Artist in Residence

Audrey Cibel is a self taught craft and textile artist with a degree in photography and image making mediums from New York University. She exists in the space between the physical and digital realms, often merging the two to fabricate a new form of interaction with an image. By pushing the boundaries of rug making she makes her digital designs and memories tangible. Her fabric of handmade rug material is manipulated into various forms of soft sculpture and wearable art pieces that possess themes of queer Latinx identity, biomorphism, and a connection to the women craft artists in her own lineage. From the expertise she gained being her own teacher and employer of her commission based rug business, she has transitioned into teaching rug introduction courses and other fiber art courses. Sharing her skills for this niche craft has become an art practice in itself, and a new direction towards curating spaces for creative expression. Audrey is currently working as an Artist in Residence at the Textile Arts Center where she will be progressing as an artist, curator, and educator.

My fiber work explores the rhizomes of connection among the trans and queer community, our relationship to the earth, and our relationships throughout time, including history, futurism and myth. I use recycling and found materials, collected natural dyes, and objects with personal history to deconstruct histories and create new meaning. Through weaving, quilting, and sewing materials together, I compost utility and combine material to create new meaning and experiences. I am currently working on a woven world of trans myths born from storytelling and mixed with present documentation of queer and trans community.

Hera Ford is a multimedia artist, textile designer, and dancer. She’s a 2020 graduate of Rhode Island School of Design where she majored in Textiles. Her work is influenced by her relationship to the Black American South, her ancestral land, and heirloom dances of Black Americans and the African Diaspora.

Jimmy is a second-generation Fujianese American whose work grapples with family lineage, neglected cultural traditions, and value placement within the American-Western hegemony. He achieves this by reimagining aesthetic systems that interpret value outside the Western capitalist notion of scarcity and permanence. He looks to his familial roots and diasporic heritage, building a lexicon from aspects of his parent's takeout and Fujianese culinary traditions. His most recent works explore these relationships through animal fat, glutinous rice, and monosodium glutamate. Working within an ephemeral image-object practice, his work embraces each material’s innate qualities and their natural process of entropy, repositioning our focus to the odyssey of creation.
Jimmy understands meaning to be derived from a work’s interconnections, the web of consciousness that forms through various lifespans and reincarnations. His understanding draws from the Daoist principle of Wu-Wei, nondual action that works in harmony with nature, and Indra’s Net, the belief that the cosmos is a construction of infinite linkages, all inherently conjoined to one another; both cosmological philosophies understand the universe to be a reflection of its correspondence. Working within this framework, he rejects the notion of “mastery,” as he is skeptical of art that gains value through its separation from the mundane. His work aims to extend the knowledge systems embodying materials, the language of said materials, and their connected methodologies-- those that the dominant culture has undervalued.

Julie Clapton is a fiber based artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. After attending Rhode Island School of Design for Textiles, Julie will continue her practice within the Textile Arts Center’s Residency program. Committing herself with care and intention to blur the confines of disciplines, coalescing them to in turn create new growth and understanding about the realms in which textiles can live. Experimenting and pushing the terminology of functionality, adornment, and tradition through unconventional techniques such as staining to gather multiple narratives and interweave new visual languages.

With a strong background in traditional textile craft techniques, Lovisa explores contemporary challenges through a lens that combines humor and familiarity. Her creative process typically begins with illustrations and paintings, which she then transforms into sculptures and larger figurative images.

During her residency at TAC, she plans to delve into the intriguing question of why certain objects or experiences linger in our collective memory. Whether it's a house, a piece of furniture, a painting, a place, an advertisement, or even a food package, she's curious about what makes them stay with us. Lovisa's goal is to pluck these elements from their original contexts and incorporate them into her textile art. Through her work, she hopes to craft a kind of tribute that tells individual stories within the context of our shared experiences.

Lovisa graduated from Konstfack in 2021 and has since exhibited her art in various locations in Sweden, Greece, and Iceland.

Nana YaaSerwaah Akuoku is a NYC based WearableArt Designer and Visual Artist of Ghanaian heritage and American nationality. Akuoku is an Alumna of the Fashion Institute of Technology and is recognized for her conceptual wearables that obscure boundaries between “traditional” art, fashion and technology.
The uniqueness in Akuoku's practice is in conceptualizing innovative methodologies of approaching fashion design by removing preconceived notions of what objects and their uses are and in doing so, reshaping their context to express narratives related to identity, introspection and culture. She often refers to concepts in science, technology and contemporary art within her fashion-based practice. Akuoku is recipient of the Wassaic Project's Winter 2019
Teaching Fellowship. Her works have been on view at NORDSTORM NYC as part of the Fashion film installation presented by artist Diane Smith. Past installations include Afrochella festival, the Ghana Tech Summit and The Black Gala at the Accra Science and Technology Museum. Her designers have been highlighted by publications such as Allure, Essence, and New York Times Style. Recently, Her work "Rapunzel"; was worn by the opening performer of the prestigious “Wearable-Art-Gala”; Headed by philanthropist and Beyoncé’s mother; Ms.Tina Knowles-Lawson.

Shawna Tang is a fiber artist and sculptor based in Queens, NY originally from San Jose, California. Shawna also owns a jewelry and home decor brand, Cookie Smut, with designs that are colorful, kitschy, and yes sometimes smutty.