I’m deeply honored to share that my work Caribbean Friendship Bracelet has been included in Fiber Forward at The Gallery at Yellow Studio in Cross River, New York.
Fiber Forward brings together women and non-binary artists whose practices challenge and expand traditional ideas around fiber art. The exhibition explores how thread, rope, fabric, and other fibrous materials can hold memory, meaning, experimentation, and conversation.
The exhibition will be on view from May 30 through June 28, 2026, with an Opening Reception on Saturday, May 30 from 4–6pm. An Artist Talk will take place on Saturday, June 27 at 2pm during Upstate Art Weekend.
Included in the exhibition is Caribbean Friendship Bracelet, one of the earliest works from my I Am My Hair series. The piece is constructed from wrapped and embellished rope using recycled sari thread, ribbon, beads, zip ties, and other found materials. Through color, texture, and repetition, the work opens conversations around hair, identity, touch, and the lived experiences of microaggressions.
I’m grateful to be in dialogue with so many thoughtful artists working within fiber, materiality, and storytelling. Thank you to The Gallery at Yellow Studio for including my work in this beautiful exhibition.
June moves like a crossing. Two bodies of work, two distant geographies, each carrying its own truth about material, memory, and who gets to touch what.
Fiber Forward — Caribbean Friendship Bracelet
May 30 – June 28, 2026 The Gallery at Yellow Studio, Cross River, NY Artist Talk: June 27 (Upstate Art Weekend)
Caribbean Friendship Bracelet reads like hair before you read it as sculpture.
Extensions of rope; wrapped, woven, tied, and embellished with recycled beads, zip ties, ribbon, lace, tape, and bottle-cap bobbles, pull you in with color first. Hue as lure. Texture as invitation. Then the work turns.
These forms stand in for natural hair: bold, whimsical, and loaded. They open a door to conversations people often avoid, microaggressions, stereotypes, implicit bias, carried in something as intimate and public as hair.
Imagine, hair. The elusive, coveted “good” hair. On some days and for some people, that is my hair. Or was. Or can be. But you should know by now—Don’t. Touch. My. Hair.
This piece holds more than my hand. I invited the community into the studio, five people wrapping yarn, recycled sari thread, ribbon onto rope. We worked side by side, talking through the trials and negotiations of our hair. Their gestures live in the surface. Their stories are embedded in the tension of every wrap.
It’s not just a sculpture. It’s a collective record.
Miami Fiber Triennial: Exterior Interventions — Place as Material
June 11 – July 23, 2026 Threading the City: America250 Miami-Dade County Cultural Affairs / National Endowment for the Arts
In Miami, the work moves outward.
Fiber enters the city as a material system—bound to labor, migration, extraction, and care. It meets weather, infrastructure, and the public not as decoration, but as evidence.
As a place-based artist, I begin by walking—listening, foraging. Plants, seed pods, shoreline debris. Marine waste becomes material, but also record, carrying the imprint of tide, trade, and time.
Through weaving and knotting, I don’t transform these elements—I bring them into relation. Each piece is a conversation with the land and sea, shaped by what is revealed and what resists.
My practice moves across gardening, foraging, assemblage, weaving, moving image, sound, and installation because the story itself is layered.
Rooted in African diasporic knowledge and the weight of colonial and environmental memory, the work navigates inheritance and rupture—what has been preserved, buried, and what continues to surface.
Within the frame of America250, the work traces what has been built—and at what cost.
What does the land remember? What have we taken—and what remains? What continues to speak, whether acknowledged or not?
Across both exhibitions, the thread is clear:
Hair. Rope. Vine. Line. Each one a carrier.
Of touch. Of boundary. Of history that refuses to stay hidden.
If you meet the work this June, stand close, but understand what it asks of you.
I’m happy to share that Power Puff and Black Racing Stripe has been selected for Fiber 2026, opening this Saturday at AlterWork Studios.
Fiber has always been a material of contradiction, soft yet resilient, domestic yet radical. This exhibition brings together artists working across traditional textile practices and contemporary fiber experimentation, showing just how expansive the medium has become.
For me, fiber is a language. It holds tension. It carries memory.
