embroider these paper pieces. I would tell them, "If you could think about your journey, your life journey, how would you stitch that journey as a path on a piece of paper?" And they would all create different kinds of paths, different kinds of stitches. Again, I was teaching them how to embroider as well because many of them did not know how to embroider.

Pier Carlo: And can I ask why stitch on paper rather than cloth or fiber?

Maria: Well, papermaking is what I focused on when I was doing my MFA, and there's just so much beauty ... . The process of paper making is just —

Pier Carlo: Oh, so the workshop also made the paper?

Maria: Yep. During the residency, during the summer, I just made paper with kids, with older people, with anybody who would come to my studio and wanted to make paper with me. Then when all the paper pieces were made and pulp-painted — because you can paint with pulp — I pressed and I dried those pieces of papers, and then they were ready to be embroidered. And that's when I asked the women to come and help me embroider these pieces of paper with journeys, paths with stitches. 

After they embroidered the pieces, then I assembled the entire thing together as a paper horizon, a five-foot-by-five-foot piece. 

Pier Carlo: I'm guessing you displayed it somewhere.

Maria: Yep. It's part of the Pinney Library's permanent collection. If you ever come to Madison, you can go and see it there.

Pier Carlo: That's amazing. What it was like when the women who had made the piece first saw it displayed?

Maria: Oh, they were just in awe, right? Because it was framed and it was hung, and they did a special unveiling for the piece. They just felt so proud to be part of this project. And at the end, when we finished embroidering, some of the women came to me and said, "Can we continue to meet and embroiderer and do this?" Because they just loved it.

So immediately after that residency, I got an opportunity for another one at Synergy Coworking in Madison. I proposed to them a project called Bordando Memorias, which means embroidering memories. I proposed that project so that we could continue to meet as a group and embroider. I said, "I want to create a collective of women, Latina immigrant women, who come together to create art and community." And they loved the idea. And so I formed this group, and I invited not only the women who had been part of the previous project, but I opened it up to the entire Madison community. We put flyers in all the libraries, and anyone who identified as a Latina immigrant was welcome to come. The groups were in Spanish. We met on a monthly basis. Over about 30 women ended up participating, but we had a core of about 12 to 15 women who always came.

Pier Carlo: Latina immigrant is one demographic group, but of course, there are a lot of different cultures under that umbrella.

Maria: Yes.

Pier Carlo: What was it like for different cultures to intermingle? Were there surprising things for you or for the participants?

Maria: Well, I think one of our favorite parts of our meetings was the food. 

Pier Carlo: Yeah, because culture is clearest in food-making. And music. Music and food-making.

Maria: Yes, music and food. It's always part of our culture too. And that's why with that first project that I talked about, they invited us in their own homes and cooked a meal for us. It's like food is so integrated into everything we do in our culture.

When I proposed the project to Synergy, I asked them as part of the budget to have money so that I could purchase Latin American food from Latin vendors in Madison and I would be bringing that food for every meeting. I would always be bringing food from different Latin American countries for each meeting, and we would just gather around this food and talk and just catch up. Then we would move into another room where we would embroider. It was just so much fun to just eat and just share, almost like a little party.

Pier Carlo: Sure. Well, which brings me to my next question. Just the experience of gathering monthly to share food and stories has great impact. What do you think is particularly important about the artmaking aspect of your meetings? Why is it so crucial?

Maria: Embroidery is an artform that has been used in Latin America for centuries, and so it's a craft that we can all connect to, all of us. If you ask any of these women, they'll have memories that relate to embroidery. "Oh, my grandma used to do embroidery." "Oh, I remember in school they taught us embroidery." Embroidery is something very much embedded in our memories.

Embroidery is also a very, very slow process, and it allows us to pause, it allows us to be present, it allows us to stitch. While we're stitching, we can talk at the same time and have really meaningful conversations during this artform that is very slow. It gives us that time, and it gives us that space to just share with one another. Other artforms are not as slow and require a different kind of attention. Embroidery is so beautiful in that it allows us to sit together and create community with one another.

And the other beautiful thing about embroidery is that it’s almost like writing or drawing with stitches. Food is wonderful, but it's very ephemeral. You eat it, and then it's done. It disappears. All that stays is a memory. But with embroidery, attached to that experience, it allows us to almost document and preserve that meal that we just had and shared with one another. It preserves our experiences, and it lasts longer than a meal would, if that makes any sense.

Pier Carlo: Yeah, that makes sense. What's been the most useful or surprising piece of feedback you've heard from one of your participants?

Maria: Well, if it's OK with you, I wanted to share a quote from one of our participants.

Pier Carlo: Oh, sure.

Maria: I wanted to share it in Spanish first because it sounds way better in Spanish, because Spanish is just such a beautiful language.

Pier Carlo: Sure. And then you'll give us a translation?

Maria: And then I'll give you a translation.

Pier Carlo: Awesome. Thank you.

