News & Events

Jerry Bleem: Textile Traditions of Northern Uganda: Basketry and Cloth
October 24, 2024

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Photo credit: Jerry Bleem

During a recent trip to the northwestern corner of Uganda, known as West Nile, Jerry Bleem had the opportunity to research local textile traditions, and meet craftspeople and vendors. For his lecture, Bleem will share some of his experiences, and will show textiles/artworks he collected during his travels for acquisition into the Textile Resource Center.

Jerry Bleem, an artist, teacher, writer, Franciscan friar and Catholic priest, earned his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his M.Div. from the Catholic Theological Union at Chicago. As an artist, Bleem examines the cultural construction of meaning by looking at what we discard and by transforming the nonprecious through time-intensive accumulation. These two-and three-dimensional surfaces raise issues ranging from apprehension to beauty, ecology to politics. He has participated in numerous residencies including the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. The Illinois Arts Council has recognized his work with seven grants and individual artist fellowships. His teaching career at SAIC began in 2000. As a writer, Bleem investigates the intersection of art and religion; US Catholic magazine has published over 200 of his monthly columns.

Cian Dayrit: Fabric Art and the Social Fabric
September 11, 2024

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Inferno, 2024. Detail. Photo credit: Nome

Cian Dayrit will talk about his work using textiles, from collaborating with artisans, researchers and peoples organizations, the process of making these textile pieces become dynamic records of ongoing struggles and growing solidarity networks.

Cian Dayrit (born 1989, Philippines) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates notions of space, power and identity as they are represented and reproduced in monuments, museums, maps and other institutionalized media. Working with textile, installations, archival interventions and community based workshops, Dayrit’s work responds to different marginalized communities, encouraging a critical reflection on colonial and privileged perspectives. While informed by the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the Philippines, his work nonetheless defies being tied to a specific position or location. Instead, his work and research cross over geopolitical and supranational bearings. Dayrit is a founding member of Sama-samang Artista Para sa Kilusang Agraryo (SAKA), an alliance of cultural workers advocating for land rights and food sovereignty. He is also currently enrolled at the Department of Geography in UP Diliman.

Mitchell Lecture Series: Angela Hennessy
April 13, 2023

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AngelaHennessy. Night Flowers, 2023. Synthetic hair. 38” x 30."
Photo courtesy of: pt.2 Gallery

Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and survivor of gun violence. Tending to themes of loss and liberation, her work draws upon mourning practices that activate hair as a material exchanged between the living and the dead. She is an associate professor at California College of the Arts where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death in contemporary art. Hennessy’s work has been featured in SculptureMagazine, Wovenutopia, and The New Yorker, and in exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum of California, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and Pt.2 Gallery. She has received awards from the Fleishhacker Foundation, SanFrancisco Artadia, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her work is in the collection of the de Young Museum and the Crocker Art Museum.

Hong Hong: A Body at Center
March 9, 2023

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Hong will trace the evolution of, as well as connections between, two distinct series of works: Tracing with Ashes the Sphere's Shadow (2017–2021) and An Earth at the Edge of My Sun (2021–current). She will also discuss ties between language, diagrams, light/shadow, mythology, painting, performance and temporality.

Abbey Muza: Fragments 
September 14, 2023

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Image courtesy of the artist.

This lecture traces a sequence of nodes between 1920s queer Paris and now, examined through archival research and realized as a series of tapestries. Compelled by inclination and desire, Muza maps their own experience onto the historical through the recuperation and re-presentation of archival material. If the archive as history intends to locate, place, and position, then Muza acknowledges this fragmented perspective as an inherent abstraction. Weaving offers a structural framework for cohering what seem to be apparent dislocations—in fact, time and space compound as a subtle yet consistent mechanism in the unfolding of their work. Fragments is a research project and exhibition supported by a Fulbright fellowship to France.

Abbey Muza makes weavings centered in queerness, haptics, and sensuality. They are a 2022-23 Fulbright France-Hariet Hale Wooley award recipient and visiting artist in the department of Design, textile, et matière at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. They received their MFA from theTyler School of Art and Architecture and their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They live and work between Chicago and Paris.

Jerry Bleem: “Textiles from the Philippines: Piña and T’nalak"
October 9, 2023

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Photo credit: Jerry Bleem

Composed of more than 7,500 islands, the geography of the Philippines’ archipelago produced a variety of cultures, many of which actively use distinctive languages and customs. In this lecture, Jerry will focus on two textiles produced in the Philippines, piña and t’nalak. Piña, considered the national cloth, was introduced by the Spanish colonizers; to this day, the pineapple grown for this fabric is called Spanish Red. A difficult fiber to process and weave, often blended with other fibers, and traditionally embroidered, piña continues to be the cloth of the well-dressed.

Though abaca—related to banana—is grown in a variety of places in the Philippines, the T’boli people of South Cotabato make a singular, warped-faced ikat cloth. The patterns they employ depend upon a collective tribal subconscious that relies on dreams. When the cloth is dyed in traditional colors, it is considered sacred, and its use is restricted.

