WOOLPUNK: punking up fibrous stitchery one granny square at a time

Michelle Vitale (aka woolpunk) is an American artist, born in Summit, NJ in 1971. Inspired by an immigrant seamstress grandmother, who sewed American flags, she machine knits fiber installations and embroiders on photos of urban sprawl.  She is the founder of the Gimme Shelter Project and has created large-scale site specific forms for a variety of institutions including St John’s Cathedral, NYC; Hunterdon Museum, NJ; Lion Brand Yarn Studio, NYC; Casaterra Residency, Italy; and the Object and Thought Gallery, CO. Vitale has been included in numerous exhibitions including the New Jersey Arts Annual; the Arts and Crafts Museum, Itami, Japan; Grey Lock Arts, North Adams, MA, ABC No Rio, NYC; and Galerie Kurt I’m Hirsch, Berlin, Germany. Her work has been included in several publications and she has received numerous grants from the Puffin Foundation, Goldman Sachs and the Fine Arts Work Center, among others.