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Zina Hall

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  • Born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1964, Zina Hall eventually moved to Oakland, where she learned to sew by making clothes at Fremont High School. After graduation, she honed her machine and hand stitch skills by making quilts with "the old ladies'' at the Veteran's Center across the street. When she arrived in the Creative Growth Studio in 2006, she began embroidering along the existing lines in brocade and lace fabrics, displaying extraordinary color sense and masterful stitchwork. The evolution of Zina’s practice to create embroidered portraits emerged organically, upon the suggestion that she combine her sewing skills with the treasured family photos that she transported to the Studio every day.


    Zina often uses vintage linens in her work - heirlooms that are passed down through generations and become even more treasured under Zina’s hand. Her work is a powerful tool of remembrance, bringing the past closer not only to Zina, but to her audience. This is most apparent in Zina’s portraits of her family, often used as tributes after their death. Her portraits are tangible objects of familial devotion, and serve to immortalize Zina’s love for these figures as well as process their loss. Her late mother, father, and husband are recurring subjects, plucked from photos and reverently captured in thread.

    Zina Hall

  • With an eye for composition and the diligence to complete labor-intensive pieces, Zina’s quilting skills are evident in her embroidered portraits. Zina’s pride is in their creation, demonstrated by the quick repetition of her hands. She sits stoically and with tremendous focus while she sews, filling the embroidery hoop with stitches, knotting the thread, and moving on to the next piece without ceremony. She refers to sewing as her “job," maintaining a strict routine at home that mimics her schedule at Creative Growth. "That's all I do is sew. That's what I do."

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  • Available Work

    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile with red borders. It depicts a singing Aretha Franklin, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text on the right reads "ARETHA SOUL FRANKLIN SISTER."
      Zina Hall
      Aretha Franklin Soul Sister (ZH 27), 2018
      Embroidered textile
      9x10.75 inches
    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts Stevie Wonder, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text across the top reads "STEVIE WONDER"
      Zina Hall
      Stevie Wonder (ZH 67), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      11.5x16 inches
    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts Janet Jackson and Janet Dubois on a green background, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text across the top reads "JANET JACKSON AND JANET DUBOIS."
      Zina Hall
      Janet Jackson and Ja'Net DuBois (ZH 31), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      21x21 inches
      $1,200.00
    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts Mary Wells on a blue background, filled with by neat vertical lines of stitches. Stitched text at the top left reads "MARY WELLS."
      Zina Hall
      Mary Wells (ZH 32), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      20x21 inches
    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts Glodean and Barry White on a blue background, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text across the top reads "GODEAN [sic] AND BARRY WHITE."
      Zina Hall
      Glodean and Barry White (ZH 43), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      20.75x21.5 inches
      $1,200.00
    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts Aretha Franklin in a blue dress on a black background, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches.
      Zina Hall
      Aretha Franklin (ZH 65), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      15x15 inches
    Close
  • Zina documents and celebrates American pop culture from the 60s and 70s, which had a lasting effect on her as...
    Zina Hall
    Aretha Franklin (ZH 68), 2021
    Embroidered textile
    19.5x19.5 inches
    Sold

    Zina documents and celebrates American pop culture from the 60s and 70s, which had a lasting effect on her as a child. The musicians she depicts are rooted in memories of growing up in Oakland with her parents, affectionately called “Gogo'' and “Booby.” Immersed in the heyday of Motown music, the culture of her childhood is at the forefront of Zina’s memory. She prefers to work from images that focus on faces, like album covers. Music remains fundamental to Zina’s practice at Creative Growth - she usually listens to Motown first thing in the morning as she helps set up the Studio and wears her headphones most of the day as she works.

    Zina also revisits old television shows in her work. Good Times, Sanford and Son, and The Golden Girls have always been her favorites, and during this extended period of sheltering-in-place, reruns are often playing in the background while she sews at home.

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    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts Smokey Robinson on a purple background, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text across the top reads "SMOKEY ROBINSON."
      Zina Hall
      Smokey Robinson (ZH 36), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      14.75x19.5 inches
    • An embroidery piece on found textile. The embroidery is from a Gladys Knight album cover depicting Gladys Knight and the Pips. They are filled with neat horizontal lines of stitches. ⁠"GLADYS KNIGHT AND PIPS" is sewn across the top.
      Zina Hall
      Gladys Knight and Pips (ZH 46), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      13.75x19 inches
    Close
    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts Barry White's face, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text across the top reads "BARRY WHITE."
      Zina Hall
      Barry White (ZH 47), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      13.75x14 inches
    • An embroidery piece on a beige found textile with brown borders. It depicts Deniece Williams in a red dress, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text across the top reads: "DENIECE WILLIAMS."
      Zina Hall
      Deniece Williams (ZH 37), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      11x16.5 inches
      $1,200.00
    • An embroidery piece on a beige found textile with brown borders. It depicts Betty White's face, scenes, and text from the Golden Girls, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches.
      Zina Hall
      Golden Girls (ZH 49), 2018
      Embroidered textile
      14x16.5 inches
    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts two figures embracing at the center. The background is filled with neat concentric lines of blue and green stitches to the edges. Stitched text below the figures reads "HOW WE BECAME BEST FRIENDS."
      Zina Hall
      How We Became Best Friends (ZH 35), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      19x20 inches
    • An embroidery piece on a beige found textile. It depicts Sherman Hemsley and Isabella Sanford, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text at the top left reads "SHERM HEMLE [sic] AND ISABELLA SANFORD."
      Zina Hall
      Sherm Hemle and Isabella Sanford (ZH 44), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      18x18 inches
    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts Mary Wells on a blue background, filled with by neat vertical lines of stitches. Stitched text at the top left reads "MARY WELLS."
      Zina Hall
      Dionne Warwick and Whitney Houston (ZH 33), 2021
      Embroidered textile
      20x21 inches
    Close
  • To Inquire further, please email gallery@creativegrowth.org