Jerry Bleem, an artist, teacher, writer, Franciscan friar and Catholic priest, earned his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his M.Div. from the Catholic Theological Union at Chicago. As an artist, Bleem examines the cultural construction of meaning by looking at what we discard and by transforming the non precious through time-intensive accumulation. These two-and three-dimensional surfaces raise issues ranging from apprehension to beauty, ecology to politics. He has participated in numerous residencies including the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. The Illinois Arts Council has recognized his work with seven grants and individual artist fellowships. His teaching career at SAIC began in 2000. As a writer, Bleem investigates the intersection of art and religion; U.S. Catholic magazine has published over 200 of his monthly columns. Recent work for his Franciscan Order took him to the Philippines where he investigated weaving traditions.

Kira Keck: Recent Work 
October 18, 2023

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Photo credit: Brian Kovach

Kira will give an overview of their artistic practice, which draws upon dyke aesthetics and the histories of fiber arts and a heavy penchant for color and pattern. Emphasis will be placed on recent explorations of digital weaving and needlepoint in their ongoing Zick Zack series. Topics discussed may include: the eroticism of corduroy, gender performance and pastiche, towels, the slipperiness of abstraction, differences between moths and butterflies, and shit-posting in craft.

Kira Keck is an Artist-Weaver, Designer-Craftsman, and they/them lesbian. Through hand weaving and embroidery, Kira explores queer experience, the erotic potential of textiles, and chromophilia. They have been an artist-in-residence at Fabric of Life in Shelburne Falls, MA, the Institute 4 Labor Generosity Workers and Uniforms in Long Beach, CA, and Praxis Fiber Workshop’s Digital Weaving Lab in Cleveland, OH. They earned a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art as well as studying at folk schools such as Vävstuga Weaving School. They live in Pontiac, MI with their romantic partner/artistic collaborator Jane Saso and a tiny dog named Coral.

Katarina Weslien: I Forgot to Remember
November 1, 2023 

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 I Forgot to Remember, 2023. Model for installation. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In this presentation, Weslien will delve into a new body of work currently being developed for an exhibition in 2024. As part of this process, she is engaged in building scaled architectural models to examine the various possibilities and reflect upon the numerous decisions one must make to create a final installation. These choices are influenced by the specific circumstances of the site and time. This presentation will prompt a dialogue about the complexities involved in the process of making. Are we obliged to consider the audience? And who exactly constitutes that audience?

Katarina Weslien is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Her work takes form in cross-media installations, collaborative efforts, textile constructions, and printmedia. Her projects move through layers of research with a particular interest in how ordinary images and objects elicit meaning, emotions, and the embodied awareness of our interdependencies and the concurrent ethical implications that follow. Weslien received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BFA in Textiles from Utah State University. She is the former editor of the Moth Press at the Maine College of Art and the director of graduate studies. She has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and co-led study trips to India, focusing on material culture and pilgrimage studies. Her work has been exhibited internationally and recognized with multiple awards. Originally from Sweden, she lives in Maine.

Rufina Bazlova: International Belarusian Ornament 
November 6, 2023

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Rufina Bazlova is an artist who uses traditional folk Belarusian embroidery as a medium to depict socio-political issues. In 2020, she gained an international profile for her series The History of Belarusian Vyzhyvanka. Bazlova is a coauthor of the installation The Red Thread in Aachen dedicated to the three Belarusian female opposition leaders who won the Charlemagne prize in 2022. Currently as a member of Stitch it art group (in collaboration with curator Sofia Tocar), Bazlova works on a social art project #FramedinBelarus that invites people from all over the world to stitch stories of political prisoners in Belarus. The conversation will focus on #FramedinBelrus and Bazlova’s interest in the history of Belarusian embroidery that has informed the project.

Rufina Bazlova is a visiting artist-in-residence at Hyde Park Art Center (October 10–November 17). Her residency is part of an ongoing partnership between Hyde Park Art Center and CEC Arts Link’s acclaimed international fellowship program and made possible through the generous support of the The Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation.

Dr. Vandana Bhandari: Living Embroidery Traditions in India 
November 15, 2023

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Photo credit: Vandana Bhandari

India is internationally recognized for fine artistry and is home to the most versatile styles of embroidery. These are found in varied forms through out the country. The stitches, motifs, and interpretations reflect local cultures and traditions and are a part of the living heritage of textiles. The outstanding handwork skills of embroidery have been passed down from generation to generation and have flourished in the country for thousands of years. The presentation will discuss the varied Indian embroideries, stitches, motifs, and interpretations which reflect local cultures and traditions along with the modern interpretations of the craft.

During the journey of over 35 years as an academician, Dr. Bhandari has worked as an educator, author, and administrator with an active social engagement in the fashion and textile sector. She has held the position of Dean of Academics at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, India. She is currently a design advisor for the Export Promotion Council of Handicrafts. She also serves on the Board of Delhi Craft Council, Sadhna-Udaipurand as Director on the Board of Textile Society of America. Published in journals and magazines, Dr. Bhandari has authored and compiled books on Fashion and Textiles. Her research interests include economics, sustainability projects for craftspeople, craft-based studies, Indian textiles, ethnographic studies on dress and fashion in India. 