Power Puff and Black Racing Stripe sits within that conversation, playful on the surface, but rooted in deeper questions about identity, material culture, and the quiet power of making with our hands.
If you’re in New York, I hope you’ll stop by.
Opening Reception Saturday, March 7, 2026 6–9 PM
On View March 7 – March 28, 2026 Daily, 12–9 PM
📍 AlterWork Studios 40-20 22nd Street Long Island City, NY
I’m honored to share that my work will be included in FIBER 2026 at AlterWork Studios in Long Island City.
This exhibition gathers artists rooted in traditional fiber practices alongside those pushing the edges of contemporary textile work. It feels like home, structure and experimentation in the same room.
March 7–28, 2026 Opening Reception: Saturday, March 7 | 6–9PM AlterWork Studios 40-20 22nd Street, Long Island City, NY
I’ll be showing:
Power Puff, Black Racing Stripe Emotional Baggage Cart
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
We all carry emotional baggage. Some of us push carts. Some carry backpacks.
I carry a lifetime of racial trauma.
This piece transforms BAD NEWS into something radiant. Plastic New York Post sleeves become structure. Gold becomes insistence. The black racing stripe becomes momentum.
I choose joyful resistance.
Not denial. Alchemy.
If you’re in New York, come stand beside the cart. Listen for the bell.
As Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths closes at Cummings Art Galleries, I keep thinking about thresholds.
Curated by nico w. okoro, the exhibition asked us to look closely at race, space, and place and to imagine something freer than the histories that shaped them. The work was soft in material, but steady in truth.
This show also held a first for me. It was the first time my poetry was shared publicly in a gallery. Seeing my words on the wall felt makes me feel exposed. And somehow exactly right. Another layer of my practice stepping into the light.
Borderlands aren’t theoretical for me. They live in the body. In identity. In the small adjustments we make to move through rooms not built with us in mind.
March holds my work in two different spaces, each asking urgent questions about race, place, memory, and power.
Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths
January 20 – March 6, 2026 Closing: March 6 Cummings Art Galleries Connecticut College, New London, CT
Borderlands dismantles the social constructs of race, space, and place, imagining an end to the colonial legacies that bind them.
The idea of borderlands feels deeply embodied in my practice, the Atlantic as archive, mixed race identity, code-switching as survival, material memory woven from what remains. Borders are not only geographic. They live in systems, in land, in the body.
This exhibition closes March 6.
Expressive Creative Soul 2026
February 21 – March 21, 2026 Bridge Art Gallery Wilmington, DE
Celebrating ten years of bold creative voices, this exhibition includes my works Wonder Women Tapestry and Wonder Woman Selfie posters, centering Black womanhood as strength, complexity, and sovereignty.
Bridge Art Gallery has supported my journey for years, and I’m honored to be part of this milestone. Though I won’t attend in person, I’m there in spirit.
Two exhibitions. Different geographies. One thread, truth, resilience, and the power of holding space.
On view through early March, Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths invites viewers into a critical and poetic reckoning with the social constructs of race, space, and place, and the enduring legacies of colonialism that bind them together.
Curated by Nico W. Okoro, the exhibition gathers works that sit in tension: soft gestures carrying hard truths, quiet materiality holding urgent questions. The artists resist fixed boundaries, instead imagining borderlands as sites of possibility—where histories are unsettled, identities are fluid, and inherited systems can be dismantled and reimagined.
Important update: due to the recent snowstorm, the opening reception originally scheduled for February has been rescheduled to March 2, 2026. The exhibition remains open to the public during its full run, and we look forward to gathering in person once conditions allow.
Exhibition Details
Exhibition Dates: January 20 – March 6, 2026
Opening Reception:March 2, 2026(rescheduled due to weather)
Location:Cummings Art Galleries Connecticut College 270 Mohegan Avenue Parkway New London, CT 06320
At a moment when borders, geographic, cultural, and ideological are increasingly weaponized, Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths offers space to pause, feel, and think differently. It asks what becomes possible when margins soften, when we listen across difference, and when art becomes a site for both reckoning and repair.
If you’re in the region, make time to experience the exhibition, and join us on March 2 to mark its opening together.
