Tabitha Arnold:

Gospel of the Working Class

Curated by Jacob Rhodes

Sep 4 - Oct 4, 2025

PRESS coverage is listed at the bottom of the page.

Field Projects is proud to present TABITHA ARNOLD : GOSPEL OF THE WORKING CLASS. 

Gospel of the Working Class illuminates 100 years of labor struggle in the south through a series of narrative tapestry banners. Inspired by a historic union victory by the United Auto Workers at Volkswagen Chattanooga in 2024, Tabitha Arnold partnered with the People’s History of Chattanooga to bring little-known labor history back into public memory. The show emphasizes the reactionary south as a site of revolutionary struggle, profoundly shaped by its history of labor militancy and working-class revolt. Arnold appropriates bible-belt imagery from her own childhood into symbols of class struggle; a nod to the deep tradition of spirituality interlinked with socialist organizing in East Tennessee. The tapestries rest on the same banner poles used at the annual Durham Miner’s Gala in England, transforming them into public artworks that can travel to union rallies and live with the working people whose struggles they commemorate.

Tabitha Arnold is a Chattanooga-born artist, socialist, and labor organizer. Her labor-intensive embroidered tapestries reflect coming of age during a wave of renewed union efforts in the United States. In 2019, Arnold joined an emerging cafe workers’ movement in Philadelphia, where she studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Her experiences in the workplace and on the picket line informed her self-taught textile practice, which references political art movements like Soviet social realism and Palestinian liberation posters. After moving back to Chattanooga in 2022, Arnold began to depict the radical labor history of the south as a call for East Tennessee to return to its militant roots.

PRESS

Last year, workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted to join the United Auto Workers — a breakthrough in the largely non-unionized South. The decision inspired Tabitha Arnold, a local artist and organizer, to dig into the labor history of her hometown, with the help of a project called the People’s History of Chattanooga. The episodes she uncovered inform the three riotous and righteous tapestries in her exhibition “Gospel of the Working Class.”

The pieces, which hang from metal poles, are mixture of propaganda posters, religious banners and fiber art. Arnold stacks rows of figures that alternately toil, march and rally against sites like trolley cars and factories. The repetition of bodies suggests the repetitive nature of so much modern labor, but also the coalescence of people that organizing requires.

Arnold intersperses religious imagery, which helps create the sense of a vertical progression between hell and heaven, or at least struggle and satisfaction. The top of “These Hands” (2024) depicts workers holding up a bridge that cars drive across, while angels trumpet above.

Reproductions of archival material and short, original videos by Jeremy Flood, a video producer at the United Auto Workers, expand the show’s history lesson. But there’s something about Arnold’s choice of medium — punch-needle tapestry, a labor-intensive process that she taught herself, and continues to do by hand — that moves her work beyond simple propaganda. As you contemplate the products of her physical labor, they begin to tell their own stories. JILLIAN STEINHAUER

In the early 16th century, the forces of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, rescued the northern Italian city of Pavia from the siege laid to it by France’s Francis I—dividing his army, felling many Gallic nobles and eventually capturing the roi himself. Shortly thereafter, this pivotal battle was immortalized in a series of tapestries by Bernard van Orley. While the struggles captured in Tabitha Arnold’s tapestries may not determine the fate of kings, her depictions of the labor movement are just as epically rendered.

The history of labor brings to mind Chicago’s Pullman strike, Pittsburgh’s steelworkers and New York’s postal employees. But Chattanooga and Volkswagen? Now at Field Projects, “Gospel of the Working Class” is a small show with outsize impact, in which three of Ms. Arnold’s punch-needle textiles honor workers’ actions in her native Tennessee.

These works, each roughly 4 by 6 feet and hung from banner poles used at the annual Durham Miner’s Gala in England, borrow religious imagery common to the American South, but Ms. Arnold also travels further afield, developing her own take on social realism that hints at Egyptian hieroglyphics and Assyrian friezes. Men and women in profile ply their trades, comfort one another, and strike. “These Hands” pays homage to the decision in 2024 by workers at that Volkswagen plant to unionize. The stacked horizontal sections of the piece build upon one another, both literally and figuratively, to convey the connections among the factory’s laborers and their broader community. At the bottom, they weld and drill, constructing a stable base on which the rest of the composition flourishes. Hands maneuver wires, which are fed along a snaking line of protesters and into a fiery central square of the factory. Overhead, angels glide above a string of cars that cross the Tennessee River on a bridge held aloft by still more workers.

