Cotton Stockings

Mary Grigoriadis was raised in New Jersey as a second-­ generation Corfiot American. The Greek Orthodox Church played a significant role in her family life, and sitting before the iconostasis during Mass, as she first did as a young child, enthralled her. This early exposure to images of saints, and blue-­ and-­ gold patterned borders, left a deep impression. Symmetrical, precisely structured paintings such as Cotton Stockings allude to temple façades and sculptural reliefs—references to the artist’s own heritage as well as to other ancient cultures, whether Assyrian, Persian, Byzantine, or Native American. Grigoriadis also cited in such works the hand-crafted rugs and embroideries that had decorated her family home. In 1975, the decorative tendencies being explored by ­ Grigoriadis, along with a coterie of other young, New York–based artists, led to the birth of an official movement: Pattern and Decoration, or P&D. In response to the then-­unchallenged preeminence of Western, male artists who expressed their rationalist ideals through the stark aesthetics of Minimalism and conceptualism, Grigoriadis’s work was multicultural and hybrid, valuing ancestry and highlighting neglected art forms. Defiant, she evolved her practice in the face of contemptuous attitudes toward the decorative arts at large and toward non-­Western cultures more specifically.