Maria: This is by Rosi. Rosi has been a part of this embroidery journey since the very beginning. This is what she shared. This is her quote in Spanish first: 

"Me encanta esta actividad porque mientras bordo, hago volar mis pensamientos al pasado y medito en los bellos y malos momentos entre mi país y esta nueva cultura. Pero, en cada puntada que avanzo, me digo: no importa dónde esté, ahí me abriré camino, lo vestiré de colores y lo alimentaré con las experiencias de mis compañeras. La experiencia de bordar es nueva para mí, como tantas cosas nuevas que he experimentado en esta cultura. No es fácil bordar y no es fácil vivir lejos del lugar donde nacemos. Cuando veo el trabajo terminado digo: no fue fácil, pero lo logré y se ve bello. Pero lo más valioso son las experiencias compartidas entre el grupo y darme cuenta de que no importa qué tan lejos estemos ni qué tan difícil sea, aquí también haremos historia y brillaremos.”

And this is the English translation:

"I love this activity because while I embroider, my thoughts travel back in time, and I reflect on both the beautiful and difficult moments between my country and this new culture. But with each stitch, I remind myself, no matter where I am, I will make my way. I will dress my journey in colors, and I will nourish it with the experiences of my companions. Embroidery is new to me, just like so many things I have encountered in this culture. It is not easy to embroider, just as it is not easy to live far from the place where we were born. But when I see the finished work, I tell myself, it wasn't easy, but I did it and it looks beautiful. And the most valuable part is the experiences shared within the group, the realization that no matter how far we are or how hard it gets, here too we will make history and shine." 

Pier Carlo: It must be so edifying for you.

Maria: Yeah.

Pier Carlo: You must be so proud.

Maria: I am. It's a very powerful quote, and it's a reminder that art is more than just an activity. It is a tool for building community, connection and a sense of belonging for all of us.

Pier Carlo: It also makes me wonder, since these are crucial stories that are being told in a visual stitchwork manner, is there an archive being made of these?

Maria: Of the stitches, of the embroidered work?

Pier Carlo: Of their work, yes.

Maria: For the Creando Arte y Comida project that we're currently doing right now — which is we're sharing meals with one another and teaching each other how to make the meal and inviting the community to come and eat our meals — the second phase for this project is to create an embroidered recipe book for these meals. Then we're going to digitalize the book so that it's accessible to anyone who has access to the internet. So that, I think, is going to be our first time that we're going to be documenting our work.

Pier Carlo: This is a brand-new project you're kicking off?

Maria: Yes. Right now, as we speak, we are meeting every month, once a month, and each of these women are teaching us how to make a meal from her home country. And the community, the Madison community, is invited to come. Anyone can come; you just have to register in advance. We're just sharing this meal, and the women that's presenting her meal is sharing her story.

Our hope is that after we're done with the meal portion of this project this coming fall, we're going to start meeting together again just as our group, just the Unidas por Hilos group, to embroider those recipes and to embroider the images that come to our minds through those recipes. Then we're going to be scanning all of these pages, our cloth pages, and creating a digital book of it. But we're also going to create an artist book, a tangible artist book. It'll just be one, but we're hoping to have an exhibition for it along with a digital version of the book and a video that documents the whole process.

Pier Carlo: Fantastic idea. 

I wonder if in the last couple of months the conversations have changed at all, given a number of edicts coming from Washington? What are you hearing from members, whether they're documented or not, about what they're feeling? Has there been a change in attendance or a change in what's being discussed?

Maria: There's definitely been a lot of fear and uncertainty, and more than fear, I think it's more uncertainty. Some of these women are kind of in limbo as to what's going to happen. They don't know what's going to happen.

But our meetings are not spent focusing on that. Our meetings are very joyful meetings, and our meetings are just a time for us to take a deep breath and leave everything from the outside world behind. This becomes our world, and we get to define what happens inside our own little group. When we're together, we make a conscious decision for that space and that time to be a celebration of us. When we celebrate ourselves, it's just a time of joy for all of us, right? 

Yes, there's been times where some of them have cried, and there's been times when some of them are going through really challenging times, but what we're living through right now in this political environment, it's not the first challenge that we've ever faced, right?

Pier Carlo: Right.

Maria: These women are resilient. They have gone through so much.

Pier Carlo: Yes. Talk about journeys!

Maria: Yes. This is just one thing happening, but these women will push through this because all of us, we're resilient women. It's not going to hold us down.

For me personally, it makes me feel very sad. I didn't know that there were so many people who don't want us, who don't welcome us, and because of a piece of paper. That makes me very sad. It makes me feel all unwelcomed. In fact, I had been telling my husband the other day, we were talking about that, and I said, "You know, I really miss being in Honduras and just feeling home, feeling like I don't have to have anything to prove myself in this country because this is my home, Honduras." And he asked me, "Do you feel home now here?" And my answer was, "Well, home isn't just a place anymore. It's home for me now. It's where I've developed deep connections." 