Installation view of the show featuring Ms. Arnold’s ‘These Hands.’ Photo: Field Projects

Elsewhere, a darker piece examines the strikes, boycotts and riots of the late-19th and early-20th centuries related to the city’s streetcars: Figures tear down cable poles that are reminiscent of Christ’s cross as a funeral procession marches by. “Mill Town” recounts the 1934 strike at a textile plant in the area, a subject that gives the piece a level of meta resonance that’s echoed in the labor-intensive production process of these vibrant narrative artworks.

Ms. Arnold is one of an ever-growing number of contemporary artists who have rescued textiles from second-class status in the art world. She is part of a larger trend in which media long consigned to the craft bin—or, more offensively, scorned as “women’s work”—have been reappraised, a movement that’s been aided by recent museum shows dedicated to the likes of Anni Albers, Marta Minujín and Dorothy Liebes. This is a welcome development for myriad reasons, not least because it brings us exhibitions like “Tamara Kostianovsky: Moved by Forces” at SLAG&RX.

Tabitha Arnold doesn’t make quiet work. Her tapestries thrum with the noise of strikes, of sermons, of busy factory floors. Her latest series—now on display at Field Projects in New York City—resurrects Chattanooga’s buried labor history, from streetcar operators who walked off the job a century ago to modern auto workers fighting for a union contract. These aren’t just scenes—they’re stories, stitched together with righteous anger and archival receipts. Raised in church and trained in painting, Arnold has since swapped religion for revolution, oil and canvas for the punch needle and the loom. Her tangible, “labor-intensive” art is both personal and political, driven by her values and her own experience as a labor organizer. We sat down to talk just after Labor Day, as she was setting up the new exhibition.

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DOUGLAS CORZINE: First of all, nice to meet you. Yesterday was Labor Day. How did you mark the occasion?

TABITHA ARNOLD: Well, I drove here because I tried to ship my work to New York and made a mistake with the address, so I ended up having to drive it up all by myself. But I stayed overnight in Wheeling, West Virginia, which was awesome, and then came here. I missed the Labor Day parade, which seemed really awesome. So I guess I labored.

CORZINE: What took you to Wheeling?

ARNOLD: One of my closest friends in Chattanooga is originally from Wheeling. I wanted to stop and see the Walter Reuther statue, and I had just heard they had this amazing organizing community. I saw this place called MoJo, which is a community arts center with a lot of free programming for the public. So I was just curious about what’s going on.

CORZINE: In addition to your work as an artist, you have also worked and organized in the service industry. How do you filter your own organizing experience into your art?

ARNOLD: It’s interesting. I feel like my tapestry work is not very autobiographical, really. I don’t really portray myself ever, but it is all rooted in my own experience. Being an organizer made me realize the amazing transformation people go through when they realize that they can be in a union and have power. So I don’t necessarily portray exactly what I went through, but I look for it in other labor struggles and I try to get to the spiritual and emotional heart of it.

CORZINE: You’ve talked before about the need for political artists to keep organizing and taking action beyond their art. I’m wondering how you do that now as a full-time artist.

ARNOLD: Yeah, it’s tough. Sometimes I feel like a more effective place for me to be in is community organizing because I keep getting opportunities to make artwork. But right now I’m the chair of my DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] chapter in Chattanooga, so it feels more like administrative organizing than the excitement of being part of a labor movement. There’s also a community solidarity project between people in Chattanooga and the UAW at Volkswagen because the new local won their union drive about a year ago, but they still have to negotiate a contract, which is one of the hardest parts. So I do some design work for their shirts, signs, and banners. I’ll do illustrations here and there, but it is a tough line to straddle. I miss labor organizing and being a direct part of it, but I hope what I’m doing is still helpful.

CORZINE: You have called your work “labor-intensive art.” I wonder if you can talk me through the actual physical labor that goes into making one of these pieces.

