On Apps and Appliqué

The Travelers

When Ashkenazi/Anishinaabe Métis artist Mimi Gellman shows me her recent stitchwork for Traveler 1 and Traveler 2 (2025), she removes a dark, beaded collar, revealing a circular shape. The beads come in four sizes, the smallest barely fitting the width of a needle. The larger beads form constellations with connective thread, each constellation representing star arrangements on the night of her mother’s birth. The smaller beads accompany the constellations as a kind of celestial backdrop, a view of the universe continually at hand. As Gellman returns the collar to its place atop a red Melton wool dress, the collar forms a poncho-like curve, a half arc draping across the chest and back. It covers the dress around the shoulders with a sweep of the sky.

Gellman’s second form, a traditional jacket and pants, features stiff layers of tobacco leaves that she soaked in glycerin and water, dried and pressed, and attached to a larger backing fabric. The leaves make the surface thick with texture, their veins collecting at the seams like well-worn leather. For her, tobacco comes with great responsibility. As education scholar Debby Danard Wilson (Anishinaabekwe) explains, “this practice of offering tobacco with humble thankfulness is to petition guidance from the spiritual realm to the physical realm.”1 

In this configuration, Gellman is not working alone. Her materials create with and collaborate, inviting a sacred reciprocity.2 Across months of patient handwork, listening to and remembering familial teachings, Gellman draws connections with past and future making practices. Bead to cloth, fiber to backing, organic fronds to felted wool, the materials remind and remember. Their connections, felt and passed on while pressing leaves and stitching beads, hold possibilities for what lies ahead. 

Appliqué

Within stitching traditions, Gellman’s work with layered fiber and beading could be characterized as appliqué—attaching small pieces of fabric onto a larger cloth. Borrowed from French, the word invokes the Latin applicāre, “to attach, join to, devote oneself to” (a combination of “ad,” meaning to, toward, at, and “plicāre,” meaning to fold, to bend). As the past participle of the French term appliquer, appliqué has long referred to a functional process, or “to use (for a particular purpose), to put into practice, to attribute (to), (reflexive) to adapt (oneself to).”3 The technique relies on two main components: a base fabric and a piece of cloth layered on top, often small and decorative.4 To create an appliqué, a craftsperson cuts and stitches a small fabric piece to the surface of a larger fabric, often toward a pattern or larger design.5

As a decorative technique, appliqué dates to at least the fifth century BCE.6 Early forms include Coptic Egyptian tunics, which sometimes used fabric scraps and remnants,7 and ancestral jacket making and other clothing decoration by the Ainu, an aboriginal group of Hokkaido in the northernmost main island of Japan.8 Additional forms include carpets and wall hangings with felted fabrics, where “the designs were formed with other, smaller pieces of multicolored felt.”9 Later examples involved straw designs on brisé fans made of wide sticks,10 gilt paper motifs and spangles,11 and Ferragamo sneaker pumps with appliqué patterns.12

Art historians tend to locate appliqué within the ornamental, a type of decoration that embellishes but does not define the work ahead. In this formation, the technique undergirds its broader erasure as a mode of feminized, racialized labor. Feminist quilt historian Patricia Mainardi made this point in her 1973 essay “Quilts: The Great American Art,” where she compared pieced quilting traditions with appliqué quilting traditions: 

Although the sexist and racist art world will, if forced, include token artists, they will never allow them to expand the definitions of art, but will include only those whose work can be used to rubber-stamp already established white male art styles. Because our female ancestors’ pieced quilts bear a superficial resemblance to the work of contemporary formalist artists such as Stella, Noland and Newman… Male curators and critics are now capable of “seeing” the art in them. But the appliqué quilts, which current male artists have not chosen to imitate, are therefore just written off as inferior art.13

As one act of discrimination, Mainardi observes that exhibition catalogs for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1971 “Abstract Design in American Quilts” show in New York and the Smithsonian’s 1972 “American Pieced Quilts” show in Washington, D.C praised pieced quilts as noteworthy with words like “strong,” “bold,” and “vigorous,” while dismissing appliqué quilts as superficial with words like “elegant,” “pretty,” and “decorative.” Within the catalog essays for both shows, as within adjacent curatorial spaces, connections with appliqué proffered familiar tactics of subjugation. 

Gellman’s garments suggest that the work of connecting material is neither conceptually nor symbolically static. It draws on craftwork traditions, especially embroidery and quilting, that activate stories within a wider history of protest. In her astute analysis of cotton harvesting represented within visual arts, historian Anna Arabindan-Kesson traces how textile objects like the Bible Quilt (1885–6) by Harriet Powers, a formerly enslaved woman who became a sharecropper, carried emancipatory stories (in her case, connecting American quilting traditions to salient visual symbolism of animals used by the Fon people of Dahomey in the south of present-day Benin).14 As Arabindan-Kesson explains, Powers used combined quilting and appliqué techniques to “materialize the multiple and various kinships she was connected to.” Appliqué, as a means of rehearsing ancestral knowledge, offers a tool of materialized dissent.

Left: Mimi Gellman, Traveler 1, 2025. Right: Mimi Gellman, Traveler 2, 2025.