Zina Hall

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."

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.