Author: Theda Sandiford

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Meltdown: A Changing Climate

Curated by Patricia Miranda and supported by ArtsWestchester, this exhibition brings together artists including Rachel Olivia Berg, Zaria Forman, Jaanika Peerna, Sarah Cameron Sunde, myself, and many more to confront the urgent realities of climate change.

The show reflects on the Hudson Valley’s vulnerabilities to rising waters and the shifting symbolism of ice, once a resource, now a fragile warning of what we stand to lose.

My piece, Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody, transforms single-use bottle caps into woven vines and blossoms inspired by the lush vegetation on my rainforest property. The work reimagines waste as beauty while holding space for the tension between human consumption and the natural world’s resilience.

Artists have always been catalysts for awareness. Meltdown invites us to bear witness, reflect, and act.

Meltdown: A Changing Climate

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 11, 2025, 4-6PM

Exhibition Dates: October 12, 2025- January 11, 2026

Location: ArtsWestchester, 31 Mamaroneck Ave, White Plains, NY

Theda Sandiford Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody Woven bottlecaps vines on blue and white polyurethane rope and paracord draped on rolling Z rack 79 x 12 x 72 in 2023
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October Exhibitions: Newark & San Diego

October is shaping up to be a joyful, art-filled month, and I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be participating in three exhibitions that hold deep meaning for me. Each show invites us to consider resilience, transformation, and the many ways art can be a vessel for joy and collective healing.

Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY

📍 Newark Museum of Art, 49 Washington St, Newark, NJ
🗓 October 8, 2025 – November 2, 2026

At the Newark Museum of Art, two of my pieces will be on view: Classic LBD and Boa Quill.

  • Classic LBD reimagines the iconic little black dress as armor against microaggressions.
  • Boa Quill asks the question: If I adorned myself in a feather boa of zip ties, would you still come for me in the same way?

Both works embody my ongoing exploration of how everyday objects and adornments can be transformed into protective talismans.

Newark Arts Festival 2025: Pure Joy

📍 Express Newark – Paul Robeson Galleries, Main Gallery, Hahnes Building, 54 Halsey St, Newark, NJ
🗓 October 8, 2025 – November 26, 2026

At Express Newark, I’ll be showing Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart. Covered in bright pom-poms, this work transforms heaviness into play, using joy itself as a form of resistance and resilience.

Meltdown: A Changing Climate

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 11, 2025, 4–6pm
Dates: October 12, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Location: ArtsWestchester Galleries, 31 Mamaroneck Ave, White Plains, NY
Learn More

Curated by Patricia Miranda, Meltdown addresses the urgent realities of climate change through the lens of ice as both resource and warning. My work Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody reflects on the lush vegetation of my rainforest property, reimagining single-use plastics as woven blossoms to mirror the vibrant forms of heliconias and birds of paradise.

Interpretations 2025

📍 Visions Museum of Textile Art, 2825 Dewey Rd #100, San Diego, CA
🗓 October 17, 2025 – January 10, 2026
🎉 Festival Days: October 17–18, 2025

I’m honored to be part of Interpretations 2025 at the Visions Museum of Textile Art in San Diego. This exhibition celebrates innovation in textile art and brings together a remarkable community of artists. My Blackity Black Blanket Ladders will be on display. Blackity Black Blanket Ladders are woven monuments of reclaimed materials that honor Black resilience, transforming the weight of microaggressions into visible, collective testimony.

October will be a month of celebration, connection, and, most importantly, JOY. If you plan to attend Newark Arts Festival or Interpretations 2025, let me know, I’d love to see you there and share in these moments together.

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Nesting Into Inspiration

This month has been a season of settling in, creating, and reconnecting with my practice. I’ve been nesting in my studio, opening long-forgotten boxes, sorting materials, and rediscovering treasures that feel like gifts waiting to be transformed. There’s something grounding about this process of organizing and making space; each thread, each object, reminds me of where I’ve been and what’s possible.

Hurricane season has brought its own rhythm. The rains return, streams carve their paths through the property, uncovering shards of pottery and even revealing waterfalls. We’ve been clearing walking paths to open up the waterfall that flows between our home and the residency property, a reminder of how nature constantly reshapes and uncovers what is hidden.