For example, home is when I'm at work and I'm surrounded by all my amazing coworkers and students. I get the privilege to work at a school that is over 80% Hispanic-identifying students. And the majority of my coworkers are also from Latin American countries. So when I say that I feel at home at work it’s because I'm literally surrounded by people who speak my language and understand my culture. I also feel at home with the women at Unidas por Hilos because we connect through art, we connect through meals, we connect through our stories and our stitches. I also feel at home when I am cuddling in bed with my husband and my two kids and especially my golden retriever. 

So even though home in the outside world is a hard concept to define, it's very easy for me to define it when I'm with those people who I know how to connect with.

Pier Carlo: You have your own immigrant story. What's been the most surprising thing you've learned through Unidas por Hilos about other immigrant stories?

Maria: It's funny because I struggled with connecting with Americans, even though I'm married to an American, very much a white man from Michigan, and I've been part of this culture for, like I said before, over 28 years. Yet I still had a really hard time connecting with people. And I'm not alone in that. If you ask these women, they will say that for them one of the hard things is not the physical wall on the border, it's the invisible walls between us here in our communities, these invisible walls that keep us separated from one another. We are in a little bubble, and the others are in a little bubble. How do we break our bubble so that we can connect with one another?

For me, I always thought it was my lack of understanding of American humor. I always thought I was not a funny person because I wasn't witty enough or I wasn't sarcastic enough. I simply just never understood American jokes, and so I thought maybe that's why I can't connect. But I am a funny person when I speak in Spanish. [She laughs.]

Pier Carlo: [Laughing] You just made me think that actually, along with food and music, there is nothing as culturally specific as humor.

Maria: Yes, humor is so wonderful. When I'm with these women at Unidas por Hilos, all that humor that I haven't been able to understand in the American culture just comes back, and I'm like, "I am a funny person and I understand jokes," because these women are just funny and we laugh and I understand what they're saying and I understand the context surrounding their humor as well.

When I was in my MFA program, I was once told, "You need to find your people here. You need to know who your people are." That always stayed with me. Everywhere I went, I was like, "Who are my people?" One of the most beautiful things to have resulted from Unidas por Hilos, this collective of women embroiderers, is that I have finally found my people. They are the women that I can connect with and I can laugh with and just be myself.

Pier Carlo: You mentioned these invisible bubbles that made it hard for you and many of your friends to connect in this culture. How would you like artists of all types, whether immigrants or not, to pop those bubbles? In what way can artists do that kind of work?

Maria: I always tell other people who ask a similar question, "Just come. Come and eat with us." Listening is so important because when somebody stops and gives you attention — just like you are doing, right? You're interested in my story — it makes me feel that what I have to share is important to you. For someone else to ask an immigrant to share their story over a meal, I think it makes them feel validated and heard.

Also, I've seen some artists creating work about immigration, but I think it's also important to create work with immigrants. Why not give them that opportunity? And when I say that, it's not about just creating participatory art projects where you are inviting them to be part of your project, which is what I've been doing sometimes. Like, yeah, Viajes del Horizonte was participatory in nature. I led the whole entire thing. I was the one with the idea and I just taught them how to make paper, and then they pulp-painted. But there wasn't much choice for the participant in that project, which was not a bad thing because that was the nature of the project. But I think as artists, it would be also good to create projects that are more collaborative.

For me, collaboration is where everybody invited into that project is sharing ideas from the start so that the project is not a project owned by one person but it's a project owned by everyone in the group and where everybody's creative contribution holds equal value. I think that's been something very important for me to continue to reflect on after every project, to say, "What kind of project do I want this to be? Do I want this to give space for the women to be co-collaborators on this? Or do I want this project to be something where they just come and make a mark?"

For me, Unidas por Hilos is a collaborative project versus Bordando Memorias, which was more limited in terms of choice for the women because I was the one who drew their portraits. I was the one who created the drawing. They were the ones who said, "These are the flowers that I want on my portrait," and they were the ones who embroidered it. But how much choice ... ? It's almost like when I'm teaching students K through 8, when I'm planning my lessons, I'm always asking myself, "How much choice or how much creative voice will students have in this lesson?" 

I think there's room for both because sometimes the students just need to focus on skill where creativity is not as important. But then when they've obtained that skill, I think it's very important to give them room for creative voice. And so now that the women know how to embroider at Unidas por Hilos, now it's a good time for them to share their own creative voice.

So when we do the embroidered recipe book, I will be there providing guidance if they need it, but my goal for that embroidered book is for them to design their own cloth page, however they want to do it, with whatever stitches they want to make. For me, that process is a successful process when the process is ending in 100% creative voice for that person who's participating in the project.

So yeah, when artists are doing projects with immigrants, perhaps part of the project is teaching skill, but it should always have room for sharing the immigrant's voice because it's a voice that is often unheard and invisible.