Sophia Narrett Presents Powerful Work Exploring New Motherhood at the Flag Art Foundation
The textile artist's striking, hand-embroidered piece "These Days Are Mine to Keep" is on view through October 25
On view through October 25, the FLAG Art Foundation’s “Spotlight” series returns to Chelsea with a presentation by 2019 Galerie Emerging Artist Award-winner Sophia Narrett. The program highlights new or never-before seen artwork alongside commissioned texts, producing focused exchanges between artists and writers. For this installment, Narrett debuts These Days Are Mine to Keep (2025), paired with an essay by art journalist Jacoba Urist.
Through her meticulous creation process, Narrett resists the accelerating pace of contemporary media, transforming the historically domesticated practice of embroidery into a vehicle for exploring the complexities of womanhood. Her lush scenes engage the histories of American advertising and feminist art, where pleasure and desire coexist with critique. Drawing on source material from the internet, she reworks the visual language of mass media to question how representations of female sexuality, intimacy and power circulate in the digital age. Within her densely layered narratives, “every piece is very personal and literal, and each part has a specific meaning,” Narrett explained to Urist.
These Days Are Mine to Keep is the first work Narrett created since becoming a mother, tracing the cycles of marriage, sex, childbirth, and maternal love. In it, a woman shoots breast milk while spinning cabbages, one couple balances on a seesaw as another has sex below, and a mother tends to her newborn in a hospital bed—a surreal blend of tenderness and wit. Urist proclaims that “sex, the essential catalyst for the life cycle of this artwork, is a transformative moment of eroticism…time elasticizes as Narrett’s characters outline an emotional ontological framework for past, present, and future.”
Inspired by Harrison Fisher’s early twentieth-century “wedding series” lithographs and Susan Stewart’s writings on how manufactured mini-worlds can reflect big emotions, Narrett turns everyday life into something poetic and myth-like. The result is a work that feels both grounded and transcendent, a vision of motherhood and desire stitched into permanence.