I’ve been cutting back invasive vines, and soon their fibers will find their way into my work. I’ve also been upcycling rope, fabric, and leftover yarn into the beginnings of new projects that are slowly, patiently coming together. When the power goes out and I’m forced to shelter in place, I take it as an invitation to slow down, to listen, and to let the work unfold at its own pace.

In this season, I’m learning again that inspiration isn’t something to chase. It emerges naturally, like streams after the rain, if I make space, clear the path, and let it flow.

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Work In Progress: Swallowed Silence

Recovered marine line, sea-tumbled and salt-worn, is my starting point for this vessel. I wove and knotted the rope with yarn, letting each twist carry memory, frustration, and resilience. What emerged is not just an object, but a container for the silences I’ve had to swallow.

This piece speaks to the moments when ideas were dismissed until repeated by another voice, suddenly valid, but no longer mine. It embodies the raw tension of being unseen, unheard, and undervalued. Every knot becomes both a reminder and a refusal, binding what was silenced into something visible, undeniable.

The vessel is tangled, resilient, and true. It carries the weight of memory while resisting erasure. Like the marine line itself, once discarded, now recovered and remade, it is a testament to survival and transformation.

Alongside the work, I wrote this haiku:

Sea-tumbled cord knotted,
swallowed silence made visible,
resistance holds fast.

Together, the poem and the vessel create a net of memory and resistance—an offering of truth that can no longer be unseen.

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Mark Your Calendars: Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY

From October 8–12, 2025, Newark Arts Festival will transform the city into a living canvas of art, music, and culture. This year’s theme, JOY, celebrates its power as a bold and transformative force—one that uplifts, empowers, and connects us all.

JOY is not frivolous. It is strength, harmony, and revolutionary change. This October, the festival invites us to embrace JOY in its fullest sense, through exhibitions, live performances, thought-provoking talks, family-friendly programming, and more.

I’m honored to be showing work in two venues this year:

Newark Museum of Art

49 Washington St, Newark, NJ
Works on view: Classic LBD & Boa Quill (2 of 5)

These works address the insidious weight of microaggressions, those subtle, often unconscious insults that people of color experience in everyday life.

  • Have you been followed by security while shopping?
  • Asked to prove you “belong” in your own home or garage?
  • Mistaken for “the help” in a store or restaurant?
  • Or expected to represent “all Black Americans” when the only person of color in a room?

These furtive slights accumulate into stress, anger, frustration, and invisibility. Classic LBD recasts the timeless “little black dress” as armor against microaggressions, while Boa Quill expands this conversation, transforming stereotype and bias into a statement of resistance and resilience.

Boa Quill
Theda Sandiford
100′ of slip half hitched chain black glitter 1/4” cotton rope, knotted with ribbon, recycled sari ribbon, acrylic yarn, pearls and 8” zip ties on bamboo ring.
60 x 14 x 4 in
2021
Classic LBD
Theda Sandiford
Recycled fishing net, ribbon, paracord and handmade jewelry on dressform
46 x 20 x 6 in
2020

Express Newark

54 Halsey St, Newark, NJ
Work on view: Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart

This piece transforms a reclaimed shopping cart, wrapped in woven New York Post newspaper sleeves, into a vessel of joyful resistance. BAD NEWS becomes reimagined as beauty, hope, and empowerment, an act of flipping the narrative.

Joyful resistance is about reclaiming space, finding connection, and celebrating resilience in the face of adversity. It is about holding onto vision and possibility, even when challenged by oppressive forces. By weaving the mundane into the extraordinary, this cart becomes both a shield and a beacon, carrying stories of survival and transformation.

Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart Theda Sandiford Bike reflectors and bell, paracord, Fresh Direct bag yarn, doggie poop bags, plastic newspaper bags and plastic grocery bags woven on gold spray painted recovered shopping cart. 36 x 40 x 24 in 2021

Come Celebrate JOY

Newark Arts Festival 2025 is an invitation to see Newark in full, vibrant color. Whether you are deeply rooted in the arts or simply curious, come celebrate JOY as the heartbeat of the community.

📅 October 8–12, 2025
📍 Newark Museum of Art & Express Newark

What’s your JOY?

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Work In Progress: Wash Woman’s Rites

This mop, once a tool of labor, is now a symbol of resistance.

