An enduring testimony to the power of art to build community

Embroiderers of Ninhue (cloth)

Stitching Chilean Rural Life

Carmen Benavente, with foreword by Jean L. Druesedow

View highlights from “The Art of Stitching the Ordinary: Embroideries from Ninhue," exhibition at the Embassy of Chile, March 9-April 29, 2011

For four decades, the embroiderers of Ninhue, Chile, have been stitching scenes of rural life in the “place of stones”—their village in the foothills of the Coastal Range between Santiago and Concepción. Their work stands today among the most evocative of Chilean arts, as evocative as the story of how they came together at a crucial moment in Chile's history.

Amid the political upheaval of 1971, stitchery expert Carmen Benavente returned to her native Santiago to find much of her family’s farmland expropriated and resentment fomenting against former landowners. “Death to Benavente” she saw painted on one wall as she drove through the streets.

Despite her family’s anxieties, Benavente was determined to bridge alienation, to reach out to the families she’d grown up among. Going door to door on foot, she offered to teach the women of Ninhue wool embroidery, a nontraditional art. What followed is the story of a remarkable group of women empowered creatively and economically by their new undertaking. As artisans and entrepreneurs who found eager markets for their original works in such imaginative patterns and textures as those showcased here, they continue to stitch a success story all their own.

In Benavente’s poignant telling, the embroiderers of Ninhue map a social, economic, and artistic journey inspiring to artisans, aficionados, curators, historians, and economists. Despite dramatic swings of the political pendulum, what these women built together succeeded in giving them a sphere of standing too little explored.

Born, raised, and educated in Santiago, Chile, teacher and lecturer Carmen Benavente took up embroidery in 1963 after making the United States her permanent home. A longtime enthusiast of the textile arts, Benavente continues to study and write at the home she shares with her husband, composer Juan Orrego-Salas, in the woods of southern Indiana. Jean L. Druesedow is director of the Kent State University Museum.

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