Artist/Maker Victory Garden (founded 2016)

Miss Take

2017

Synthetic fibers

Overall: 4 1/8 × 71 1/2 in. (10.5 × 181.6 cm)

Gift of Victory Garden

2018.17.11

Victory Garden is a New York City group of six women artists and curators (Louise Eastman, Janis Stemmermann, Jess Frost, Tara Geer, Katie Michel, and Wendy Small) who began meeting after the presidential primaries to collaborate on responsive and impactful creative projects. The group named themselves after the victory gardens of World War II. For the Women’s March, they created sashes that reference those worn by early 20th-century suffragists, but with messages that riff on beauty pageants, such as “Miss Construed,” “Miss Judged,” and “Miss Understood.” Working out of Russell Janis, Stemmermann’s studio and retail space in Williamsburg, the group freely distributed some 1,200 embroidered and screenprinted sashes in a quick timeframe to groups marching in cities across the nation. Several individual marchers donated their sashes to the New-York Historical Society. Miss 2017 is the group’s formal artistic document commemorating the project. Produced in an edition of fifteen and published by Planthouse gallery, it consists of a boxed portfolio containing eleven sashes and a colophon, along with a letterpress printed poster. The sashes’ color schemes reference the suffrage tricolor of green, purple, and white.

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