Interwoven: Fiber in Contemporary Art

Interwoven: Fiber in Contemporary Art! 🧵✨

In Interwoven: Fiber in Contemporary Art, six artists—Ellen Dickinson, Ruth Douzinas, Thea Lanzisero, Jessica Penagos, Tamika Rivera, and Emma Welty—redefine and recontextualize fiber-based practices, weaving together materiality, memory, and meaning. Each artist embraces fiber not merely as medium, but as metaphor—threading personal, political, environmental, and ancestral narratives into form.

Fiber has long existed in the margins of fine art, traditionally associated with craft, domesticity, and femininity. This exhibition challenges those historical hierarchies. From the structural coiling of Dickinson’s sculptural forms—echoing natural spirals and organic growth—to Welty’s archival reactivation of Armenian textile traditions, these works push beyond aesthetic to become acts of cultural preservation, reclamation, and transformation.

Several of the artists draw directly from ancestral practices and identities. Rivera’s bold, color-rich fiber portals are grounded in Taíno cosmology and nomadic feminine wisdom, activating Indigenous Caribbean memory through texture and ritual. Similarly, Welty’s lacemaking becomes a vessel for diasporic longing, where each knot and stitch is a political and poetic gesture.

For Douzinas and Lanzisero, fiber becomes a site for environmental contemplation and repair. Douzinas applies acts of care and reuse to industrial cast-offs—pallets, rags, and cinder blocks—turning overlooked urban materials into meditations on sustainability, grief, and resilience. Lanzisero’s immersive installations speak to both the violence and wonder of the human condition, drawing connections between quantum theory, spiritual practice, and the invisible threads that link all life.

Penagos and Dickinson explore the lineage of women’s labor with quiet intensity. Penagos reclaims domestic textile traditions, elevating “women’s work” as a language of power, identity, and beauty. Dickinson’s fiber sculptures, built with basketry techniques rooted in ancient forms, honor the harmony between natural pattern and human intention.

Together, these artists blur the boundaries between utility and ornament, history and futurity, fragility and strength. Interwoven invites viewers into a layered dialogue—one that acknowledges the body, the earth, and the sacred in every thread. In doing so, it affirms fiber’s vital place in contemporary art and its enduring capacity to bind us—materially, emotionally, and spiritually.
-Beth Giacummo, Executive Director


Exhibition Details:
🖼️On view May 3- July 6, 2025

☕️Coffee with a Curator: May 31st, @ 12:00 PM (In person and on Zoom)
Meeting ID: 873 0499 3359
Passcode: 962774

📍 PAC • MoCA L.I., 20 Terry St., Patchogue, NY

You may also like the following events from Patchogue Arts Council:

• This Saturday, 21st June, 12:00 pm, Pride n' Shine in Patchogue
• This Saturday, 21st June, 05:00 pm, Providence & Confluence by Artalatte @ Toast Coffeehouse in Patchogue

Also check out other Arts events in Patchogue, Fine Arts events in Patchogue, Exhibitions in Patchogue.