Elsa Hansen Oldham

"Elsa Hansen Oldham ... creates embroidered tableaus that are simultaneously naïve and knowing, primitive and wittily sophisticated. Much of her work contains groupings of tiny figures — resembling eight-bit Atari characters — that convey something akin to a Freudian six degrees of separation: Shelley Duvall paired with Coco Chanel; a recasting of the Three Stooges starring Larry Flynt, the Velvet Underground’s upright drummer Moe Tucker and Curly Neal of the Harlem Globetrotters...

Hansen Oldham is enigmatic about her creative process and how she chooses her subjects, which are often a mix of pop culture, history and politics seen through a blithely cracked lens. The ideas seem to flow from her unconscious, not from some contrived post-textual analysis. In fact, she is more focused on the actual activity, which calms what she refers to as her natural rambunctiousness."

--Minju Pak for The New York Times Style Magazine, April 4, 2017