Tabitha Arnold

Born and based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Tabitha Arnold got into labor organizing through an emergent coffee workers movement in Philadelphia, where she studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 2018, she began to make tapestries about labor history and her contemporary experiences, using a rug-tufting tool as a makeshift embroidery needle. Arnold now lives and makes work deeply rooted in East Tennessee.

Arnold’s work has been profiled in Jacobin, Hyperallergic, and Burnaway, and featured on print covers for Dissent Magazine since 2021. She has held solo exhibitions at the Worker's Art and Heritage Center, List Gallery at Swarthmore College, and ICA Chattanooga. Her work is in private and public collections, including Dom Museum Wien in Vienna, Austria, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. Arnold has been awarded a Tennessee State Fellowship from South Arts, as well as a project grant from the Ford Foundation, which supports her ongoing collaboration with the People's History of Chattanooga: a tapestry series depicting 100 years of labor history leading up to the United Auto Workers’ historic union victory at Volkswagen Chattanooga.