Womb Chair Speaks (2018) is an ongoing, collaborative feminist art and advocacy project grounded in acts of appropriation and reclamation. By refashioning Eero Saarinen’s iconic 1948 Womb Chair through collective stitching and “stitch ’n bitch” sessions, the project alters the chair’s form, surface, and expression, transforming a modernist design object into a site of embodied critique.
The project sponsors a space and forum to examine the cultural and medical mythologies surrounding the human uterus, while asking how women live in bodies with wombs in patriarchal society. Centering conversation as feminist care work, Womb Chair Speaks allows the people gathered around the chair to direct the dialogue, producing knowledge through shared story, touch, labor, and repair.
At its core, Womb Chair Speaks advocates for women’s health and brings attention to the women’s health gap, where women face 25% poorer health worldwide because of biased science, underinvestment, and long-standing neglect of women’s bodies in research and care.
Womb Chair Speaks has been exhibited at Winterthur Museum, Harvard University, the University of Graz, Austria, and at University College, Dublin. The project is the centerpiece of a seminar Makker teaches at Hobart William Smith Colleges called “Gender, Space, and Narrative,” during which students participate and lead stitching sessions with the Chair, and work on their own projects of reclamation and stitching as feminist cultural intervention.
