Melissa Haims

Chestnut Hill artist Melissa Maddoni Haims, 40, walked down Germantown Avenue on a mission. She carried a basket full of yarn and two large knit pieces she had already created at home. She was preparing to “yarn bomb” a metal pole outside of The Tangled Web.

Yarn bombing is a form of guerilla art, stitching yarn around inanimate public objects, such as benches, sign poles, or bike racks. Haims prefers the term “knit graffiti” and has been doing it since 2010. She began leaving little knit pieces in places she identified with, like on a pole in front of a friend’s home. People began asking her to take photos of the work, and it took off from there. She has yarn bombed at art exhibitions, on vacation, and at rap concerts. She yarn bombed a microphone at the FiberPhiladelphia 2012 festival before Mayor Nutter spoke. She yarn bombed an entire piano. She yarn bombed a forest at The Schuylkill Center, which, she emphasized, the center requested. She was assured it would only be left up for a short amount of time, since it can promote rot in trees.

“Trees are already beautiful, they don’t need my help. Telephone poles, bike racks, they need my help,” she explained. “Anything cold and metal I like to make warm and fuzzy. It’s just a way of forcing a happy accident, that little bit of joy it brings to someone’s face when they walk around a corner and run into a telephone pole covered in yarn. It changes your whole perspective on things. It’s a delight, it’s fun, it’s unexpected materials in unexpected places.”

Technically, what she’s doing is illegal; it is graffiti. However, due to their non-permanent nature, as well as the fact that they can just be cut down, she has never had any trouble with the law. After the microphone incident, Mayor Nutter tracked her down to yarn bomb a bike for him as a practical joke. But Haims does more than just yarn bombing; this is only one chapter in her life as an artist.

Ever since she was young, Haims always knew she wanted to be an artist. She grew up with four older sisters who all attended Gwynedd Mercy Academy. She lived in their shadows and “wasn’t the smart one.” She gravitated toward art as her refuge and flourished. Her formal art education started with several summer courses, one in drawing and ceramics at Moore College of Art and Design in 1989 and then another in textiles at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Sciences in 1990. That fall she went to New York City and studied painting and drawing at Parsons School of Design. Then she attended the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 1991, studying painting and ceramics.

In the fall of 1992, Haims was accepted by the SEA Education Association to spend a semester at sea. That experience propelled her to attend the University of Rhode Island’s Marine Affairs department, where she earned a BA in Marine Affairs in 1996. However, she couldn’t give up the arts and after transferring credits from earlier colleges and taking several courses, she also earned her B.F.A. in Painting the same year.

Around this time, her own style of art began to take shape: focused on combining different elements into a whole. She sewed canvases out of found fabric like her mother’s old skirts or curtains from her sister’s nursery. Haims incorporated prints, photos, woodcuts, and found objects into her work. Her work could be called mixed media and collage.

Shortly after graduating from college in 1996, she moved to New York City. Haims had success with her work, putting on shows in New York, and even securing representation from two galleries in Manhattan.

She found work at a manufacturer of commercial carpet tiles and soon was bringing home samples and leftovers. Haims experimented with these new materials, as well as working on silk paintings and quilting.

Near the end of 2001 she became pregnant and had to stop working with casting resin and gold leaf because it was toxic. This was when she moved into fibers and fabrics as her mainstay. But it wasn’t until 2006 when yarn and knitting took over her focus.

“It’s all my mother’s fault. She was sick, and was given 10 days to live. She asked me to finish a knitting project for her,” Haims said. Her mother was a master knitter and made scarves for everyone: family members, friends, volunteers at her cancer center, friends of the volunteers. Haims started work on a scarf for her mother’s best friend that she hadn’t been able to finish. Haims knitted straight for several days to finish the scarf. When it was done, her mother said, “There’s another one I need help with. And then another.”

Her first major art show in yarn, “Heaven and Hell”, covered the floor and ceiling of the Highwire Gallery in Fishtown in 2009. But her next project might end up being her best. Her best friend died suddenly at the beginning of the summer, and it hit Haims hard. She began searching for memories of her in the places where she had lived and worked, and ended up at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Massachusetts, where her friend had volunteered for a year. Haims walked all through the grounds, looking for places her friend might have visited. That's when she decided to crochet coverings for rocks as an offering to her memory.

And after “Heaven and Hell” debuted, she found herself with a lot of yarn and nothing to do with her hands, so she started making scarves and bracelets for poles. But she insists that while her knit graffiti has helped make a name for her, it’s only just for fun.

Her daughter, Noa, 10, “thinks I’m crazy...but I think she thinks it’s cool too. When people ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she says ‘An artist like my mom’. All I want her to be is a nuclear physicist. [She laughed.] I don’t know what my husband, Josh, thinks about it. I think he’s made his peace being married to an artist.”

Outside of The Tangled Web, Haims pulled the already constructed pieces from her basket, wrapped it around the pole, and began to stitch together the spine. “I do like to point out that I’m reusing materials [her yarn and fabrics are donated or reclaimed], but I’d say the real statement I’m trying to make is for people to open their eyes and see there is art everywhere. It doesn’t have to be a painting in a museum or a sculpture in a gallery, it’s not the only art there is. And art can be fun.”

For more information about her work, please visit www.melissamaddonnihaims.com. And for general information about the fiber arts in Philadelphia, please visit Fiberphiladelphia.org.