Vanessa Viruet: Hood Academic 
March 29, 2022

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Image courtesy of the artist.

In both gang and gay culture, the feminine patterned bandana fabric acts as a way of identifying, or flagging, oneself.  By introducing this textile icon into a gallery setting Viruet seeks to call attention to the space between the art world and various communities of so-called outsiders. Exaggerating the scale is a symbolic gesture of intervention, a way of colonizing and claiming space in the world as a queer, Latina woman from a barrio. The value of art rests in its ability to communicate across barriers.

Vanessa Viruet is a Chicago-based fiber artist of Puerto Rican descent. She creates monumental scale artworks to examine the complex histories rooted in textiles such as identity, cultural heritage, gender, and class. Viruet holds a BFA and a MA in Teaching from the Maryland Institute College of Art as well as an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She currently serves as an art instructor for Chicago Public Schools and teaches in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Someday she hopes to have her own scholarship for artists of color.

Poppy DeltaDawn: How to Make a Body 
October 11, 2022

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Courtesy of the artist.

In How to Make a Body, Poppy DeltaDawn takes a deep dive into the tutorial and the humble sample. While introducing her audience to her most recent work and research, the artist will exhibit overlooked instructional media that evolves with our evolving technology: the printed tutorial book, the Youtube video, social media video clips and memes, and other tools. DeltaDawn considers the expansive possibility of the metadata and the autobiographical content that the instructions contain while considering ways of manipulating and transforming her own pliable body.

Amy Yoes: Stages, Locations 
October 25, 2022

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Image courtesy of the artist. 

Amy Yoes will talk about the multi-room installation Hot Corners, her most recent project, on view at Mass Moca in North Adams, MA. She will also discuss her earlier works and share ongoing sources and inspirations. Amy cuts, weaves, overlays, folds, records, and splices imagery in her paintings, photographs, sculptures, performances, and animations. She responds to formal topologies of ornament and style that have repeated and reverberated through time, tapping into a shared visual and cultural memory. Her installation Hot Corners is currently on view at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. She teaches at SAIC in the departments of Fiber and Material Studies, Sculpture, Photography, and Contemporary Practices.

Nancy Feldman: Contemporary Textile Imagery in Peru’s Amazon 
February 25, 2021

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Courtesy of the artist.

In this talk, Nancy Feldman highlights the work of contemporary women artists in Peru’s Shipibo-Conibo communities. Their work with traditional textile forms, materials and processes bear witness to the complexity of artistic production in the time of encroachment onto Amazon indigenous lands, ecological devastation and relocation into cities. These artists’ reinvigorated imaginings of kené, the linear patterned design making visible Shipibo cosmology, reveal new narratives and practices in Amazonian art making.

Nancy Feldman is an art historian whose work engages with textile histories as well as medieval art. Through the study of objects, her work explores the foundational significance of place, materials, and processes of making. Currently Associate Professor Adjunct in the Art History Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she also serves as Supervisor for the SAIC Textile Resource Center. She served as co-director and producer for the Field Museum’s Amazonian documentary, Shipibo: Movie of our Memories, a MacArthur Foundation-supported film. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute.

Nia Easley: And I hold power 
March 4, 2021

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Composite image of works by Nia Easley including photos by Anjali Pinto and Milo Bosh

Named after a workshop held at Gallery 400 last year, this lecture will focus on recent public installation work by the artist and the many afterlives of that work—including being in a recent music video for the Grammy-nominated album Place.

Nia Easley in an artist, designer, researcher, and curator based in Chicago, Illinois. She creates works that address issues of visibility, accessibility, urban migration, social justice, and data visualization. Her artist books are currently in the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection, DePaul University, Northwestern University, and the University of Iowa special collections. She has participated in exhibitions in the United States, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic. Easley has received the ThreeWalls RaD Lab Grant (2017), the ThreeWalls Outside the Walls Award (2018), and a Chicago IAP Grant (2019).

Ellen Rothenberg: visual noise + good trouble= the labor of citizenship 
March 11, 2021

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Courtesy of the artist.

This lecture will focus on a public conversation on resistance, working in isolation, and the “historical now.’’ Ellen Rothenberg’s recent public projects and installations focus on global migration and the political and social response in destination countries; the intertwined histories of electoral activism and of voter suppression; and the possibilities for individual and collective action. Her research repurposes the archive through presence and emplacement—inhabiting architecture, public spaces, and sites of everyday life.

Working and living between Chicago and Berlin, Rothenberg is currently a Research Fellow at IGK Arbeit und Lebenslauf in globalgeschichtlicher Perspektive (re:work) Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Professor, Adjunct at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As Faculty Research Fellow in SAIC’s Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice during 2018–19, Rothenberg and Daniel Eisenberg curated and organized RE:WORKING LABOR, an international symposium and exhibition on contemporary representations of labor and the future of work.

