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If Mary M. Mazziotti isn’t the only Pittsburgh artist using embroidery for social commentary, she’s surely the best known.

An entertaining and provocative sampling of Mazziotti’s work is now on exhibit at be Galleries, in Lawrenceville, as “Thank You For Your Attention to This Matter.”

Many of the two dozen wall-hung works illustrate public statements by President Trump and his administration with appropriated imagery drawn from the World War I and World War II eras, including lifts from the Nazis and the Soviet Union. All rendered, mind you, in the cozily domestic medium of embroidery.

“Torture works, believe me,” reads one depicting a club-wielding beast in a red-starred cap, a helpless woman under one arm.

Mazziotti has been a distinctive presence on the local art scene for more than a decade, originally through her darkly humorous contemporary “memento mori” (“remember that you must die”). “Oh Death! It’s always about you isn’t it?” reads one such work, featuring death’s head angels in full flight, blowing trumpets.

The Forest Hills native began her career in advertising, as a copywriter and creative director in the U.S. and overseas. In the 1990s, and then in her 40s, she says, she got burnt out, returned to Pittsburgh and took classes at the Carnegie Museum of Art and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

She started out painting but switched to embroidery because, somehow, the former aggravates her arthritis while needlework doesn’t.

Her memento mori — think Death, in jeans, working the phone for a date, or aproned, doing endless rounds of domestic chores — have been exhibited at the Carnegie, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Mattress Factory and overseas, and she’s been chosen for residencies in Italy, Spain, France and Australia as well as the U.S.

“I tried to be more witty than morbid,” she says.

“Thank You For Your Attention,” straying from its main theme, also highlights Mazziotti’s fascination with medieval art, which she loves for its weirdness and humor. In the gallery window, a piece titled “An Open Mind Gathers No Moss” depicts two apparently living monks holding the bloody, severed crowns of their own skulls.

Mazziotti turned to explicitly topical commentary during Trump’s first term, with a series titled “Needling the Regime” that’s incorporated into “Thank You For Your Attention” along with newer works.

Like the memento mori, the works in “Attention” play off traditional sentimental embroidery. But instead of mottos like “Home Sweet Home,” these say things like, “The Press Needs to Shut Up” and “It is Illegal to Criticize Me,” the text adorned with laurel wreaths or royal crowns.

Mazziotti appropriates — or, as she says, “steals” — the original images and revises them to her liking with ChatGPT (“I use it the same way someone would use Photoshop”). Then she projects them on plain muslin, traces them, and completes the works with fabric paint and her colorful embroidery. (Her renderings of hair and animal fur are worth an up-close look.)

Soviet and Nazi propaganda images are widely available. “It was pretty disturbing how closely statements from Trump and the administration fit with those images of very clear Nazi or fascist propaganda,” she says.

In her work “Alternative Facts,” the word “morning” is used to label a bear. The word “book” denotes a bottle of vodka, “airport” a machine gun, and “potato” a Soviet rocket. In another piece, the head of a man in a red-starred military cap, hand to his ear, thinks “Our Real Friends Speak English,” inside a decorative border of characters from other alphabets.

“Stand Back! The Department of War is Here to Protect You,” reads another work, as five faceless soldiers aim rifles at the viewer while the U.S. Capitol burns behind them.

“This is what I do. I do antifa embroidery,” Mazziotti says.

“Thank You For Your Attention to This Matter,” originally scheduled to run through Jan. 31, has been extended through Feb. 14.