Linda Friedman Schmidt “RULER OF MYSELF"
Linda Friedman Schmidt "FOOLED" 2024
Discarded Clothing and Textiles, Upholstery Swatches, Vintage Costume Jewelry Parts, Yarn, Thread, Beads
Dimensions: 44 x 34 x 3 in
Unique
Signed on recto and verso, includes a certificate of authenticity
Linda Friedman Schmidt is a self-taught artist known for her emotional narrative portraits created from discarded clothing. She was born stateless in a German displaced persons camp, the first child of Holocaust survivors. Her artwork weaves together fragments of personal history with contemporary political, social, and feminist issues.
Linda’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States in group shows at the American Folk Art Museum, Allentown Art Museum, Coral Springs Museum of Art, Lyman Allyn Art Museum, Morris Museum, New Jersey State Museum, Montclair Art Museum, Monmouth Museum, Noyes Museum of Art, Attleboro Art Museum, Alexandria Museum of Art, Koehnline Museum of Art, Jersey City Museum, Loveland Museum, Cahoon Museum of American Art, Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles among others. Linda has presented solo exhibitions at the Lancaster Quilt & Textile Museum and Pascal Gallery at Ramapo College. Prestigious curators who have selected her work for exhibitions include artists Faith Ringgold and Judy Chicago, MoMA curator Anne Umland, art critic Donald Kuspit, Renwick Gallery founder Lloyd Herman, among others.
Internationally her artwork has been shown on four continents: North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. It has been featured in the Contextile Biennial of Contemporary Textile Art, Guimarães, Portugal, Retazos Testimoniales de Chile y Otras Latitudes at Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Every Woman Biennial, London, UK, and Stripes, Mikimoto Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. She has been included in Natural Impressions and Threads of Tomorrow, two International Museu Têxtil online exhibitions and books curated and compiled by Brazilian artist and curator Rodrigo Franzão, Fiberarts Design Book 7, Not Normal: Art in the Age of Trump, Contemporary Hooked Art: Themes and Memories, and other books. Online publications and magazines include Hyperallergic and notable international textile magazines Textiel Plus and Mr X Stitch. She has been interviewed by Interlocutor Magazine, Maake Magazine, Living Artists Magazine, and others. Her artwork is held in multiple esteemed private collections.
Linda Friedman Schmidt is a recipient of a 2025 artist grant awarded through the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship program.
“My emotional narrative portraits are a visual response to dark and challenging times. We are living in a world of Fascist centralized control with the illusion of a democracy, a country with a dictatorial leader who issues ultimatums. We are being distracted and influenced to waste time being entertained and fooled by clowns in media, entertainment, sports, and politics. Crisis actors, fake experts, fake doctors, fake scientists, and fake politicians in the scripted circus are fooling us about everything. Most are too busy looking at their cellphones or the clowns in the clown show to realize that we are being manipulated. They don’t notice the skies, the smart dust being sprayed on them, nor the electronic prison system being built all around them; they remain unaware of the digital convergence foisted upon us without our consent and pretend these things are not happening. My activist artwork sends messages about liberty, freedom of choice, bodily autonomy, rejection of authority, trust in the self, finding strength in adversity, and taking our power back. It reframes ideas about power and gender and encourages women to step into their full power and potential and become the masters of themselves and their lives. It encourages dialogue about female empowerment, political resistance, refusal to be controlled, and living without limitations, without rules and regulations, so that we can be the sovereign beings that we were intended to be. Discarded is my medium. It is the second skin, an extension of the self. It is porous, tactile, pliable, fragile, and emotional just like human skin; it is susceptible to harm and manipulation, just like human beings are. It evokes discarded humanity. I give second chances, new life, and a fresh start to the worn, torn, frayed, broken, the mistreated, the abandoned, the unwanted, the devalued, the disrespected, the dispensable, and to myself. I see the untapped potential and intrinsic worth of all human beings. It raises awareness of the significance of human creativity in a time when artificial intelligence and robotization are gradually replacing work by humans. Artwork created with the human hand and human feelings can hold multiple dimensions of truth that AI can never fathom.” - Linda Friedman Schmidt
Read more about her artwork on our website.