ARNOLD: I start with fabric stretched on a big set of canvas stretchers. Because I started as a painter, I was used to building canvases, but now I have embroidery backing linen, and it’s the size that the piece will eventually be. And then I’m embroidering with a punch needle, which is a faster technique than traditional embroidery. It still does take a really long time, and I will start at the very bottom of the piece and take it row by row. Generally, I don’t have a super cohesive image of what it’s going to look like at the end and these pieces take about 200 hours, give or take. So that ends up getting spread over a month or two. And during that time, I’m reading things and talking to people, so there’s a lot of room for them to change.

CORZINE: Does the flexibility of adjusting as you go feel like a departure from your painting background in some way?

ARNOLD: Yeah, I would just get paralyzed a lot with painting because every decision has a million different variants. I always found that so overwhelming. So when I got into tapestry weaving, it felt so different and just joyful. I felt like I could play around with it and I copied that process when I went into punch needle embroidery, which I got into because a representational image is more efficient to do with punch needle. 

CORZINE: Do you feel like there’s a symbolism in the idea that you’re reading from the bottom up?

ARNOLD: I think it is part of the narrative because generally they will start with depictions of people having union meetings, and then they’ll escalate to what a lot of labor organizers would call the action thermometer. I see that happening in the work. You’re building with these very small actions that teach people at the workplace to trust each other and flex their power. And then the more you do, the bigger your actions can get. You can escalate to a strike or you can march on your boss and demand something to change, or you can get out and have a riot in the street. And generally, they’ll just erupt at the very top into something.

CORZINE: Can you just talk about how that applies to this particular work?

ARNOLD: So this piece is about a specific series of trolley car driver strikes and riots that happened in the 1910s in Chattanooga. It’s based on some newspaper coverage and photos from the library archive. In this piece, you can see people on the picket line joining this initial action that was prompted by an automatic fair collector. It’s a green object toward the bottom. It was demonstrating a lack of trust in the trolley drivers to be able to collect their own fares without stealing them. So it was about dignity and respect, which is what a lot of labor stuff is about. And then you have the “I Walk” campaign, where people walked miles and miles to go to work instead of public transit.

CORZINE: Chattanooga is also a particularly hilly city so it’s maybe not the easiest walk.

ARNOLD: Yeah, it’s mountainous enough that our last surviving train or trolley car is the incline. So you would have to take the incline up and down Lookout Mountain. So then it got to the riots because community members started taking it into their own hands at one point—attacking scab drivers, throwing furniture at them, and derailing the trolleys. Then, it goes up to a funeral. There was a really pivotal moment where a bystander got shot by a scab driver during an altercation in one of these riots and his funeral ended up being a big galvanizing moment for the union. The top, I would say, is where it gets spiritual and takes a little bit of a wider lens. I found it really interesting how much of that particular event was interwoven with spiritual leaders and spiritual language. There were moments where the community would gather to talk about the strike, and it would always be almost like, emceed by different preachers, and they would address the crowd using biblical language—they called it David and Goliath between the strikers and the company, and then they described the strikers as god’s children. They were employing a very emotionally charged language for the southerners, but also a language that helps people understand a moral struggle.

CORZINE: The title for this exhibition actually comes from a book about Southern preachers who were helping organize during the 30s and 40s. So it’s interesting that you talk about the spirituality of your work. Did you feel like you were carrying on their legacy when you named it that?

ARNOLD: Yes, I think. I mean, I found the book really interesting and inspiring. It’s about these two southern preachers who started as pretty typical clergy and then became radicalized by their congregation’s needs, leading them in union efforts. But the title itself, I really just wanted to steal because I think that it captured a lot of what I was also thinking about. I think about gospel as a really interesting device for the idea that you can form a union from being something that a lot of people gate-kept in the South, and the practice of union organizing being something that’s like teaching someone about what they can do and how much power they have. I’m really interested in how people in the South have appropriated Christianity and spirituality because I think we’re all used to seeing it appropriated by the right as an anti-worker kind of device. And it has made a lot of people, understandably, very bitter toward the way that Christianity exists in American culture. But the fact that it’s so hegemonic in the South is also something that people have been able to exploit toward a pro-union or socialist cause. Every time Shawn Fain came to town to address the Volkswagen workers, he would talk about having faith as small as a mustard seed and being able to move mountains. So it’s the same strategy and it works really well.

