Textile Arts Center is pleased to announce the Jury Committee for AIR Cycle 17 application reviews.
Textile Arts Center's Artist in Residence (TAC AIR) combines studio access with a rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum, and regular critical dialogue, providing residents an opportunity to learn and explore the textile medium, and an alternative to traditional higher education programs.
The residency culminates in a group exhibition produced and hosted by TAC. Since 2010, TAC AIR has graduated over 100 artists and designers whose work continues to further textile art within the fashion, fine arts, design and art education fields.
TAC AIR Cycle 17 will run from October 2025 to June 2026, artists will exhibit in September, 2026.
TAC AIR Program Provides:
Program details:
The Textile Arts Center is committed to fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in all its programs. TAC's Artist In Residence Scholarship Fund will support one talented artist or designer whose career will be benefited by the program.
Apply now! We are accepting applications until February 28.
Cycle 16 residents are selected through a two-stage, competitive selection process judged by TAC staff and professionals with expertise, knowledge, and long-standing work in different fields of textile arts.
Read more about the AIR 17 Jury below:
María-Elena Pombo is a Venezuelan artist and researcher based in NYC.
She works through open-ended and interconnected projects that investigate real and speculative pasts, presents, and futures through installations, sculptures, videos, and moments that play with site-specificity, ephemerality, and participation.
Her practice is based on embodied knowledge acquired through closely working with materials and research that draws from science, history, nature, mythology, language, and conversations.
Her work centers Earth-matter holding historical and contemporary importance across different cultures and times, which she often gathers through collaborations. From avocado-seeds and mollusk shells gathered by restaurant-workers, petroleum and algae gathered by individuals, and more. A framework to engage heterogeneous publics into co-creating alternative forms of knowledge through contemporary rituals based on cooperation.
Applying ancient and emerging technologies such as natural dyes and bioplastics, both of which draw inspiration from geological processes, she re-contextualizes and transforms these materials beyond recognition as a metaphor for the need for new ways to understand the world.
She has participated in residencies at Yaddo, Wave Hill, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Bronx Museum, and NEW INC, The New Museum’s incubator for art, design & technology.
Pombo won the 2021 London Design Biennale’s Theme Medal, and has received grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Queens Council on the Arts, New York Restoration Project, and more.
Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago (USA), Palazzo Simoni Fè (Italy), and more, and has been exhibited at Somerset House (London), Mana Contemporary (Jersey City), A/D/O (Brooklyn), SXSW (Austin), Yamamoto-Seika (Osaka), Fabbrica del Vapore (Milan), and more across the USA, Europe, Japan and Latin America.
Pombo’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The Slowdown, Metal Magazine, i-D Italia, Vogue México, Forbes, and the book ‘True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes”.
She is faculty at Parsons School of Design, teaching and developing curriculum for studio classes with a focus on research and experimentation. Pombo was instructor at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the New York Botanical Garden, where she designed and taught classes on natural dyes through a decolonial and non-extractivist lens.
Paolo Arao is a Filipino-American artist working with painting, textiles and site-responsive
installations. He received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and attended the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions include: David B. Smith
Gallery (Denver, CO), The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), The Columbus
Museum (Georgia), Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYS), and Western Exhibitions (Chicago).
He has participated in residencies at: Monson Arts, MacDowell, Haystack Mountain School of
Crafts, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Art Omi, Bemis Center, The Museum of Arts and Design
(NYC), Millay Arts, MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, NARS Foundation, Wassaic Project, and
the Fire Island Artist Residency. Arao has taught workshops at Penland School of Craft, Haystack
Mountain School of Crafts and The Museum of Arts and Design (NYC). His work has been
published in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, ArtMaze, Dovetail and Esopus. Paolo
Arao is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Painting from The New York Foundation for the Arts
and a 2023-2024 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee. He lives and works in New York.
Isa Rodrigues is an artist and educator currently based in Brooklyn, New York and Lagos, Portugal.
She works mostly with weaving and dyeing, inspired by natural phenomenons, handmade textile processes, and sustainable materials. She is also interested in art education as a means to create community and preserve material culture. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, Ace Hotel Brooklyn, Heirloom Brooklyn and the Textile Arts Center. v
Isa is a founding team of the Textile Arts Center (TAC), where she has worked as Co-Executive Director, and founded the project Sewing Seeds, activating natural dye gardens in empty lots and community gardens in Brooklyn. She also runs a textile fabrication business, 505 Textiles, through which she has created work for clients such as Altuzarra, Gabriela Hearst, Ace Hotel, M.Patmos, Thompson Street Studio, amongst others. She teaches textile materiality, weaving, natural dyeing and other surface design techniques at TAC, Ox-Bow, Rhode Island School of Art, Pratt Institute, and other venues.
Kelly Valletta is an artist, art educator and one of the founding team members of TAC. She attended Pratt Institute where she received her Masters in Art Education. She believes that the arts can play a vital role in community engagement, and thoroughly enjoys sharing her broad knowledge of art with people of all ages.
Romina Chuls (1991, Lima) is a researcher and multidisciplinary artist. Her work focuses on postcolonial gender issues in Peru and Latin America, topics related to androcentric memory, gender violence, and sexual and reproductive practices. She holds an M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She also holds a Bachelor's in Fine Arts, with a major in painting, from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. In 2021 she was granted the AAUW International Fellowship to support her studies at NYU and her research on anti-colonial pregnancy interruption practices.
Her solo shows include Parir los Pétalos (2023), an exhibition that articulates an understanding of abortion as part of a collective and more-than-human fertility cycle, at Real Art Ways, Hartford; Clandestinas (2020), a project that portrays the emotional stage of being pregnant with an unwanted being in a context where abortion is criminalized, at Galería Forum, Lima; and Tierra Incógnita (2017) at Fundación Euroidiomas, Lima. Her work has been shown in spaces such as Kunstraum (NYC, USA), at Palácio e Centro e Centro Cultural Vila Flor (Guimaraes, Portugal), at Museo de Sitio Julio C. Tello (Paracas, Peru) and Centro Cultural San Marcos (Lima, Perú).
Romina has led embroidery workshops as part of her project Qué rico menstruo in Lima, Oaxaca, and New York.