I’m honored to share that my work is currently on view in Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths, a powerful group exhibition curated by nico w. okoro in collaboration with Connecticut College’s Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), commemorating CCSRE’s 20th anniversary.
The exhibition is on view January 20 – March 6, 2025 at the Cummings Arts Center, inside the Joanne Toor Cummings Gallery. The galleries are free and open to the public.
Exhibition Reception
Monday, January 26, 2025 4:30 – 6:30 PM EST Cummings Arts Center, Joanne Toor Cummings Gallery Free and open to the public
I will be in attendance and would love to see you there.
My Works in the Exhibition
Liminal Staff
Liminal Staff
Recovered marine line, sea-tumbled, woven and knotted with alpaca wool, fabric, acrylic yarn, beads, shells, washers, vintage watch parts, and deconstructed line.
Liminal Staff is an emblem of authority and sovereignty,, a sacred artifact that operates as a conduit between worlds. Crafted from recovered marine line shaped by hurricanes and tides, the work is layered with memory and intention. Each knot and material fragment carries a story reclaimed from chaos and transformed into a vessel of spiritual protection and ancestral reverence.
This piece emerges from the tension of being both tethered and adrift. It honors the countless lives lost to the Atlantic, the water graves of the enslave, and the resilience of those who survived. Bridging the living and the dead, land and sea, Liminal Staff echoes tidal pull and cyclical time. Conjure bags, locs of hair, and marine debris lend their essence, layering the work with magic, memory, and reclamation.
We are water’s kin. Like rivers flowing unerringly toward the sea, this piece speaks to our origins, our endurance, and the enduring human capacity to find our way home.
Offering to the Lost Ones
Recovered marine line, sea-tumbled, woven and knotted with eyelash yarn, acrylic yarn, deconstructed line, glass beads, shells, chain, and handmade bells.
Offering to the Lost Ones is a beacon of remembrance honoring the spirits lost during the transatlantic slave trade, while also reflecting on humanity’s ongoing disruption of the natural world. Shaped by storms, the materials carry dual histories, environmental devastation and the turbulent seas that bore witness to unimaginable human suffering.
Each knot, bead, and bell holds space for reflection, transforming debris into a solemn offering for those whose names dissolved into the depths of the Atlantic. Chains and bells converse with shells and glass, mirroring the tension between bondage and liberation, death and resilience.
This work calls us to remember the past while confronting the present. The sea holds ancestral grief and the scars of modern neglect. In this offering, mourning becomes a gesture toward healing, between people, memory, and the natural world.
About the Exhibition
Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths dismantles social constructs of race, space, and place, imagining an end to the living legacies of colonialism that continue to bind them. The exhibition features work by:
Ophelia Arc, Nic[o] Brierre-Aziz, Alexis Callender, Adger Cowans, Lewis Derogene, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Shabez Jamal, Fidelis Joseph, Nsenga Knight, Ron Norsworthy, Theda Sandiford, Toby Sisson, Dina Nur Satti, and Amanda Russhell Wallace.
If you’re nearby, I hope you’ll join us for the opening reception on January 26. These works are offerings of memory, of reckoning, and of repair and it means a great deal to share that space with you.
Installation view fromMeltdown: A Changing Climate ArtsWestchester
Inspired by the lush vegetation surrounding my rainforest property, Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody is built from close observation of what grows around me each day. I wove single-use plastic bottle caps into vines and floral forms, using color, repetition, and pattern to mirror the plants that hold my attention—orchids, heliconias, birds of paradise, and the dense, winding vines that thread through the landscape.
Working with discarded materials allowed me to translate the vibrancy of this environment while acknowledging the presence of plastic within it. The bottle caps become leaves, petals, and stems—familiar shapes rendered in synthetic form. The piece is less a replica of the rainforest than a response to it, shaped by daily proximity, care, and attention.
Installed within Meltdown, the work sat quietly in conversation with the exhibition’s broader themes, offering a moment rooted in observation and material transformation. The installation images document a process of looking closely, collecting slowly, and weaving what is already here into something new.
Meltdown: A Changing Climate has now closed at ArtsWestchester. Installation photos: Maksim Akelin
