I’m excited to share that my work will be part of Pure Joy, Newark Arts’ inaugural group exhibition at the Paul Robeson Galleries @ Express Newark. This landmark show celebrates Newark Arts Festival 2025 and brings together over 70 visual artists exploring joy as a creative force.
Pure Joy highlights joy not as fleeting, but as a catalyst for resilience, hope, and connection. Through painting, film, and mixed-media, the exhibition showcases how artists transform joy into an act of resistance, love, and cultural celebration.
As Audre Lorde reminds us: “Once we recognize we can feel deeply, we can love deeply, we can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.”
✨ Please RSVP (free) to join me for the opening reception and festival weekend!
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 2021Classic 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
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.
