Elaine Luther: Available Works

This blog post is to be helpful to curators putting together shows, and to collectors looking for which of my artworks are available for purchase.

Eventually, this may be a whole special page on my website, and for starters, we’ll do this as a post. I’ll organize this by body of work.

Feel free to contact me to discuss show opportunities or collecting.

The Healing Quilts
Folks are asking me all the time lately, where will my Healing Quilts will traveling next? And I have to say that I don’t know yet, that I have to enter shows and submit exhibition proposals to get them their next viewing. I do love and appreciate this idea that these artworks should be constantly on view, somewhere!

Here’s what The Healing Quilts look like:

In terms of exhibition space, they are 3 feet in diameter and about 7 feet high. They require electricity. A response area for patrons/visitors is available. Each walk in quilt has a motion sensor, and an audioscape begins when a person enters.

Wages for Housework Quilts and Related Works
The Wages for Housework Quilts grew out of my time cards for mother/Clocking in for Unpaid Labor Project, and reference the 1970s movement Wages for Housework, which was international. I used quotes from movement newsletters and put them on quilts.

This series includes 6 quilts and many related smaller works. You can see 5 of the quilts in this post, about my 2025 solo show at Art Reach of MidMichigan. Here is the 6th quilt. And in this post, I explain the history of the Wages for Housework movement and show the quilts and talk a bit about how they were made. Some of them include cyanotype prints on fabric.  All of these works are available for exhibition and/or purchase.

Text on Doilies and Doilies on Hankies

This body of work began in 2021, really picked up speed in 2022, where my solo show, Ghost Prints and Shadow Work featured a lot of these pieces. That show included a number of vintage linens (handkerchiefs, placemats, quilt fragments, napkins) printed with images of vintage doilies. I printed them with light reactive dye.

That show included linens with words on them, including the title of the show, and a napkin with the definition of shadow work, both frontwards and backwards.

You can see more light reactive dye prints on vintage linens in the Portfolio section, Ghost Prints and Shadow Work.

You can see more recent work in this post, New Prints Made with Light.   While for the 2022 solo show, we pinned these linens directly to the wall, for the 2022 solo show at the Orland Park Public Library, I had to stitch the doilies onto fabric wrapped canvas, so that the art could be hung on their gallery wall system.  You can see all the artwork from that show in this blog post.  That show also included three collages on panel and some quilted works, mounted on canvas.

All of these works are available for exhibition and/or purchase.  Some are stitched to fabric wrapped canvas and some are not.

Our Ladies of Perpetual Housework

This body of work is being kept together and is owned by the artist (that’s me!) It is available for shows but cannot be shipped (unless a museum or gallery wants to crate it).  …they are very well made but can’t survive the UPS treatment.

This series began in the early 20teens and includes:

Our Lady of Perpetual Laundry, Our Lady of Perpetual Dishes, and also OLP Homework, OLP Cooking, OLP Housework, OLP Driving, OLP Beauty, OLP Coffee, and OLP Frugality/Button House.

All of these works are available for exhibition.

Medals that You Wouldn’t Want to Earn

You can see all of these in their portfolio section. Of these, “Total” has sold and the rest are being kept together as a group.  All of the remaining works are available for exhibition.

Lace as Botanical Prints

This is a new series, it debuted this January (2026) in a solo show at the Trailside Museum of Natural History in River Forest, IL.  I printed handmade and manufactured laces, as if they were botanical specimens.  I also printed native and invasive plants.  The label you can see in the image above was oiled paper – the same method Anna Atkins used to make her labels.  You can see more of these prints in this post.

All of these works are available for exhibition and/or purchase.

Balance & Tension

While this series once contained well over 50 sculptures, some were sold and others were taken apart for lack of storage space. Approximately 10 or so still exist, including Precarious Tea Party 2, pictured above.

Here’s what they looked like installed in a library, rather difficult to photography, but the effect was really cool and patrons loved it.

Some of the Balance & Tension pieces were intentionally left behind (with permission) at a residency.  You can see at least one of those in my blog post, The Lost Artworks of Elaine Luther, which is from 2021, and I update it as needed.

The B & Ts were also in a solo show in Popular Library at Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago, see that here.  And in a show at the Orland Park Public Library, which I don’t seem to have a blog post on.

Public Art

This example is an installation that was up at the Orland Park Public Library September to October 2025. These are scans of my hand dyed, vintage linens, printed on vinyl and adhered to the outside of the windows. This space has glass cases on the other side of these windows, where the very same linens were displayed, suspended from tiny clotheslines.

I can work with you to have large scale versions of my work professionally printed for you.  Installations can be temporary or permanent, indoors or outdoors.

So Much Art!
Is that really all of it?  I feel like this list doesn’t feel totally comprehensive.  Perhaps that’s because I’ve focused on bodies of work, which leaves out individual pieces that don’t quite fit.

You know how libraries own more than they can store?  That’s because they know that 30%, or whatever, of their materials will be out circulating at any given time.  My art is mostly ini my studio and I am running out of space to store it.  I need more of it to circulate, either out on loan, or for it to be sold.

Setting up an online store to sell original art is a lot more expensive than you might imagine, and yet, most folks don’t buy art from a website.  People tend to buy art in person, but not always.

My work-around is that I’m planning to more clearly label my artworks that are for sale, with their prices, in posts like this.

The one exception is 12″x 12″ works.  Those are easily shippable for a predictable price, so I may list some of those in my online shop.

My work is available for solo shows, small group shows and for collection by individuals or institutions.  For solo shows, I’m available for artist talks and workshops related to the theme or methods of the artworks in the show.