CORZINE: How does this version of the exhibit differ from what went up in Chattanooga in the winter? Is there anything new you’ve brought to it?

ARNOLD: Nothing new, it’s just a lot smaller. New York has a little less real estate than I had in Chattanooga so there’s several things omitted from this version, but I think it’s still really good.

CORZINE: I’m actually from Nashville, so I first heard of your work from friends back in Tennessee and I wonder, bringing this to New York, if you feel like there’s anything you want people viewing your work to understand or reconsider about the South?

ARNOLD: I think a lot of people who’ve never lived in the South might have some reactionary assumptions about it. I lived in Philadelphia for nine years and sometimes I would get frustrated feeling like I was being put on the defensive about the South. But I think I want to spin it a little bit differently. And one of the books I have on display in this exhibit is Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley, who is probably my favorite contemporary historian of the South, and he has described the South being this site of revolution in the United States. I mean, abolition of slavery was the biggest revolution we’ve had in this country and in the 1930s, we got about as close as you could to a real communist revolution. And a lot of that was led by working-class people in Alabama whose stories don’t get told in a lot of places outside of Hammer and Hoe, which everyone should read. So I think I want to emphasize that the reason the South is so reactionary is because they got really, really close at one point. And I think the work being done there is vital because right now it exists as an internal colony. It’s where companies go to get guaranteed lower wages and lower standards of workplace safety—

CORZINE: And Tennessee has been cutting deals with automakers like that for 45 years.

ARNOLD: Oh, absolutely. I mean, after the UAW made so many massive union victories in Detroit and around Michigan, a lot of these auto plants moved to the South and it became very, very difficult to organize because all these manufacturers have gotten to enjoy really low wages and they’ve had these politicians giving them tax breaks. Chattanooga is no exception. So I want people to know that that is a frontier that people in the South are fighting and their victory means something for everyone. The lowest-paid person in the country is going to set everybody back. So as long as someone non-union is doing this work in very dangerous working conditions, it’s dragging every single worker down.

CORZINE: You mentioned automation as sort of a common labor cause. And I just want to ask if you think that the tactile nature of your work and the labor-intensive quality feels, in any way, like a response to trends toward automation?

ARNOLD: I don’t think, for me personally, that my preference for craft is about automation. I wouldn’t say it’s a reaction. For me, the craft process is part of the work and it’s important to me that I do it all by hand and I don’t use a tufting gun or any kind of efficient technology beyond a punch needle because the craft is the work. I also think that this technique connects me to workers in an interesting way. The first one I made, the Volkswagen campaign, I brought that to a community solidarity meeting about a week before the Volkswagen union vote, so all these workers were there and they were seeing this piece celebrating them. And the first question they all would ask would be, “How long does it take?” So just describing hours of labor, that’s a language that makes sense to everyone who’s worked. That gave it so much meaning to them, that I put in that amount of time thinking about them and their struggle. Contemporary art can be impenetrable to people without a fine arts education, so it was really powerful to do something labor-intensive and then have that connection with working people.

CORZINE: What are you working on now?

ARNOLD: Well, I do want there to be a fourth one of these Chattanooga tapestries. I am a little unsure about the subject. My project partner—The People’s History of Chattanooga, which is a volunteer research project that looks at labor history—wants me to do one about the Knights of Labor, but we don’t have any pictures of it. So I’m a little up in the air. And eventually I am hoping to do a commission for the UAW directly, but that’s something that their union has to vote on. So we’ll let them decide.

Douglas Corzine freelance arts journalist and critic with bylines in the New York Times, Town & Country, Interview, and many more.

Art for labor's sake: Union organizer's tapestries depict workers' struggles

Tabitha Arnold's show, 'Gospel of The Working Class,' is at a Chelsea gallery

Posted Tuesday, September 9, 2025 2:50 pm

BY DUNCAN FREEMAN

Before Tabitha Arnold found her own way as an artist, she tried to unionize her workplace. The Tennessee native studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy for Fine Art and after graduating took a job at Green Line Cafe in Philadelphia and honed her artistic work in her free time.  

