Summer Shade, Brianne Cortez, 2025, embroidery, 8 x 8 in. / 20.32 x 20.32 cm.

Brianne Cortez: Embroidery With Humor, Horror, and History

December 9, 2025 Gavin Coates

Featured image: Summer Shade, Brianne Cortez, 2025, embroidery, 8 x 8 in. / 20.32 x 20.32 cm.

Brianne Cortez transforms embroidery into a vivid narrative medium, merging pop culture, horror aesthetics, and art-historical references with painstaking hand-stitching.

Brianne Cortez creates bold, narrative embroideries blending humor, pop culture, and meticulous hand-stitching with bright color and imaginative storytelling.

Her works Crimson Peak-a-Boo, Swim Reaper, and Four Ways demonstrate her flair for reimagining familiar imagery through texture, color, and wit. Using embroidery hoops as both frame and stage, Cortez builds worlds that are playful, unsettling, and always meticulously crafted.

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Crimson Peak-a-Boo, Brianne Cortez, 2022, embroidery, 10 x 10 in. / 25.4 x 25.4 cm.

Crimson Peak-a-Boo brings Gothic suspense into the intimate scale of embroidery. A pale, candle-bearing heroine stands unaware as a skeletal red figure looms directly behind her, a finger lifted to its lips. Cortez stitches the architectural arch in deep crimson threads, creating a cathedral-like vault that frames both figures. The contrast between the soft, glowing yellows of the woman’s hair and the jagged, visceral reds of the creature amplifies the tension between innocence and menace. Embroidery’s tactile nature heightens the theatricality: raised textures mimic carved bone, stitched folds suggest fabric, and the circular hoop becomes an eerie peephole into a frozen moment of cinematic dread.

Swim Reaper, Brianne Cortez, 2025, embroidery, 10 x 10 in. / 25.4 x 25.4 cm.

n Swim Reaper, Cortez injects dark humor into a sunny, modern setting. A cloaked Grim Reaper lounges on a bubblegum-pink pool float, drifting across a vividly stitched blue pool. The surrounding courtyard and lush green hills are rendered in tight, directional threads, giving the environment a graphic snap. The absurdity of Death relaxing at a luxury vacation home creates a sharp visual punchline, memento mori meets weekend getaway. Cortez uses embroidery’s inherent softness to transform the macabre into something approachable, even charming, without losing the underlying bite of satire.

Four Ways, Brianne Cortez, 2023, embroidery, 25 x 24 in. / 63.5 x 60.96 cm.

Four Ways reimagines ‘Warhol Birth of Venus’ through a labor-intensive field of French knots, each portrait built dot-by-dot like a textile pointillist painting. Arranged quadrantly, the four Venuses shift across palettes and materials: the left pair stitched in cotton thread, the right pair enhanced with metallic thread that catches and reflects light. This variation introduces movement, glamor, and a contemporary shimmer. Cortez celebrates both Warhol’s seriality and Botticelli’s iconic figure, merging high art and craft tradition while showcasing embroidery’s ability to hold complexity, color depth, and sculptural tactility.

Across these works, Cortez demonstrates how embroidery can transcend domestic associations and become a vehicle for narrative and critique. Crimson Peak-a-Boo channels Gothic anxiety, Swim Reaper blends morbidity with satire, and Four Ways updates art-historical icons through material innovation. Together, they highlight Cortez’s unique sensibility, one that embraces humor, world-building, and meticulous technique, proving that thread can tell stories just as powerfully as paint or film.

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