Tag: Visions Museum of Textile Art

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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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Mid-Summer Update: Shows, Studio Time & Liminal Rites

This summer has been a gentle stillness—a season of rest, reflection, and quiet becoming.

I’m honored to have work currently on view in Fiberart International 2025, a juried biennial exhibition showcasing contemporary textile art from around the globe. If you’re in Pittsburgh, you can catch the show at Brew House Arts (711 S 21st St #210) through August 30, 2025. The depth and diversity of work in this show is incredible, it’s worth the visit.

Looking ahead, I’ll be showing work in Interpretations 2025 at the Visions Museum of Textile Art in San Diego. The exhibition opens October 17 and runs through January 10, 2026. I’ll be in town for the Festival Days, on the 17th and 18th. If you’re in Southern California, I’d love to connect while I’m there.

In the meantime, I’m taking the next three months to dive deeply into the development of Liminal Rites, a new immersive installation exploring the thresholds between this world and the spirit world. This body of work has been slowly gestating since the beginning of the year, guided by dreams, rituals, and research.

I’ve been gathering foraged materials, weaving textures of memory and transformation, and building what will become a ritual altar table layered with intention. Video, soundscapes, and scent will round out the sensory experience, designed not just to be seen, but felt.

This is sacred, slow work. A season of inward focus. I’m allowing the process to unfold in its own rhythm, trusting the liminal space between inspiration and manifestation.

Stay tuned. More to come soon.

Theda

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July And Beyond

What’s Now & What’s Next with Theda Sandiford

Fiberart International 2025

June 20 – August 30, 2025
Brew House Arts, Pittsburgh, PA
Work on view: Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody
Size: 79 x 12 x 72 in
Medium: Woven bottlecap vines on blue and white polyurethane rope and paracord, draped on a rolling Z rack

Inspired by the lush vegetation of my rainforest home in St. Croix, this piece transforms discarded bottle caps into flowering vines—evoking the tangled beauty of orchids, heliconias, and Birds of Paradise. It’s a meditation on plastic, color, and reclamation.

Coming Soon: Interpretations 2025

October 17, 2025 – January 10, 2026
Visions Museum of Textile Art, San Diego, CA
Festival Days: October 17–18

Next up: Blackity Black Blanket, Ladders travels to California.
Part of a larger zip tie installation that covers a full studio apartment in over 500,000 handwoven strands, this work transforms ladders into bristling, burdened monuments of aspiration. Wrapped in dense armor, they symbolize the weight of implicit bias and the tension of trying to rise while being held down.

These blankets aren’t cozy—they’re confrontation. They resist softness. They hold the sting of microaggressions and reclaim the materials of containment into shields of truth and visibility.

More updates soon from the studio and the garden. Stay tuned, and thank you for walking this journey with me.

—Theda