Knots of yarn and thread echo the rhythm of praying a rosary, each knot a meditation, each pull a remembrance. Soon, crystals will be sewn into the bottom of the mop, grounding its transformation from utility to ceremony.

Theda Sandiford
Wash Woman’s Rites
Upcycled mop, acrylic yarn, embroidery thread and gold leaf.
60 x 12 x 5 inAugust 2025
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St. Hildegard of Bingen: Mystic, Maker, Medicine Woman

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a German mystic, composer, writer, healer, and abbess, one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. A visionary and Doctor of the Church, she integrated spiritual insight with music, natural medicine, and ecological wisdom.

She authored major theological works based on her visions, composed over 70 original chants (writing both music and lyrics), and produced texts on healing, botany, and natural history. Hildegard’s holistic approach saw the body, mind, and spirit as deeply interconnected, and her remedies drew from plants, food, and elements of nature.

Lately, I’ve been immersing myself in her world listening to her celestial chants, reading her herbal remedies, testing her recipes, and studying her illuminations. Her work is more than historical, it feels like a living lineage, a call to remember the sacred intelligence of the body, the earth and spirit.

A fierce intellect and spiritual force, Hildegard spoke truth to power and left behind a body of work that still inspires mystics, artists, and healers like me today.

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Fall 2025 Exhibitions: Newark & San Diego

This fall promises to be a vibrant season of art, travel, and community. I’m thrilled to share two major opportunities where my work will be on view in Newark and San Diego.

Newark Arts Festival 2025: JOY

October 8–12, 2025
📍 Newark Museum of Art, 49 Washington St, Newark, NJ
📍 Express Newark, 54 Halsey St, Newark, NJ

This year’s Newark Arts Festival embraces JOY as a radical, transformative force—one that uplifts, empowers, and connects us. I’m honored to be showing in two venues:

  • Newark Museum of Art – Classic LBD & Boa Quill
    These works address the invisible weight of microaggressions, recasting the iconic little black dress as armor and weaving narratives of resilience and defiance into fiber form.
  • Express Newark – Power Puff with Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart
    Woven from recycled New York Post sleeves on a reclaimed shopping cart, this piece transforms bad news into joyful resistance, reclaiming space and rewriting the narrative.

Interpretations 2025

October 17, 2025 – January 10, 2026
📍 Visions Museum of Textile Art, 2825 Dewey Rd #100, San Diego, CA

Hot on the heels of Newark, I’ll be heading to San Diego for Interpretations 2025. This exhibition brings together textile artists from around the world to explore innovation, tradition, and storytelling through fiber.

  • Festival Days: October 17–18
  • Special Events: Award & Donor Party (Oct 17) and Artists’ Talks & Dinner (Oct 18)

I’m honored to have my work included in this gathering of visionaries at the Visions Museum of Textile Art, where the boundaries of fiber art continue to be pushed and redefined.

Looking Ahead

September and October will be a whirlwind of celebration, and connection. I look forward to sharing moments from both Newark and San Diego as these works take on new life in community.

Stay tuned for behind-the-scenes updates, and if you’re in either city, I hope you’ll join me in celebrating the power of textiles, storytelling, and JOY.

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August Reflections: Rediscovering Time Capsules

August has been a month of introspection and growth. I’ve been returning to old techniques with fresh eyes, particularly 2D mixed media works on paper. For a recent birthday activation, I created a series of Masquerade Masks and found myself diving deep into my archive, sorting through old monoprints, tissue prints, handmade papers, magazine tears, postcards, early collages, and ephemera I had tucked away and forgotten.

In the process, I stumbled across a time capsule I set aside in 1995. Inside were treasures I hadn’t expected: rare photos of my father smiling, fragments of memory, and traces of ideas that still pulse through my work today. What once felt like discarded experiments now read as early whispers of themes that continue to guide me; ancestral spiritual practices, cosmic geometry, abstraction, African masks, adornment, and divine intervention.

Funny how time reshapes our perspective. Works that seemed incomplete years ago now feel like essential threads in my practice. The textures, patterns, and iconography I once set aside have returned, asking to be seen anew, insisting on their place in the conversation of my work.

I am still processing these rediscoveries, letting memory and material speak. I look forward to seeing how my hands guide me as these old forms weave themselves into the present moment.