Blackity Black Blanket Installation in Print

I’m tickled pink!

My installation work Blackty Black Blanket will be included in 2023, Surface Design Journal’s Eighth Annual International Exhibition in Print: Lasting Impression selected by Guest Juror Lorna Hamilton-Brown.

Thank you, April Tracy for taking these photos, guest Juror Lorna Hamilton-Brown and Surface Design for the opportunity to share this work.

Blackity Black Blanket, ladders and emotional baggage cart installation

I am so grateful to have my bottlecap pony bead braids included in Surface Design Association Spring 2023 online exhibition. Take a look at all the fantastic work included in the show.

Curator Statement

Afterlives, our Spring 2023 Selections Online Exhibition, features artists who consider an artwork’s lifespan before and beyond the moment of creation. Whether material or conceptual, their artistic transformations foreground lived experiences including migration, childhood, disability, and climate anxiety. These artists pull us in close and invite us to connect through shared identities or empathize with those outside our own.

Destini Ross (she/they), Guest Curator


SDA’s Forecast/Recast

The online exhibition page and gallery is now live!

Forecast//Recast brings together artists and artworks that explore ideas of predicting, reshaping, and re-predicting — works that offer a glimpse of possible futures, reexamine historical narratives, shed light on needed social and ecological interventions, and bend inquiry towards new aims to reframe the way we view the world.

Highlighting fiber and textile-based materials and techniques, cross-disciplinary practices, experimental processes, and material innovation, this exhibition prompts a reshaping of the future with works that predict our current trajectories, cast a new gaze on the past, and revise what is to come.

Forecast // Recast Opens Next Week

Exhibition Dates: December 6- January 27th, 2023

Location: Chehalem Cultural Center; 415 E Sheridan St, Newberg, OR 

Blackty Black Blanket, 2020, Recycled commercial fishing net and black 4″ zip tie blanket on white leather chaise lounge chair.
120 x 60 x 36 in

(EM)power (EM)brace (EM)body

I am excited to share that my work Corporate Crossroads Jail Net has been selected for Surface Designs Associations online exhibit (EM)power (EM)brace (EM)body.

(EM)power (EM)brace (EM)body explores concepts of bodies from social, political, and psychological points of view, considering the body as a site for liberation, reclamation, and/or empowerment. The artwork featured interrogates themes from body autonomy to traditional constructions of beauty and gender, whether deeply personal and/or challenging, dismantling, and speaking to larger societal structures. 

– Curator Katayoun Bahrami

Life at the Crossroads

Forecast // Recast

What a thrill to be selected for Surface Design Association’s juried members’ exhibition held in partnership with the Chehalem Cultural Center. 

Exhibition Dates: December 6- January 27th, 2023

Location: Chehalem Cultural Center; 415 E Sheridan St, Newberg, OR 

Blaty Black Blanket, 2022, Recycled commercial fishing net and black 4″ zip tie blanket on white leather chaise lounge chair.
120 x 60 x 36 in,

Inspired By… Machine Dazzle

One of the best things about Surface Design is their TEXTILE TALK series.

Textile Talks features weekly presentations and panel discussions from the International Quilt Museum, Quilt Alliance, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Studio Art Quilt Associates, and Surface Design Association.

This episode highlights the themes, objects, and extravagant style of the exhibition Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle currently on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

The exhibition is a solo presentation of the genre-defying artist Matthew Flower, better known as Machine Dazzle. A provocateur commanding an expanded repertoire of costume design, stagecraft, performance, and music, he is also a virtuoso practitioner of the visual language of queer maximalism.

Elissa Auther, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and the William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design, examine the ways in which Machine Dazzle counters the prejudices of high culture and transforms bodies through sculptural materials and ornamentation. SDA board member, Michael Sylvan Robinson moderates.

Fabulous Surfaces: Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle (MAD Museum and SDA)

High Praise for Blackty Black Blanket

I’ve been tickled pink by the reception of Blackty Black Blanket has been getting.

It was selected to appear in Surface Design Journal’s Seventh Annual International Exhibition in Print: The Fusion of Fiber Arts, Fashion & Design is month.

And was also juried into Fiber Art Now’s eighth annual Excellence In Fibers exhibition.

Juror Kate Irvin, Curator and Department Head, Costume and Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Art Museum reviewed 1300 artworks and selected Blackty Black Blanket for the winter issue of Fiber Art Now to be released in January 2023. The work is also eligible for the onsite exhibition at San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, August 23, 2023 through January 4, 2024.

None of this would be possible without the stellar photos of my work by April Tracy. Thank you April for elevating my vision.

Im Stoked

I am pleased to share that Blackety Black Blanket was chosen for Surface Design Journal’s Seventh Annual International Exhibition in Print: The Fusion of Fiber Arts, Fashion & Design selected by Guest Juror Amber-Dawn Bear Robe and SDJ Managing Editor Lauren Sinner.

Each year, SDA’s International Exhibition In Print showcases the breadth and depth of contemporary artists and designers working with fiber and textile-based materials, methods, and techniques. 

My work will appear in print and digital edition of the Fall 2022 Surface Design Journal.

photo credit: April Tracy