The UI Stanley Museum of Art invites you to hear Canadian artist, filmmaker, and environmentalist Sandra Sawatzky speak about her monumental 220-foot, hand-embroidered narrative, The Black Gold Tapestry, currently on view at the museum.
Sawatzky will share details of the nine-year process behind the creation of this intricate masterpiece that traces the global history of oil.
After a museum visit revived Sawatzky’s interest in embroidery in 2007, she conceived of The Black Gold Tapestry, which she describes as a “film on cloth” devoted to the cultural history of fossil fuels. Sawatzky, who resides in Calgary (the oil capital of Canada), hand embroidered this 220-foot-long tableau over the course of nine years.
To tackle the imposing subject, she conducted extensive research: “Geology, paleontology, chemistry, mining, automobiles, aeroplanes, rockets, drilling, distillation, weapons, whaling child labour, combustion engines, robber barons, textile mills, the world wars, royal jewels, and the colour purple, just to name a few, that all inform this history of oil.” Sawatzky, who has worked in fashion and film, began by making drawings in a sketchbook. She then traced and arranged these elements in a paper cartoon, which guided her design on the linen cloth.
Formally, The Black Gold Tapestry takes cues from the Bayeux Tapestry, an eleventh-century textile frieze that recounts the conquest of England by the Duke of Normandy. This medieval embroidery (like Sawatzky’s, it is technically not a tapestry) consists of 58 captioned scenes depicting the Norman invasion, but the incidental details about everyday life are what make it especially noteworthy. Sawatzky borrowed the compositional logic of the Bayeux tapestry, organizing her design into three pictorial registers. In her narrative, this layered approach also evokes archaeological principles of stratigraphy; throughout, the hand-dyed wool/silk threads match colors with specific periods and places.
The Black Gold Tapestry will be on display at the Stanley Museum of Art through June 14, 2026. For more details about the work, visit https://stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu/black-gold-tapestry.