The Lace Archive
The Lace Archive is an historical community archive that grew out of the many donations sent to me for recent projects.
Thank you to all those generous folks who continue to send lace. I am honored by the generosity and thoughtfulness of artists, friends and strangers. These donations, along with the contributors and their stories, have become integral to my work. Their names and narrative are included in exhibitions of the work.
The Lace Archive is a recipient of a Barbara Demings Memorial Fund for Women, for feminist work [2023], and an ArtsWestchester Individual Artist Grant [2021] for the project, A Repairing Mend. I invite you to be a participant in the project.
These projects began with family lace from my Italian and Irish grandmothers, Ermenegilda Eugenia Glorinda Fungaroli Miranda, and Rebecca Cogan. After I posted images on social media of dying the lace with cochineal insect dye, an outpouring of initially unsolicited donations of lace from around the world began to arrive, and continues today. Donations arrive with letters, stories, and pictures of the family and maker. The complex form of lace, dismissed as grandma’s doilies, retains traces of the economic and craft histories of women. I recognized these donations as representing the countless stories of unknown women, and founded The Lace Archive, an historical community archive of thousands of pieces of lace and family histories.
Each note and textile is documented— photographed, measured, and archived, before being sewn into an artwork. Many textiles arrive at my door; lace, linens, skirts, aprons, napkins, handkerchiefs, tablecloths and duvet covers, embroidered in colorful threads, crocheted in complex patterns, or with unfinished needle work, from a mother, auntie, grandmother or great-grandmother. These intimate items have no commodity value, created for a home they might never leave. They are tangible acts of love, a labor of care circulating inside the domestic sphere.
The care and generosity shared through these donations is instrumental to the work, through intimate stories about the lace, the makers, the women who preserved it, and the desire for it to live on in the work and in the archive. This work demands to take up physical space, without ceding either softness or strength. This feels urgent in a moment when women’s bodies continue to be in the peril of legal and social control by governmental and religious institutions and individuals.
The Archive is an ongoing project, only a tiny portion is up on this site as of 2025, as I continue to document all the amazing donations and stories.
If you have lace and would like to donate (or sell) for the project, please contact me. I cover shipping! I am eternally grateful for the thousands of pieces of lace sent up to now. You can also join my (occasional) mailing list for newsletters from The Lace Archive, my personal artworks, MAPSpace, and The Crit Lab below.
Patricia Miranda