Important people: Dolton, Patricia F. (Tisha); Dolton, Tamaris Ann; Portrait subjects: Helene (1887-1965); Starbuck, Kathryn Mitchell, Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Wakeman (1882-1960); MacArthur, Anna Lewis (1858-1949); Hoag, Lydia Dwelle (1835-1906); Ferguson, Gertrude B. (1871-1964); Murray, Marcella ‘Celia’ (c. 1847-1916).
Artist and historian, Patricia (Tisha) Dolton grew up in Washington County, New York. She has a BA in History from SUNY New Paltz, and an MS in Library and Information Science from SUNY Albany. She has worked as a site interpreter in a number of sites in the San Diego, California, area, as well as in the Albany, New York area. She currently works in the Folklife Center at Crandall Public library, serves on the board of the Warren County (NY) Historical Society, and co-founded the Celebrating Suffrage in Greater Glens Falls Committee, which creates and promotes suffrage and women’s history events in the region. Dolton taught herself hand embroidery in 1988 while working as a seasonal interpretive ranger at the Saratoga National Historical Park in Stillwater, New York. In these items, Dolton has combined her skills in embroidery and drawing with her passion for woman’s suffrage to create a unique series of portraits. Tamaris Dolton, a quilter (and Tisha’s mother), did the quilting on the backs of the tea cozies. Tisha Dolton has been studying the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the songs which came out of it, for over twenty years. Because 2020 marks the centennial anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, this seemed an especially opportune time to celebrate the women who advocated for it. Dolton chose to create her portraits on tea cozies because of the very domestic nature of tea cozies – objects of the household sphere to which women of their era were supposed to be confined. Also, the Suffrage movement had strong ties to tea – even using the Boston Tea Party slogan “No taxation without Representation” as a rallying cry. The redwork style of embroidery became popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The term “art needlework” was coined to distinguish it from plain sewing. One reason for its popularity was because it only required three beginner stitches: stem stitch, lazy daisy, and French knot, and one color of thread. The six tea cozies collected here were created as a part of the exhibit Equali-tea: Suffragist Cozies in Redwork: A Centennial Suffrage Exhibition, in the Folklife Center Gallery through the summer of 2021.
Purchased from the artist by Todd DeGarmo, Director of the Folklife Center, 2021.
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