John Paul Morabito: A Queer Tangent in Tapestry 
March 18, 2021

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Courtesy of the artist.

Do you see the parallels between Bronx-Italian opulence and exaggerated drag queen glamor? Drawing upon these mirrored sensibilities, John Paul Morabito will invoke the fallen glory of tapestry to un-situate the holy with sincere blasphemy. This lecture will queerly reorient relics, icons, and rituals through a series of intersecting tangents that attempt, perhaps, to weave a tapestry of their own.

Transdisciplinary weaver, John Paul Morabito engages queerness, ethnicity, and the sacred through the medium of tapestry reimagined in the digital age. Their work outputs woven forms, moving images, and performances that look toward a future-past horizon where one can exalt queer devotion and grace. They have exhibited internationally including the Zhejiang Art Museum; CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions; Dorksy Gallery Curatorial Projects; Document; the Des Moines Art Center; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design; and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Public collections include the Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec and the Textile Resource Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Morabito holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where they serve on the faculty as Assistant Professor, Adjunct.

Judith Brotman: Of Strange and Wondrous, Odious and Erotic Occurrences That You Should Know (if you are here) 
March 25, 2021

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Courtesy of the artist.

Judith Brotman will discuss her multidisciplinary work that hovers in spaces “between”—between abstraction and figuration, deterioration and regeneration, elegance and awkwardness, generosity and obligation. She emphasizes a visual language (and a written one, in text-based pieces) that suggests the unfinished or incomplete, and might evoke the question, "What happens next?" Brotman will discuss these spaces of not knowing which she considers to be both complex and generative despite, or perhaps due to, the resulting cliffhanger of uncertainty.

Judith Brotman is a multidisciplinary artist and educator from Chicago. Her work includes mixed media installations and theatrical immersive environments which occupy a space between sculpture and drawing. More recent work incorporates language/text-based conceptual projects which are also meditations on uncertainty and the possibility of transformation. Brotman has exhibited extensively in Chicago and throughout the US. Exhibitions include: Smart Museum of Art, SOFA Chicago, Hampshire College, The Society of Arts & Crafts/Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asphodel Gallery, INOVA, the DeVos Art Museum, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Threewalls, Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, and The Illinois State Museum. Brotman’s work is in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Illinois State Museum, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. Brotman received her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the department of Fiber and Material Studies where she currently teaches.

José Santiago Perez: Haptic Choreographies 
April 1, 2021

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Photo credit: Aiyo O’Conner

Baskets are places of gathering. They embrace what they hold. They await. They receive. They keep things safe. They offer. Baskets help us carry and carry on. In this lecture José Santiago Pérez reflects on his recent basketry work and the ways that gathering, holding, and carrying form an embodied repertoire of care, empathy, and love that informs his performative approach to making and transforms how he mourns the passing of family elders in the wake of the pandemic. 

José Santiago Pérez José is a Salvadoran-American artist and educator that weaves plastics into markers of time and containers of intimacy and empathy. José is a 2020 recipient of the Chicago Artists Coalition SPARK grant and a 2021 recipient of an Individual Artist Support grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. His 2020 solo exhibition Palacios (fantasy structures) at Roman Susan was reviewed by David Getsy in Artforum. Solo exhibitions include Ignition Project Space and Wedge Projects in Chicago. He has participated in two-person and group shows and performances in Chicago at Chicago Artists Coalition, Evanston Art Center, Heaven Gallery, Ohklahomo, The Museum of Surgical Science, Defibrillator Gallery, Comfort Station, The Graham Foundation, and the MCA Chicago; Fort Mason, San Francisco; Pink Noise Projects, Philadelphia; and Fort Warren, Boston. José has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies.

Jerry Bleem: Still: Shaping an Exhibition 
April 8, 2021

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Courtesy of the artist.

As his fall 2020 solo exhibition at the Riverside Arts Center approached, what was supposed to be a 20-year retrospective no longer seemed appropriate to Jerry Bleem. The violence directed at people of color and the ensuing Black Lives Matter movement called for a response. Bleem and his curator, Anne Harris, decided to reopen his Nationalism series and make that the focus of Bleem’s exhibit Still. This talk examines the exhibit’s evolution and his Nationalism series.

Jerry Bleem, an artist, teacher, writer, Franciscan friar, and Catholic priest, earned his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MDiv from the Catholic Theological Union at Chicago. As an artist, Bleem examines the cultural construction of meaning by looking at what we discard and by transforming the nonprecious through time-intensive accumulation. The resulting work—both two- and three-dimensional surfaces—raises issues ranging from apprehension to beauty, ecology to politics. The Illinois Arts Council has recognized his work with seven grants and individual artist fellowships. Bleem has also participated in numerous residencies including the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program.

Bleem has taught in the department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2000. His interests span historic and ethnographic textiles, the dynamics of collecting, and material culture expressive of popular religious practices. In his writing, Bleem investigates the intersection of art and religion in a monthly column for US Catholic magazine; his essays have appeared in journals and exhibition catalogs.