Over the course of a year, Arnold struggled with her coworkers to form a union. They finally reached majority support, but only just before the cafe closed at the outset of the pandemic. Arnold never returned to the cafe, but throughout the unionization campaign her work — which had shifted from painting to tapestry weaving — began to reflect her experience as a worker and unionist.  

The campaign changed the way she saw the world and her art, Arnold said in an interview last week, and she found that her coworkers and those around her began to respond to the themes of labor and class struggle that the Chattanooga native stitched into her art to comfort herself during the loneliest times of the unionization campaign.  

“People around me really responded to this work and it felt like there was a need for contemporary labor art,” Arnold said. "I really got started with becoming myself as an artist because I was a labor organizer.” 

This month, three of Arnold’s recent towering tapestries are on display inside the Field Projects gallery in Chelsea. “Gospel of the Working Class,” curated by Jacob Rhodes, runs through Oct. 4 during the height of gallery season. 

The three works: “I Walk,” “Mill Town" and “These Hands” picture, respectively, a 1918 Chattanooga trolley carmen's strike, a 1934 textile workers strike and the unionization of a Volkswagen plant with the United Auto Workers in Chattanooga last year. The works — each of which took Arnold more than 200 hours to create —  are an homage to Chattanooga’s workers, the artist said, and weave together contemporary and historic labor battles in her hometown. 

She created “These Hands” — a reference to an organizing video produced by the United Auto Workers —in the lead up to the historic April 2024 union election where more than 70 percent of voting workers at the only non-union Volkswagen plant in the world voted to join the UAW. Arnold had followed the organizing campaign closely and finished the tapestry a week before the election, debuting it at a community solidarity rally with workers from the factory.  

The point of installing “These Hands” together with those detailing two earlier Chattanooga struggles was to "ground it in the history of Chattanooga, basically as an argument that the Volkswagen UAW drive is not this thing that’s happening out of nowhere with no precedent,” Arnold explained. 

'Political education'

“Mill Town” was created after “These Hands” and includes the slogan “We shall not be moved,” which Arnold said was first incorporated as a labor solidarity chant in Chattanooga during the 1934 garment worker's strike after enforcers hired by the company fired lethal rounds at workers. Arnold then made “I Walk,” which depicts a little-known series of strikes, riots and labor actions by Chattanooga trolley carmen in the 1910s.  

She sees the three works as a “political education project” that she hopes will help enshrine symbols of the modern labor movement "so people can connect to them and feel like they're a part of something."  

All three include religious imagery such as halos and angels that Arnold said reflects her upbringing in a split Presbyterian and Eastern Orthodox home in the Bible Belt. Her inspiration comes from a number of places, she said, including the tactile nature of Ann Hamilton’s work, the worker-focused art of socialist Diego Rivera as well as Chilean arpillera art, Afghan war rugs and Palestinian liberation art that explores themes of martyrdom, resistance and bodily sacrifice.  

Rhodes, himself a former textile artist who helped open the Field Projects gallery, said Arnold’s art reflects the values he believes in and hopes to show in the gallery. 

“We want to make a space available for everybody in Chelsea,” the curator told The Chief during the show's Sept. 4 opening reception.. “We want to show people who usually aren’t represented in Chelsea.” 

The opening, crowded and hot, drew dozens involved in the city’s labor movement alongside New Yorkers who dropped by while touring Chelseas’s numerous galleries. In between pats on the back and conversations with friends and admirers of her art, Arnold told The Chief she was “blown away” by the support she had received, and that she had not expected as many people to show up for her first show in the city as did.  

The day before the viewing, Arnold said she hoped her work would encourage workers organizing their workplaces to feel less alone. Soon after finishing “These Hands,” Arnold learned that employees in her old workplace Green Line Cafe voted to unionize, and that some of the former coworkers she had helped organize when she worked there were involved in the successful union push.  

“I want this show to function as proof or encouragement that labor struggle is ... if you're fighting for it, wherever you are you're not alone in space or in time,” Arnold said. “Class struggle is happening everywhere. If people feel as alone as I did at some points as an organizer, I want them to feel like that solidarity is there whether they see it every day or not." 

“Gospel of the Working Class,” is on view through Oct. 4 at the Field Projects gallery, 526 West 26th St., eighth floor. 

Duncan Freeman dfreeman@thechiefleader.com @duncfree14