Jun20
Friday, June 20 - Saturday, July 19 11:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m. CDT at SAIC Galleries Street Level
Photo Credit: Cat Bower
News & Events
Mitchell Lectures in Fiber and Material Studies
Lectures are held throughout the academic year and are made possible by the generous support of the William Bronson and Grayce Slovett Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies. For more information, email fms@saic.edu.
A Feeling Is..., 2023, Deconstructed album cover and collage in handmade paper. Detail. Western Exhibitions.
Mitchell Lecture: Krista Franklin
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Writer and artist Krista Franklin presents on her cross-disciplinary practice of writing, papermaking, performing, recording, and collage. Franklin will focus on her work in papermaking and the ways she activates it as vessel, sculptural material, and archive.
Krista Franklin is a writer, performer, and visual artist. She is the author of Solo(s) (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Too Much Midnight (Haymarket Books, 2020), the artist book Under the Knife (Candor Arts, 2018), and the chapbook Study of Love & Black Body (Willow Books, 2012). She is a Cave Canem fellow, a recipient of the Helen and Tim Meier Foundation for the Arts Achievement Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. She has exhibited at Western Exhibitions, DePaul Art Museum, Poetry Foundation, Le Crédac, Konsthall C, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago Cultural Center, National Museum of Mexican Art, and her works have been included as set dressing for television programs. Her writing and art is in the collections of DePaul Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Library of Congress Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Joan Flasch Artistsʼ Book Collection + Archive. She is published in Poetry, Black Camera, The Offing, Vinyl, and a number of anthologies, literary journals, and artist books.
Courtesy of the Artist
Emily Winter: "The Weaving Mill: One Decade Down, Ninety-Nine More to Go"
Saturday, April 5, 2025
The Weaving Mill, 1801 N Spaulding Ave, Chicago
2025 marks the tenth year of The Weaving Mill, Chicago’s only artist-run industrial weaving studio. Over the past decade, TWM has cultivated a unique approach to making things, blending research, design and production with an expansive approach to education, communication and sustainability. Hosted at The Weaving Mill in Humboldt Park, this program will include a studio tour showcasing TWM’s amalgamation of industrial weaving equipment, a brief survey of the mill’s origin story and relationships to Chicago’s now-largely defunct textile industry, and a deep dive into the projects, prototypes, samples, studies and first drafts that make up TWM’s archive.
Emily Winter is a weaver, writer and teacher based in Chicago. She is co-founder and director of The Weaving Mill. Her studio work bridges functional textile design, material and historical research and formal explorations of color, construction and architecture through weaving. Emily’s research and projects have received support from the Center for Craft, the Hyde Park Art Center, the Design Museum of Chicago, and DCASE, among others. She received her MFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in History from the University of Chicago. She teaches weaving in the Fiber & Material Studies department at SAIC.
Tintype by Eric Retterbrush
Tyrrell Tapaha: "People and the Pigments: The Ethnobotanical History of Dine Weavings and the Colorado Plateau"
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
This presentation explores the history and evolution of Navajo textiles over the past 150 years, drawing on both historical narratives and personal experience. Tapaha expands upon the significant role these textiles have played in preserving cultural identity, alongside the ecological shifts caused by Western expansion, which impacted the resources and materials available to Navajo weavers.
Tyrrell Tapaha is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is centered around weaving, textiles, and fiber arts. Tapaha grew up on the Navajo Nation, where intergenerational pastoral living was handed down through their grandfather, great-grandmother, and other relatives. Working as a sheepherder, Tapaha’s artmaking process begins with the raising of sheep and finishes on the loom. Their textiles are made with raw natural animal and plant fibers, hand-spun and hand-dyed with local flora. Tapaha’s weavings are intimately interwoven with their feelings and memories, illuminating the complexity of their lived experience, the rich history of their community, and imagined futures. Tapaha continues to live and work in the Four Corners region of Southwest.
Photo Credit: Kayvan Michael Bazergan
Dr. Christine Checinska, "Textiles and Place: Textile Crafts and Regenerative Acts"
Monday, February 24, 2025
Location: Fullerton Auditorium, AIC
There is a connection between sauntering—staying a while, taking time—the crafting of textiles and the meditation upon them. All are contemplative practices that can become liberatory and therefore regenerative acts. Each might be seen as a tool for living, a tool that can awaken new, yet once familiar, ways of thinking and being. Such "soft" approaches, tied as they are to the emotional, the experiential, and the intuitive, are rooted in an everyday attentiveness to the self, to others, and to the land. This talk explores this relationship between people, land and textiles to suggest that another world is possible.
Dr. Christine Checinska is an artist, designer, curator and storyteller. Her work sets fashion and textiles into the wider contexts of art and culture, exploring their relationship to race and gender. She is the V&A’s inaugural Senior Curator of Africa and Diaspora Textiles and Fashion, and Lead Curator of the international touring exhibition Africa Fashion at the Field Museum. She is a member of the Costume Institute at the Met’s Advisory Committee for the 2025 show Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. She will take up a research fellowship at Yale Centre for British Art in autumn 2025. Christine has exhibited work in the group shows The Missing Thread, Somerset House, London, 2023-2024, and Folded Life, Johanne Jacobs Museum, Zurich, 2021. She was a co-curator of Makers Eye: Stories of Craft, Crafts Council Gallery, London, 2021. Her recent publications include ‘Material Practices of Caribbean Artists Throughout the Diaspora’, in Crafting Kinship: A Visual Journal of Black Caribbean Makers, Marlene Barnett (ed.), 2024.
Past Events
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Jerry Bleem: "Textile Traditions of Northern Uganda: Basketry and Cloth"
October 24, 2024Image
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.
Mitchell Lecture Series: Cian Dayrit
September 11, 2024Image
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.
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Katarina Weslien: I Forgot to Remember
November 1, 2023Image
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.
Mitchell Lecture Series: Angela Hennessy
April 13, 2023Image
AngelaHennessy. Night Flowers, 2023. Synthetic hair. 38” x 30."
Photo courtesy of: pt.2 GalleryAngela 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, 2023Hong 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.
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Alipio Melo, Danitza Willka, and Maria Jose Murillo: Noqanchis Awaqkuna (We The Weavers)
Mitchell Lecture Series
November 3, 2021
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). 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. -
T'ai Smith
Mitchell Lecture Series
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
Mitchell Lecture Series
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
Mitchell Lecture Series
October 10, 2019
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.Jennifer Huang
Mitchell Lecture Series
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
Mitchell Lecture Series
April 4, 2019
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.Surabhi Ghosh
Mitchell Lecture Series
March 12, 2019
Surabhi Ghosh is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Montréal. She is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Fibre and Material Practices at Concordia University, where she also co-directs the interdisciplinary research group Ethnocultural Art HistoriesResearch 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).Camille Ann Brewer
Mitchell Lecture Series
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.