Alexandria Eregbu: Surreal Threads: Tracing the Marvelous in West African Art  
April 15, 2021

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Photo courtesy of the artist and Oguguam Ugwuanyi

Fundamentally motivated by the color blue, black poetry, surrealist discourse, and Africa’s spectacular contribution to the multidimensional realm of art and storytelling, Alexandria takes a closer look at her origins by examining Nigeria’s creative output. Beginning with the Igbo worldview, she examines the ancient writing systems ’nsibidi’ and ‘uli’ most typically found embedded into the indigo-dyed  and stitch-resisted ukara cloths as well as the body art of Igbo people. Lastly, Alexandria shares the influence of community-based practices originating near her ancestral home in Owerri on her personal practice through the elaborate architecture of the mbari house in Imo State and the cloth-based ijele masquerade structures native to Anambra State. Through this study, Alexandria considers the ecologically restorative, yet critical nature of Africa’s art and use of language as exemplified in its proverbs and literature.

Alexandria Eregbu is an artist and educator whose practice draws from craft, material histories, and surrealist activity to deepen her connectivity to the natural world. Her work is often driven by notions of 'home'— studying African stories and objects of familial and ancestral origin between West Africa, the Caribbean, and her hometown Chicago. Her work has been presented through the College Art Association of America, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Public Space One in Iowa City, Poets House in New York, the French Embassy in Chicago, and Camargo Foundation in France, Casa Rosada in Salvador, Brazil, and Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, among others. Her writing has been published by the University of Chicago Press, Sixty Inches From Center, Terremoto Magazine, and Green Lantern Press. Alexandria is an Emerging Artist Fellow with the Driehaus Museum (2020); a recipient of the 3Arts Award (2016); and Newcity Breakout Artist (2015).

Kelly Kaczynski: Stages, (a)way from nouns 
April 22, 2021

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Kelly Kaczynski discusses nearness with the form of the stage. Naturally, to speak of nearness is to recognize distance. In early works, Kaczynski approached nearness with emphasis on distances, especially pertaining to “being here” and “being there”. Recently, their practice is absorbed by the problem of “being with.” This deep shift brings Kaczynski’s work closer to a practice of forming while doing, where the stages materially and linguistically arrive through proximate nouns.

Kelly Kaczynski is an artist working within the language of sculpture. Their work spans from site-responsive installation to object making, photography, video, drawing, and text. Kaczynski has exhibited widely in public, not-for-profit, alternative, artist grown, and vulnerable spaces. Independent curatorial projects addressing relationships between virtual and physical include Virtually Physically Speaking, Columbia College, 2014 and Mouthing (a sentient limb), 2011, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL. Collaborative curatorial projects include the endeavors of Working Group for Unmaking: Living Within the Play, Poor Farm, 2019-ongoing; Manatee, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, 2018; Roving Room at Habersham Mills, GA, 2014. Kaczynski grew their soul in the Pacific Northwest and attended The Evergreen State College for their BA. After a long road trip and some time comprehending another coast, they received a MFA from Bard College, NY. Since moving to Chicago, Kaczynski is infatuated with the level horizon of the lake. Kaczynski is Associate Professor, Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.

Andrea Peterson 
April 29, 2021

Stacia Yeapanis: Daily Practice and the Sacred Secular
June 3, 2021

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Stacia Yeapanis’ work is born of a longing for stillness and a compulsion towards action. Her cross-stitch embroideries, remix videos, and improvised installations sit at the intersection of habit and ritual, neurosis and spirituality, addiction and meditation. In this lecture, Stacia will discuss collecting, collage/remix, working horizontally and impermanence as foundational strategies in her studio. She’ll also address TV shows as sacred texts, hobbies as holy rites and brushing her cats as a devotional act.

Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer. She explores the relationship between repetition, suffering and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix videos, temporary collages and improvised, sculptural installations. Yeapanis is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at SAIC, where she earned her MFA in 2006 and won a Marion Kryczka Excellence in Teaching Award in 2020. Her first monograph was published jointly by Aperture and The Museum of Contemporary Photography in 2009. Yeapanis was a 2011–2012 Artist-in-Residence and a 2012–2013 Mentor-in-Residence at Chicago Artists’ Coalition’s BOLT Residency. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017), Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018) and Kent State, Stark (North Canton, Ohio 2019), and Finlandia University (Hancock, Michigan 2020). Stacia is the Spring 2021 Artist-in-Residence at Zócalo Apartments in Houston, TX.

Melissa Leandro: Poco a poco, little by little 
June 10, 2021

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Image courtesy of the artist.