     

     

     

    • A photograph of Glodean and Barry White, laying on a blue bed in a dark bedroom. The outlines of their shapes have been traced with black felt-tipped pen.
    • A black felt tipped pen drawing on white paper of two indistinct figures, reclining on a bed.
    • An embroidery piece on a white found textile. It depicts Glodean and Barry White on a blue background, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text across the top reads "GODEAN [sic] AND BARRY WHITE."
    Close
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    Using a lightbox and a black felt-tipped pen, Zina traces the contours and essential features of her chosen photograph onto the linen. Then, she deftly begins her stitchwork, choosing thread that matches most closely with the palette of the original image, or if it is black and white, using up any thread she has laying around (Zina is not one to tolerate waste). The outlines are quickly filled with fields of horizontal running stitches, which delineate details like an arm around a shoulder, or the way her mother, Gogo, used to wear her hair. Similar to a photo album, Zina labels many of her portraits with the subject’s name. If she chooses to include a background, those stitches carry the same weight, creating immersive planes of textured color.



    • A photograph of Sherman Hemsley and Isabella Sanford embracing. They have been outlined with black felt-tipped pen.
    • An embroidery piece on a beige found textile. It depicts Sherman Hemsley and Isabella Sanford, filled with by neat horizontal lines of stitches. Stitched text at the top left reads "SHERM HEMLE [sic] AND ISABELLA SANFORD."
    Close
  • Zina Hall, a Black woman in a red dress, clasps her hands and smiles down at a colorful embroidery on the table she is sitting at.

    “I met Zina when I started working at Creative Growth. She’s an amazing sewer with her exquisite, tiny little embroidery. It was so painterly. I would see her taking these family pictures out of her bag, organizing them, and putting them back. So I asked her once, why don't you just draw them and maybe we can do embroidery if you draw them onto fabric? We started having a lot of conversations regarding her photographs - this big collection of amazing photos. So I gave her a pen and a lightbox, and with some translucent fabric, she just started tracing and has been doing it ever since.”

    - Veronica Rojas, Studio Instructor


    “I think about the type of embroidery Zina does. She uses a running stitch most often - that’s the building block of hand sewing. This technique, meant for attaching, signals that something is handmade. Conceptually, it’s like she’s doing this bonding technique between her and her family, and her memories. Retracing it and remembering it. It’s like she’s spending time with her loved ones.”

    - Amy Keefer, Studio Instructor

     


Creative Growth is a nonprofit organization that serves artists with disabilities by providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition, and representation.

 

Founded in 1974, Creative Growth is the oldest art center and exhibition space for adults with disabilities in the United States. Currently, there are over 150 artists working in our studio in a variety of media including painting, drawing, textiles, woodwork, ceramics, rugs, printmaking, and video production. Artwork fostered in this unique environment has been acquired by prominent institutions worldwide, including the MoMA, The Centre Pompidou, SFMOMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The American Folk Art museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Collection de L’art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.

 

If the first university developed from a gathering of people exchanging ideas, then Creative Growth is a kind of university. Here for almost 50 years, artists with disabilities have gathered to communicate, express themselves, draw, paint, sculpt, and seek innovative ways towards creative self-realization and identity.                     

--Tom di Maria Director, Creative Growth Art Center

 

The work produced by Creative Growth’s artists represents everything I could hope for in art: it is simultaneously joyful, sincere, obsessive and puzzling, and forcefully reminds me of why I remain committed to the potential of art to illuminate our lives.                                               

--Matthew Higgs Director and Chief Curator, White Columns, New York

Creative Growth is a nonprofit organization that serves artists with disabilities by providing a professional studio environment for artistic development, gallery exhibition, and representation.

 

Founded in 1974, Creative Growth is the oldest art center and exhibition space for adults with disabilities in the United States. Currently, there are over 150 artists working in our studio in a variety of media including painting, drawing, textiles, woodwork, ceramics, rugs, printmaking, and video production. Artwork fostered in this unique environment has been acquired by prominent institutions worldwide, including the MoMA, The Centre Pompidou, SFMOMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The American Folk Art museum, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Collection de L’art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.

 


If the first university developed from a gathering of people exchanging ideas, then Creative Growth is a kind of university. Here for almost 40 years, artists with disabilities have gathered to communicate, express themselves, draw, paint, sculpt, and seek innovative ways towards creative self-realization and identity.                     

--Tom di Maria Director, Creative Growth Art Center

 

The work produced by Creative Growth’s artists represents everything I could hope for in art: it is simultaneously joyful, sincere, obsessive and puzzling, and forcefully reminds me of why I remain committed to the potential of art to illuminate our lives.                                               

 


Creative Growth Art Center | 355 24th st Oakland, CA | Contact gallery@creativegrowth.org with any questions

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