The crowd lining up to get into Tabitha Arnold’s exhibition in New York City last fall wasn’t full of the older, moneyed types one might expect to find at a Chelsea gallery opening. Instead, the small space was packed with twenty- and thirtysomethings wearing Zohran Mamdani pins, Democratic Socialists of America hats and SEIU T-shirts.

If the crowd might have seemed unusual in the context of the city’s fancy gallery district, they looked right at home next to the art that had drawn them there. The exhibition on display, called Gospel of the Working Class, featured monumental handmade tapestries highlighting working-class struggles from both recent and distant history. In one, textile workers carry bolts of fabric and wield scissors, while people dodge bullets from strike-breakers outside the factory. In another, angels walk behind autoworkers carrying picket signs above a row of hands holding drills and other tools.

The artist behind it all, Tabitha Arnold, is a socialist and labor organizer based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose goal is to create art that reflects and inspires organizers and workers. In a pop culture and media landscape littered with stories about the uber-wealthy, Arnold’s pieces focus instead on the working people who make up the 99%. In doing so, she’s garnered plenty of recognition: she was awarded the 2025 Southern prize for visual art, received a prestigious MacDowell fellowship in 2023 and has exhibited her art all over the world.

What she wants more than anything is for her work to be useful to the people it’s meant to portray. “I think of my work as being for labor organizers,” she said. “I see it as being a source of encouragement for organizers, reflecting and validating what they’re doing back to them.”

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Arnold first got interested in labor politics while studying art in Philadelphia in the late 2010s. In between classes, Arnold worked as a barista. When a wage-transparency spreadsheet began to make its way around the coffee shops in the city, she realized the $8.50 an hour she was being paid lagged behind what many of her colleagues were making elsewhere. One of her regulars at the coffee shop was the president of the local Teamsters unit, who gave her his card, and it wasn’t long before Arnold got involved in a union drive at her coffee shop.

Though pandemic layoffs halted that effort before the union could truly get off the ground, the experience stuck with Arnold.

“I had these really transformative experiences going to picket lines, which is such a high-energy, ecstatic kind of experience. But doing the union drive actually taught me about how much of the process is very boring, thankless, slow, difficult work. And so I had a lot of respect for what the process looks like, and I was interested in capturing it in my artwork,” she said.

Art has played a “vital role” in social movements throughout history, according to Julia Bryan-Wilson, a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University. She pointed to Russian constructivism, in which artists with revolutionary politics used abstract forms to appeal to and communicate with a peasant class who couldn’t always read or write, and Chilean artists like Lotty Rosenfeld, who used guerrilla graffiti to oppose the Pinochet dictatorship. Some of the specific artists who have shaped Arnold’s approach include the muralist Diego Rivera, who depicted Mexican working-class society, and the Palestinian poster movement, which put forward anti-imperialist messages and celebrated farmers, workers and teachers.

“Art not only provides crucial information, but sometimes it also can point to alternative futures,” Bryan-Wilson said. “I think that’s one role that artists have, the critical role of imagining otherwise.”

Bryan-Wilson also drew a connection between Arnold’s work and that of 20th-century textile artists like Faith Ringgold, whose narrative quilts depict Black American experiences, and Hannah Ryggen, an anti-fascist tapestry maker in Europe.

“Textiles are uniquely suited to make comments about labor because textiles were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and all of the many issues that arose with exploited bodies in systems of mass manufacturing,” Bryan-Wilson said. The connection between textile work and radical politics runs deep, she added. Friedrich Engels, who co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, was politicized in part by seeing what happened in textile mills in Manchester, England.

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Despite the deep overlap between art and pro-worker social movements throughout history, Arnold can still see the tension that exists when her tapestries about the working class are exhibited in museums or other rarified spaces ⁠– which is why she was so excited to have the chance to unveil her piece These Hands for the first time at a local union hall.

The piece commemorates the Tennessee Volkswagen organizing efforts with the United Auto Workers, and the tapestry is aswirl with images of autoworkers on the assembly line, literally holding up the bridges that cars drive down, and carrying UAW picket signs. Those images are intertwined with religious imagery of angels and snake handlers that hearken back to Arnold’s Bible belt roots.

While she saw the 224 hours she spent making the piece as a kind of “meditation” on organizing, when it came time to share it with workers, she found herself getting nervous. She was supposed to reveal the tapestry at a rally of about 200 Volkswagen workers and their family members before a much-anticipated vote on whether or not to form a union. “I didn’t know what the workers would think about it, and I was kind of scared that they might think I was hijacking their really important moment,” she said.

It was a “really important moment” in part because two previous attempts to unionize the Tennessee plant had failed ⁠– and the stakes for workers were high. According to Caleb Michalski, an employee at the plant, employees were pushed to keep to strict timelines, even to the detriment of their health and safety.

“I’ve seen people cut and bleed and get yelled at by the supervisor for stopping their line,” Michalski said. “I’ve heard of people collapsing on the line, and the supervisor pushing their body out of the way so the line could keep running. That’s our reality.”

It was against this backdrop in the spring of 2024 that Arnold first shared her tapestry These Hands at the IBEW Local 175 union hall. Despite her fears, the tapestry was a hit. “All these people just kept grabbing me and wanting to tell me how much they loved it and how meaningful it was to them,” she said.

Michalski appreciated the depiction of the role he and his co-workers play in society. “I like how it artistically demonstrates how working people are the drivers of the economy,” he said. “Things exist because we make them. [Elites] make billions of dollars because of our blood, our sweat, our tears.”

Less than a month after Arnold unveiled her tapestry, Volkswagen Tennessee workers made history by officially voting to join the UAW, becoming the first southern autoworkers outside of the big three (General Motors, Ford and Stellantis) to do so ⁠– a fact that is striking in part because the south has long been seen as resistant to unionization. If Arnold’s work is meant to do anything, it’s to reflect, uplift and celebrate these kinds of moments. She felt “lucky”, she later wrote, “to play a small part in supporting [the workers] with community solidarity.”

Just this month, two years after that initial union vote and Arnold’s tapestry unveiling, that same group of workers notched another win: They reached a tentative agreement with Volkswagen that will secure 20% across-the-board wage increases, affordable healthcare and real job security for workers. On 19 February, workers voted to officially ratify the contract. Michalski, who is now a member of the UAW-Volkswagen bargaining committee, is relieved and already dreaming of a future where the union can build their own union hall. When they do, he said, Arnold’s tapestry depicting their fight will be hanging in a central place so that workers can draw strength from it for years to come.

“People feel seen and understood when they see themselves in an art piece. Otherwise, what they see subconsciously is that they’re invisible and no one gives a damn about them,” he said. “I will always say: make more art, make more music, because our stories need to be told.”