Melissa Leandro’s work draws us into her richly colorful and surreal landscapes, which explore personal, familial, and cultural experiences from her everyday life and family histories. Her presentation will discuss the roots of her many nostalgic and imagined visual symbols seen in her work, and how they are ingrained in her cultural identity. By continuously absorbing movements in familiar and foreign environments, Leandro produces textile works through digital jacquard weaving, embroidery, fabric dying, and heavy embellishment, to abstract the subtleties of particular places, people, and memories. Leandro’s lecture will delve into the impact of her present day collecting, the experiences of her mother, her family’s home in Costa Rica, and her father’s livelihood as a construction worker. As her artwork continues to evolve, she welcomes us to explore how these events shape her art practice. 

Melissa Leandro is the recipient of the Artadia Award, the Craft Fellowship Grant from the Illinois Arts Council, the Wingate Artist Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center Residency, the Luminarts Fellowship from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, Union League of Chicago, the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, and a Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration EAGER Grant. Leandro was a BOLT resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition for 2017–18, and was named one of Newcity Chicago's Break Out Artists of the year in 2018. Leandro has attended the Master Residency at The Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Ragdale Residency at the Ragdale Foundation, the Jacquard Center Workshop, Research, design, & production in Hendersonville, North Carolina, ACRE, the Roger Brown House Residency, and TextielLab. Recent solo exhibitions include the University Club of Chicago, Union League Club of Chicago, Rockford University, the Wright Museum of Art, Andrew  Rafacz Gallery, and Frieze Art Fair New York. Leandro is represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago. She holds a BFA and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is also a current Lecturer.

Nelly Agassi: Innermost 
June 17, 2021

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Courtesy of the artist.

The talk will include selected works from the last 20 years of my practice. I will discuss inspirations, concepts, production and materiality through insights from the “backstage” of my creative process and way of working. I will share milestones in my career and the development of the work.

Chicago-based artist Nelly Agassi (b.1973, Israel) is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with performance, installation, video, textile, sound, and works on paper. Her work explores the relationship between the human body and architecture through investigating sites and their histories, traumas, and hopes. She weaves personal and collective stories into a universal fabric of new history. She received her MFA from Chelsea College and her BFA from Central St. Martins, both in London. Her work has been shown internationally at institutions and galleries such as The Arts Club of Chicago, Aspect Ratio, Hyde Park Art Center, The Israel Museum, Poor Farm, Tate Modern, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, La Triennale di Milano, Zacheta Warsaw, Foksal Gallery Warsaw and upcoming show at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. Agassi is a cofounder of the nonprofit organization Fieldwork Collaborative Projects and a 2019 Graham Foundation Fellow, Pola Magnetyczne, Warsaw. Agassi is represented by Dvir Gallery and Pola Magnetyczne, Warsaw.

Alipio Melo, Danitza Willka, and Maria Jose Murillo: Noqanchis Awaqkuna (We The Weavers) 
November 3, 2021

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Image courtesy of María José Murillo. 

This lecture brings together members of the Noqanchis group (Union of Textile Artists,  Andes of Peru), recently formed by prominent young Indigenous weavers from Pitumarca, Peru, Alipio Melo and Danitza Willka, together with artist María José Murillo (SAIC MFA 2019). In Quechua, noqanchis translates to “we all.” It is an inclusive ‘we’ (+) as opposed from noqayku, which refers to a restrictive ‘we’ (-). Unlike Western languages, Quechua maintains the same root for ‘I’ [noqa] and for ‘we’ [noqanchis/noqayku], demonstrating the inseparable link between the individual and the community in the construction of Andean identity. The presentation will create a space for the weavers to speak from their most personal voice, thereby subverting the historical representations that the western perspective has imposed on indigenous cultures. Textile artists from Pitumarca—better known as “The Capital of Andean Weaving”—will share reflections on how they keep their traditions alive, focusing on the ancestral and trans-temporal technology of the backstrap loom as a tool for contemporary cultural production. In this way, weaving is lived in the Andes not only as an activity, but also as an episteme, establishing relationships between the Earth beings and the Cosmos, between the past and the future.

Elnaz Javani: Shaping Space
October 26, 2021

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Image courtesy of the artist.

How do we respond to place and displacement in real and imagined spaces? How do bodies inhabit spaces and become the space that they inhabit? How do inhabited spaces shape bodies and mental geography? In this lecture, Elnaz Javani will discuss her practice, current and previous projects, which explores the landscapes of biography, surreality, fantasy, and madness in the intersection of identities.

Elnaz Javani is an artist and educator currently residing in Chicago. She works in between the media of textiles, drawing, print, soft objects and  installations. Her practice revolves around the fragmentation of identity and place, power dynamics and labor. She holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was the recipient of the New Artist Society Merit Scholarship, and BFA from Tehran University of Art. Javani was awarded the Enrichment Grant, from the Art Institute of Chicago (2021), The Spark Grant from Chicago artist Coalition (2021), the Kala Art institute Fellowship award and residency grant (2020), the Define American Art Fellowship Grant (2019) and the Hyde Park Art Center Flex Space Residency award (2019). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally in the USA, Spain, Iran, France, Colombia, Turkey, UAE, Germany, Canada, and Switzerland. 

