Murrysville artist's silk-screened quilts on exhibit throughout Pittsburgh

Murrysville artist Patty Kennedy-Zafred can remember seeing the heartbreaking photographs shot by Lewis Hine in the early 1900s, documenting working conditions for juveniles for the National Child Labor Committee.

“It was just really compelling, especially photos of those boys in the mines,” said Kennedy-Zafred, 70, of Murrysville, a fiber and textile artist whose work is currently on display in four parts of the Pittsburgh area this month.

One is the BNY Mellon Satellite Gallery, an extension of a larger “Food Justice” exhibition at Contemporary Craft’s gallery in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. Working with photographs from the Library of Congress — where she initially encountered Hines’ work — Kennedy-Zafred began to create quilts that combined the working-class men, women and children of America with many of the products their labor helped bring about.

“I started silk-screening the prints onto vintage feed sacks,” she said. “I mostly buy them from eBay. They come in this horrible condition and you wash them multiple times, and print on those. I thought it really suited the images.”

To do silk-screening, Kennedy-Zafred leaves her home studio for Artists Image Resource on Pittsburgh’s North Side. “The folks there kind of look at me sideways when I come in,” she said. “Printing on the feed sacks can be a real challenge. It used to be for me, but now it’s just the physical aspect of things as I’m getting older — piecing the quilts together, the labor of dyeing fabric. I can spend two or three weeks working in dye buckets before I have enough material to make the quilt size I want.”

Since moving from using her own photos to the Library of Congress collection, Kennedy-Zafred has created quilts focused on child labor, the Native American experience, coal miners, women of color and Japanese-Americans who were placed into internment camps in the U.S. during World War II.

“They’ve all been exhibited pretty widely throughout the country,” she said.

The latest is “American Portraits,” which focuses on the country’s farm workers. Not only is it relevant to modern America, where family farms are disappearing at a rapid rate, but it also is a reminder of Kennedy-Zafred’s childhood in rural Ohio.

“My family was not farmers, but those faces were familiar to me,” she said. “I grew up around men, women and kids just like that.”

From migrant workers to Dust Bowl survivors, the hard living of the era is mirrored in the aged and faded colors of the feed sacks. Kennedy-Zafred also kept the small bits of text and information that are included in many of the Library of Congress photos, letting it mingle with the translucent lettering of the feed sack to create a sort of agricultural pastiche.

In addition to the BNY Mellon Satellite Gallery, which is in the Mellon Building at 500 Grant St. and is also accessible from the T station, Kennedy-Zafred’s work is on display at Artists Image Resource’s “Printwork 2021” at 518 Foreland St. on the North Side; as part of “Food Justice: Growing a Healthier Community Through Art” at Contemporary Craft, 5645 Butler St. in Lawrenceville; and as part of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s 108th annual exhibition at the Detective Building, 224 N. Euclid Ave. in East Liberty. That exhibit runs through Jan. 12.

“It’s always exciting for me to challenge myself, put my work out there and compete as a fiber artist,” Kennedy-Zafred said. “There are only a few fiber pieces in the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh show. That’s the oldest arts organization in the country. And I also have a piece right now in the Craft Forms show at the Wayne Art Center in Philadelphia, so it’s always nice to be one of the few textile pieces in prestigious shows like that.”

For more on Kennedy-Zafred’s art, see PattyKZ.com.