Tabitha Arnold makes labor-intensive art.

Born and deeply rooted in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Arnold tried to study painting in Philadelphia, until an Ann Hamilton exhibit freed her to abandon the medium and teach herself tapestry weaving. In 2019, she began organizing a union at her workplace: a profound experience that called for making tapestries about labor. Using a rug-punching tool as a makeshift embroidery needle, Arnold borrows images from Bible Belt spirituality, social realism, and pre-modern art to create monuments for the working class. Her practice comes out of a generational revival of union organizing in the United States, and the tapestries tie this moment into a long lineage of historical class struggle, especially in the Appalachian South.

Arnold is the winner of the 2025 Southern Prize for Visual Art. She exhibits her tapestries at union halls and labor conventions, along with traditional venues like Field Projects (Chelsea, NY) The Worker's Art and Heritage Center (Hamilton, ON) and Institute 193 (Lexington, KY.) You can read about her work in the New York Times, Interview Magazine, Jacobin, and The Guardian, and see it on covers for Dissent Magazine since 2021. Her pieces are in museum collections and on the walls of union-loving homes, but her biggest flex is a solidarity tapestry at the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) in Havana.