JeeYeun Lee: What Place is This 
December 9, 2020

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How do we understand the place we are in? In this lecture, JeeYeun Lee will talk about her recent work, which uses walking as a durational practice to witness present-day environments created through genocide, colonization, slavery, and segregation in places like Detroit, Santa Fe, and Chicago. Can you feel the layers of history in a place as you walk? We will investigate how we might walk together through the medium of Zoom.

JeeYeun Lee is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and activist based in Chicago. Through performance, objects, and socially engaged art, her work explores dynamics of power, connection, violence and resistance. Her work has been shown in Chicago, Detroit, Santa Fe, Ohio, Missouri, and France. She has worked with social justice and community-based organizations for over 25 years in immigrant rights, economic justice, LGBTQ issues, and domestic violence. She holds an MFA in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art, MA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and BA in Linguistics from Stanford University.

Christalena Hughmanick: Unfinished Construction 
December 8, 2020

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Photo Credit: Christalena Hughmanick

Christalena is going to speak about long-term, in-progress projects that have been designed to facilitate exchange and support a continued practice of seeking. For herself and participants, collective actions complicate the definitions of work, distinctions of discipline, and understandings of home.

Christalena Hughmanick is an artist and educator making textiles and sculptural installations that become activated by performance works. Recent exhibition sites include Faur Szófi in Budapest, Carriage Trade in New York, Andrew Rafacz and MPSTN in Chicago. She has been an artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome, SÍM Association of Icelandic Visual Artists, Reykjavík Iceland, Moholy-Nagy Művészeti Egyetem in Budapest and Wedge Projects in Chicago. Christalena is a recipient of a 2018–19 academic year Fulbright Hungary Student Grant, US Department of State Individual Assistance Grant, Grainger Marburg Travel Grant and a Lenore Tawney Foundation Scholarship. Recent textile-based public engagement projects include The Freedom Quilt Hungary and some thing grand. She received an MFA from the Fiber & Material Studies Department. 

Kg Gnatowski: Moving Again 
November 23, 2020

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Kg is going to talk about all the studios they’ve occupied over the last 40 years leading up to the recent purchase of their forever home studio, bought on November 3, 2020, election day, and moved into on Friday the 13th, 2020.

Kg was born in Poland in 1980 and lives and works in Chicago. They teach weaving and studio practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include Queer Forms at the Katherine E. Nash gallery Minneapolis MN, Blue Out Of My Mouth at Freerange Gallery Chicago, Changeling at Julius Caesar Chicago, and Alter at Terrain in Oak Park IL. In January 2019 kg hung a solo exhibition, Some Kind Of Duty, of woven works at The DePaul Art Museum that included a participatory badminton field made in collaboration with artist Betsy Odom. Upcoming shows include I Am I Said at Carthage College. Kg attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017 and The Vermont Studio Center as a fellow in 2018. Their first monograph Some kind Of Duty is available at The DePaul Art Museum and on amazon.com.

Beth Hetland:  i have so little trust & so much paranoia 
November 19, 2020

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You awake suddenly in the dark, the streetlights glow through slatted blinds, texturing the wall and ceiling. You catch a glimpse of movement out of the corner of your eye. You become extremely still. Your tongue swells, smothering your breath in your throat. The room seems to warp and pulse as your eyes strain through the shadows. Ever so slowly, you feel a creeping up the small of your back. Its pace quickens as it moves toward your neck. A sharp cold electrifies your body. You snap your head around, seeking the source of the disturbance. Your flesh crawls. But you crave more. CW: There will be horrific depictions of the human body. 

Beth Hetland is a cartoonist, book maker, performer, screen printer, and fiber artist, whose work focuses on storytelling and self-publishing. She earned her BFA from SAIC and her MFA from The Center for Cartoon Studies. She is a recipient of the Part Time Faculty of the Year Award (2015) and a Marion Kryczka Excellence in Teaching Award (2020). In addition to her solo work, she has created several projects with her long-time collaborator, Kyle O’Connell, including their series Half Asleep. In between juggling projects, she is an interdisciplinary Associate Professor, Adjunct, at SAIC, teaching comics and narrative classes across three departments as well as a Faculty Academic Advisor, a Student Group Advisor, and a Portfolio Reviewer for Undergraduate Admissions. Needless to say, you may have seen her around.

Mitchell Lecture Series: T'ai Smith
February 13, 2020

Focusing on two recent film projects, by artists Judith Raum and Sascha Reichstein, this lecture will retrace the role of textiles in certain conceptual practices since the 1960s. Textiles, in this narrative—photographed and performing, but not (necessarily) materially present—can be understood as tangential media. If geometric tangents suggest a relationship, it is one where lines may touch or meet at a point on other lines or forms, but do not (ordinarily) intersect. Understood as lines in a network or diagram, textile tangents re-draw the inner logic of media. Understood rhetorically, they become figures that provide a divergence, interventions that re-align the discourse between art, societies, and economies. 

