Jessie Catherine Kinsley

File:OneidaCommunityHomeBld.JPG, a religious utopian group.

Pictured in a 1907 postcard is the Oneida Community's former home, the Mansion House.

|left]]

Jessie Catherine Baker was born in the Oneida Community (1848-1880), a utopian community of religious perfectionists led by John Humphrey Noyes. In keeping with the practices of the Community, she was raised in communal style.{{Cite book|title=Paradise Now:The Story of American Utopianism|last=Jennings|first=Chris|publisher=Random House|year=2016|isbn=978-0-8129-9370-7|location=New York|pages=334}} Women in the Community held a wide variety of jobs, but they were typically responsible for the mending and sewing, which would have helped Jessie develop her skills from an early age.{{Cite journal|last=Klee-Hartzell|first=Marlyn|date=Fall 1993|title='Mingling the Sexes':The Gendered Organization of Work in the Oneida Community|journal=Syracuse University Library Associates Courier|issue=2|page=67}} The utopian community voted to disband in 1880 when Jessie was 22.{{Cite book|title=Without Sin:The Life and Death of the Oneida Community|last=Klaw|first=Spencer|publisher=Allen Lane, the Penguin Press|year=1993|isbn=0-7139-9091-0|location=New York|pages=[https://archive.org/details/withoutsinlifede00klaw/page/270 270]|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/withoutsinlifede00klaw/page/270}} The Community then became a joint-stock corporation, eventually evolving into Oneida Limited.{{Cite book|title=Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation|last=Carden|first=Maren|publisher=Harper & Row|year=1971|location=New York}}

Jessie married former Community member Myron Kinsley (1836-1907) in February 1880.{{Cite book|title=A Lasting Spring|url=https://archive.org/details/lastingspringjes0000kins|url-access=registration|last=Kinsley|first=Jessie|publisher=Syracuse University Press|year=1983|pages=[https://archive.org/details/lastingspringjes0000kins/page/59 59]}} Myron was assigned by the newly formed company to supervise the construction and operation of the Oneida Silverplate and Canning factories in Niagara Falls, N.Y. Together the couple had three children, and Jessie also helped raise Myron’s daughter from a Community relationship. After living in Niagara Falls and Chicago, the Kinsleys returned to Oneida, New York.{{Cite news|url=http://www.niagara-gazette.com/opinion/columns/niagara-discoveries-a-visit-to-the-home-of-myron-h/article_d5af40e7-fda1-5fb3-a4da-8360b151f0f1.html|title=Niagara Discoveries: A visit to the home of Myron H. Kinsley|last=Linnabery|first=Ann Marie|date=February 13, 2016}}

At age 50, Jessie Catherine Kinsley began studying painting with Kenneth Hayes Miller, a leading proponent of urban genre painting. Kinsley was dissatisfied with her painting, but was inspired to create braidings. She wrote:

"So gradually, I found the fascination of this medium to my mind and fingers, and began making pictures in a wholly original way from my own designs...and unlike my painted pictures, braided pictures grew into satisfactory proportions and some large tapestries came with the years."{{Cite book|title=A Lasting Spring|url=https://archive.org/details/lastingspringjes0000kins|url-access=registration|last=Kinsley|first=Jessie|publisher=Syracuse University Press|year=1983|pages=104.}}

Her work quickly grew in complexity. As Beverley Sanders noted in an article about Kinsley, she went from "chair mats to large wall hangings that resemble traditional tapestries in their subtlety of color, complexity of design and sensuous texture."{{Cite journal|last=Sanders|first=Beverly|date=May 1981|title=A Scrap Bag Palette|journal=American Craft}} Kinsley created braidings until just before her death in 1938.

File:Street Scene 1938.jpg collection.]]

Kinsley's braidings are "elaborate, exquisitely colored tapestries...that evoke a fairy-tale world" in the words of one craft historian.{{Cite journal|last=Sanders|first=Beverly|date=1981|title=A Scrap Bag Palette|journal=American Craft|page=14}} Kinsley found inspiration for her braidings in poetry, and many of her pieces have quotations from poems.{{Cite journal|last=Schwartz|first=Helen|date=2000|title=Jessie Kinsley and her Braidings|journal=Heritage}} A series of landscapes, Woodlands and To a Green Thought include verses from The Garden by Andrew Marvell, while her piece Shepherd Boy was inspired by William Blake's poem The Lamb.{{Cite journal|last=Horton|first=Janice|date=2012|title=Braids into Brushstrokes:An Artist Finds her Medium|journal=Piecework|pages=44}}

Kinsley once stated that she approached her designs as a painter would, by first sketching out the design and then "using the braids just as a painter uses his brush--making braids take on movement-direction-perspective." She stripped cloth into bands and made her braids by attaching three bands to the back of a chair and braiding them together. Instead of using wool or cotton scraps, Kinsley generally used silks for their more vibrant colors.{{Cite journal|last=Schwartz|first=Helen|date=Winter 2000|title=Jessie Kinsley and her Braidings|journal=Heritage}} She assembled the braids and basted them onto the pattern she had created, bending them to cover every part of the pattern before sewing them together.{{Cite journal|last=Sanders|first=Beverly|date=1981|title=A Scrap Bag Palette|journal=American Craft|page=17}} By the 1920s, Kinsley was creating large pieces. Her first large-scale piece, titled Things Not of Man's Devising, measured 7 feet by 7 feet. The large pieces were often divided into sections, like a triptych, to make the work possible.

Much of Kinsley’s work is housed at the Oneida Community Mansion House, a museum that was once home to the Oneida Community. The museum has a permanent display of her work in an exhibit titled “The Braidings of Jessie Catherine Kinsley.”{{Cite web|url=http://www.oneidacommunity.org/visit-events/collections-exhibitions|title=Collections and Exhibitions|website=Oneida Community Mansion House}}

Kinsley’s braidings have also been featured in a 2004 exhibit “Braidings and Benches: The Oneida Community and the Arts and Crafts Movement” at Colgate University and at an exhibit titled “The Braided Wall Hangings of the Oneida Community” at Fountain Elms, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in 1978.{{Cite web|url=http://news.colgate.edu/2004/03/oneida-community-descendants-play-role-in-picker-show.html/|title=Oneida Community descendants play role in Picker show|date=March 29, 2004|website=news.colgate.edu|publisher=Colgate University}} Kinsley's braiding The Picnic is in the collection at The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College.{{Cite web|url=http://wellin-emuseum.hamilton.edu/view/objects/asimages/artist$0040Jesse$0020Catherine%20Kinsley|title=Wellin Collections|website=Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College}}

Kinsley’s papers, including letters, sketches, and journals, are archived at the Oneida Community Mansion House. Other Kinsley papers are located in Syracuse University’s Oneida Community Collection in the Special Collections at Bird Library.{{Cite web|url=http://library.syr.edu/find/scrc/collections/subjects/religious-and-utopian-communities.php|title=Special Collections: Religious and Utopian Communities|website=library.syr.edu|publisher=Syracuse University}}

{{reflist}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kinsley, Jessie Catherine}}

Category:1858 births

Category:1938 deaths

Category:American folk artists

Category:People from Oneida, New York

Category:Textile artists from New York (state)

Category:20th-century American women textile artists

Category:20th-century American textile artists

Category:19th-century American women textile artists

Category:19th-century American textile artists