For Lutz, the show is “a love letter to this lineage and my place within it, a celebration of carework’s intimate and temporal textures.” It consists of three distinct yet interrelated series. The first, Mending, is a series of quilts featuring appliqué collage and hand embroidery, each a meditation on the reciprocity of intergenerational care and made from clothing and fabric scraps passed down to the artist. Portrait of a Familiar Embrace reanimates the handmade textiles of Lutz’s childhood, each using a different printmaking method and embroidery technique to pay homage to the physical reminders of care we hold onto. Fencesitter captures fleeting moments of care contained within us through one-of-a-kind monotypes of reimagined sonograms.  

The emphasis on fiber art represents a shift in Lutz’s practice: “Whereas printmaking has always felt like a natural extension of my disabled body – where repetition and imperfections reflect the tedium of chronic illness – fiber art provides a direct connection to my experiences of caregiving,” they say. “Like stitching and mending, giving and receiving care are deeply intimate acts, and ones that have long been denigrated and obscured for their association with feminine and domestic labor. It is this in/visibility that connects carework and disability, an elusive relationship that I strive to convey through my merging of print and fiber.” 

We all need and receive care within our lives, and we all provide care in one form or another,” Lutz says. “Why, then, does this labor often feel so invisible and undervalued?” This question shaped each series in the show, connecting the artist’s personal experiences to the ways carework has long been denigrated and obscured for its association with feminized and domestic work. This pattern was reinforced as they sifted through the lives of these matriarchs, unearthing their hidden and quiet work – a leather nursing bag, binders of recipes, mended children’s clothing, unfinished weavings, founding documents for the state’s first hospice organization. “Whether in the domestic or professional sphere, each woman engaged in labor historically deemed as inferior simply for being ‘women’s work,’” Lutz says — and only after their passing, when surrounded by relics of their labor, did it become clear how invisible it was during their lifetimes. “By using fragments of their work as well as feminized mediums like embroidery and quilting throughout this show, I aim to make their labor – and carework in general – more visible and tangible to behold.”