Kelly Church
Native American basketmaker
Category Archives: Textiles
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Annie Klaney
Chilkat blanket weaver
Josephine Lobato
For decades, Josephine Lobato has created embroidered renditions of cultural memories, enactments, and folk histories.
Grace Henderson Nez
Grace Henderson Nez lived her entire life in a hogan at the base of Ganado Mesa on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. For more than seven decades, she raised and sheared sheep, carded and dyed the wool, and wove intricate and distinctive Navajo rugs.
Gussie Wells
Like other quilters in the region, Wells and Williams tended to emphasize design, bright colors, and vivid contrasts in their quilts. They played endlessly with the form of the square and the straightforward strip, disguising and exploding these essential design elements in myriad ways.
Hystercine Rankin
Because of the utilitarian nature of her quilting, Rankin never thought of herself as an artist. That began to change in 1981 when she was invited to be a resident artist at the junior high school in her hometown of Lorman, Mississippi.
Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim
Feryal Abbasi-Ghnaim is an embroiderer whose journey as an artist started in her birthplace of Safad.
Frances Varos Graves
Graves excelled at embroidering colchas with birds, animals, flowers, and other whimsical images. Her favorite subjects, however, were Catholic saints borrowed from religious paintings called retablos and three-dimensional sculptures called bultos.
Yang Fang Nhu
In 1978, Fang Nhu and her husband were forced to leave Laos, their livelihood threatened by the Communist regime. In Providence, Fang Nhu became active in the immigrant Hmong community and was eager to teach her weaving skills to her daughter-in-law Ia-Moua Yang. For Fang Nhu, weaving was not just making cloth, but was representative of a social fabric.
Yvonne Walker Keshick
A basket maker and porcupine quillworker, Yvonne Walker Keshick creates birchbark masterpieces realistically decorated with quills that depict natural images as well as cultural symbols of the Odawa tribe. Also a devoted teacher, she has developed resources and provided instruction to ensure this art form is passed down to others as it was to her.