"Shtetl Meijes: Women’s Stories from the Shtetl" examines the mostly undocumented lives of (Jewish) women in Eastern Europe from the late 19th and early 20th century through the eyes and imaginings of one of their direct descendents – me. These are the small market towns where my two grandmothers, several aunts, and mother were born and raised. As I child I relentlessly asked them “What was it like in the olden days?” But beyond the usual refrain of how poor they were, what it was like to pluck feathers from dead chickens, and how often they had to climb into the hayloft to escape pogroms, there was not much shared to satisfy what I wanted, or rather needed, to know about the experiences and lives led by the women in my family.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              My photographic practice of late has evolved to visualize what I can learn about them on my own, through historical research and archival images of all sorts, both personal ones passed down to me, and “found” in libraries and collections of public domain photos. Expressed as many-layered textile pieces that collage places, people, and things interwoven as themed narratives, the works in this group are reminiscent of or directly document what I've learned, by creating a new visual interpretation of what I imagine life might have been like for women in the Shtetl. My work portrays practices, beliefs, rituals, and emotions wrapped around coming of age, finding a mate, the milestone of marriage, and later, motherhood and the daily life challenges experienced by Shtetl women. The works mix cyanotype fabric prints, digital pigment prints on cotton and silk, hand- and machine-stitching and other embellishments to create a woman’s world filled with contradictions: hopes and dreams both fulfilled and not, rituals of faith and healing, and a body of generationally passed-down knowledge with its darker side of magic and superstition, not often shared or found, that I have only begun to explore through these works.