Maybe you’ve seen him online. Baltimore knitter Sam Barsky makes sweaters of landmarks, occasions and more, and posts viral selfies wearing them.
That’s how John Michael Kohler Arts Center curator Laura Bickford found him. “[The sweaters] invite other people to think about the places they go differently,” she says.
The center’s new exhibition this month shows 26 of Barsky’s knitted creations, including the London’s Tower Bridge, New York and the Great Lakes. He also made a sweater of the Arts Center itself, and you can wear it by appointment.
“Through knitting, he found joy and a path in life,” Bickford says. “I think the more people that he can share that with, the better.”
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Barsky’s closet contains over 160 sweaters, and he wears a different one each day. Bickford says they took this into account when curating the exhibition, choosing out-of-rotation sweaters that too light for winter wear or that no longer fit him. Fans might recognize some of featured sweaters from his posts, like his Central Park sweater.
Some of the center’s employees have taken to knitting their own sweaters a la Barsky. And the prolific knitter himself will visit Sheboygan in mid-May to give an artist talk at the Kohler Arts Center and lead knitting circles at a library and a local yarn shop.
MilMag got the chance to speak with Barsky, and we asked him about his craft, the exhibition, and why he doesn’t sell his sweaters.
What drew you to knitting sweaters?
For many years before I actually learned how to knit, it was something that attracted me when I saw other people doing it. I tried to find someone to teach me, and my first attempts to do so were not successful. But finally, I found the owners of two different yard shops who taught me various skills.
The first thing that the first instructor had me do was make a scarf. But I really wanted to do sweaters from day one. And in the second shop I went to, that’s when she taught me how to make a solid color sweater. Then a year later, I started doing multicolored sweaters. The lady who owns the shop, she didn’t think I was ready to do that, but I wanted to prove her otherwise, and I did. A year and a half after my first knitting lesson, I started designing my own sweaters.
What was your first design?
It was a (predesigned) Vogue Knitting pattern called Map of the World, like a globe. After I did that, I wanted to do something even more interesting. I thought I would design something myself. At first, I was drawing a picture on a graph paper. I was thinking of a nature scene, and then I realized I could do this without the graph paper. I could just freehand it as I went along, and that’s exactly what I did. It’s a picture on the front as a covered bridge. On the back it’s a waterfall.
When making a sweater, do you have an image in mind, or do you just kind of improvise?
I have in mind what the theme is going to be, and it’s like drawing a picture. If it’s a real place, I’ll study pictures on the internet just to get a sense of what it looks like. I don’t make an exact copy of the picture. I look for yarns that resemble things in the real world. And then from there, to the best of my ability, I draw the picture just by knitting it.
Some sweaters are places you’ve been to, while others are places you hope to visit. Is it harder to knit somewhere you haven’t been to?
I’ve run into some issues doing it, when I’ve actually gone to the place and found it quite different. One of the ones I did that I wish I could have done better was Garden of the Gods in Colorado. I thought the pictures I saw looked like tiny rock formations, and I got there and found that was much bigger. It was huge rocks, like the size of buildings. That’s one I wish I could have done differently.
There are some places you’ve done sweaters for twice. Is that why, because you wanted to do it differently?
Sometimes. And for certain holidays, I want to have more than one because I want to wear it different days of the holiday or for different types of weather. But one of the ones I did twice was the Tower Bridge in London. And the reason why I did it twice is because I first envisioned a certain yarn that looked a certain way being used for the sky, but at the time I did the first one, I couldn’t find anything like that. And then a year later, a yarn that looked exactly like that came on the market, and I really wanted to do it. … The first Tower Bridge sweater is going to be on display.
I read that sometimes you’ll go out of the way for specific yarn.
The most memorable time that happened, I was making my Oriole Park at Camden Yards sweater, and I ran out of the yarn. I was using a particular green to make the field. The two shops I knew in Baltimore didn’t have it anymore, and I found by calling around that there was a shop in the D.C. suburbs that had it. I said, “Quick, put two on hold. I’ll be over in an hour.”
What made you start posting your sweaters on Instagram and TikTok?
For the past 10 years, I’ve been posting them on Facebook. When I discovered Facebook had groups of all different interests, I started there, and I was doing that for a few years. It got me enough publicity to get a couple of magazine articles during that time.
What made me post them on Instagram – I go every year to the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival, and a vendor said she doesn’t use Facebook. If I wanted to keep in touch with her, I had to friend her on Instagram. On that day, I signed up for an Instagram account. I got 800 followers on day one, and I have over 200,000 now. TikTok came along a few years later, and I decided to sign up for that as well.
What was your reaction to being approached for the JMKAC exhibition?
I’m always glad to do an exhibition somewhere if someone offers it to me, if it’s feasible for me to do it. (Laura Bickford) wanted me to knit a sweater someplace in Sheboygan, and I thought about doing the (Mitchell Park) Domes in Milwaukee, which I still want to do. She said that’s an hour away from the museum. I didn’t want to do a run-of-the-mill building, so I thought the best thing at that point was just to do a picture of the museum itself, so people could borrow the sweater, walk outside and take your selfie.
Why was it important for you to allow guests to wear the sweater?
It’s not originally my idea. First time anything like that was done was in Boulder, Colorado. The library there asked me about six and a half years ago to make three sweaters of Boulder-area landmarks so people could do that. For a two-month period, people were borrowing them, trying them on for their selfies and returning them. I was so happy to give that opportunity to others, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to do again somewhere else.
You sell T-shirts of your sweaters, but you don’t sell your sweaters, and you don’t take commissions. Why is that?
It takes me so long to make a sweater, and it’s impossible for me to be a human sweater mill. I get requests often to make a sweater, and sometimes people offer me $1,000, $2,000 or whatever. Whatever it is, it’s not a living wage. Considering the amount of time it takes to make such a sweater, I can’t sell them like that.
What do you hope people take away from your work?
I don’t want to be the only person who have ever done this. I’m hoping more people will learn this skill, and it’ll become a normal thing that people do. Submit pictures of whatever they want, freehand without a pattern.
Your sweaters are art, but they’re also your wardrobe. By letting people try one on, are you hoping they get the same feeling that you do wearing them?
Yes, exactly. I saw an Instagram reel – it was a man who made all kinds of cakes that looked like different objects that so you can’t even tell at first that it’s a cake. But then he cuts it open and eats it all the time, saying that he responds to his friends who say, “Why don’t you keep those things because they’re works of art?” He says, “They’re meant to be eaten.” I can relate to that, too, because I feel like my sweaters are meant to be worn.