Rachel Meginnes
October 23, 2019

Trained as a weaver, Rachel Meginnes' artwork is rooted in the history and structure of textiles. Her current works, using discarded vintage quilts, center on the themes of loss, love, labor, and repair. Although no longer working directly at the loom, Meginnes identifies a persistent need to work closely with her materials by removing, mending, and adapting each original piece by hand. Through this process, Meginnes shifts her material's narrative from one set in the past to one responding to the present and questioning the future. By simultaneously paying tribute to her source material and displaying her own intuitive impulses, Meginnes breathes new life into post-functional heirlooms.

Diedrick Brackens: A Flag is a Seed 
October 10, 2019

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Brackens' lecture will focus on his interest in flags and the aesthetic power of Americana. This will culminate in a preview of his forthcoming show Allegiance, at Sewanee University. He will discuss recent works and exhibitions such as the Hammer Biennial Made in LA and his traveling exhibition darling divined. Brackens will talk about the central role weaving plays in his practice and how narrative and figuration animate his textiles.

Diedrick Brackens (b. 1989, Mexia, TX) creates woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the artist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South, and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Often depicting moments of male tenderness, Brackens culls from African and African American literature, poetry, and folklore as source. Beginning his process through the hand-dying of cotton, a material he deliberately uses in acknowledgement of its brutal history, Brackens’ oeuvre presents rich, nuanced visions of African American life and identity, while also alluding to the complicated histories of labor and migration. Brackens lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA from University of North Texas, Denton, TX and an MFA in textiles from California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York, NY, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; and the University of North Texas, Denton, TX. Recent group exhibitions include Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Jewish Contemporary Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; and Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL. Forthcoming exhibitions include solo presentations at Sewanee University Art Gallery, TN in October 2019. Brackens is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, among others. He is also the 2018 recipient of The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize and the 2019 recipient of both the Marciano Artadia Award, and the American Craft Coun- cil Emerging Artist Award.

Jennifer Huang
April 17, 2019

Jennifer Chen-su Huang is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose research-driven works weave together elements of art, language, history, and memoir. This last year, she completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Taiwan, where she was a Research Fellow with the Ethnology Department at National Chengchi University as well as a Visiting Artist at Tainan National University of the Arts. She graduated with her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley. Huang has exhibited internationally at Haiton Art Center in Taipei and across the United States at Untitled Prints and Editions in Los Angeles, Kearny St. Workshop in San Francisco, and Gallery 400 in Chicago, among others. 

Tanya Aguiñiga 
April 4, 2019

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Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles-based artist/designer/craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years she created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists' group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture and gender while creating community. This approach has helped museums and non-profits in the United States and Mexico diversify their audiences by connecting marginalized communities through collaboration.

Aguiñiga is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC and Creative Capital 2016 Grant Awardee. She has been the subject of a cover article for American Craft Magazine and has been featured in PBS's Craft in America series. Aguiñiga is the founder and director of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national transition and identity in the US/Mexico border regions. AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness while simultaneously documenting the border. Aguiñiga is the inaugural fellow for Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. The award will support her ongoing creative work in communities over 2018.

Surabhi Ghosh: Carrying Culture: Material, Myth, and Mediated Identities 
March 12, 2019

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Photo credit: Guy L’Heureux

Tracing the movements of people, textiles, and meanings through histories global and personal, Surabhi Ghosh unpacks the cultural significance of textiles and other bodily adornments as historical documents and complex symbols embedded in a range of contested narratives. With a key scene from the Mahabharata— the violent attempted disrobing of Draupadi—as anchor point, Ghosh builds a web of connections between textile objects, gendered narratives, global migration, nationalist ideologies, cultural diaspora, and her art practice. Drawing on mediated depictions of Hindu mythology circulated among immigrant communities in North America, her talk explores popularized Hinduism, the post-Independence (and post-Partition) evolution of Indian nationalism, and the formation of gender identities in the South Asian diaspora.

Surabhi Ghosh is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Montréal. She is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University, where she also co-directs the interdisciplinary research group Ethnocultural Art Histories Research in Media. Recent exhibitions of her work and collaborative projects have been held at the Wing Luke Museum (Seattle, WA), Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR), FOFA Gallery (Montréal, QC), and SPACE Gallery (Portland, ME). Ghosh’s visit to SAIC coincides with a collaborative exhibition with artist Olivia Valentine titled Margins, Material, and Metaphor, opening March 15, 2019, at Heaven Gallery.

Camille Ann Brewer
February 28, 2019

Camille Ann Brewer began her career in the visual arts over 30 years ago in Northern California, where she earned her BFA in interdisciplinary crafts at the California College of the Arts. Ms. Brewer later earned her MFA in textile design from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. After completing her education, Ms. Brewer began working over a three-decade period in the field of arts administration at many cultural institutions and non-profits such as: The Detroit Institute of Arts; Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, Michigan; Center for Creative Ageing, Washington, DC; University of Chicago; Romare Bearden Foundation, New York, New York; and The Textile Museum, Washington, DC. Brewer currently operates a hand-weaving studio focused on the production of sustainable textile products in Detroit, Michigan.