Morgan Bukovec has been involved in the service industry on and off since she was fifteen—including working the counter at Rudy’s Quality Meats, her grandfather’s butcher shop in Willowick, an outer ring suburb of Cleveland. But it was in the bar and restaurant biz as a server and bartender—working five days a week and sometimes pulling double-shifts—that she was put through the grinder of sexism, misogyny, microaggressions, and just plain aggressions.
She took a guest check pad, penciled out the first word she remembers writing down back when she first took notice of what was said to her, and stitched it into the pad with red thread. The word was “Baby.”a series of work, now numbering 100, that was assembled as part of a solo show at the“It’s not typical to cross stitch on paper—typically it’s done in fabric,” Bukovec says. “The cross-stitch community and textile work and crafts work is really meticulous and strives toward perfection.
At the Kaiser Gallery show, her voice appears in a work called my unraveling, in the form of a runaway receipt roll issuing from an old cash register from Rudy’s that she rescued from a dumpster .
A station allowing guests to share their own stories of harassment in the service industry at Kaiser Gallery in Cleveland, OhioBukovec’s interest in art was inspired by another woman artist—her sister, four years her senior, by whose side she would sit while the two of them sketched, with the older one annoyed with the younger’s copycatting .