Friday Fibers Roundup

March 31, 2017

This week’s Friday Fibers Roundup features articles about work by Mark Newport, Zohra Opoku, Bukola Koiki, and Josh Faught, plus some opening exhibitions.

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1) Zohra Opoku’s latest collection of screen prints, Unraveled Threads, recently debuted at a solo show at the Armory in NYC this week. Her work explores what it means to grow up in the West, and later, confront a set of ideas about blackness, Africa, and belonging—as both an artist and a woman (via OkAfrica).

2) Katrina Rodabaugh recently interviewed Australian-based natural dyer, artist, teacher, and author, India Flint in “Slow Fashion Citizen” about her ecoprint dye technique (via Fringe Association).

3) Active Auxetics, a new material created by MIT acts like pores on skin—opening when it’s hot and closing when it’s cold (via Creators).

4) St. Mark’s Cathedral now features Sanctuary, a 45-foot-tall textile by San Francisco-based artist Josh Faught, a woven work that touches on gay politics and a supernatural soap opera (via Seattle Times).

5) Interested in the basics of shibori? This video will show you three simple shibori patterns.

6) Lindsay Costello (OCAC BFA Thesis student) recently interviewed Nigerian-born, Portland-based artist Bukola Koiki, whose work often focuses on cultural hybridity and dislocation (via Duplex).

7) “Sympathetic Magic” by Mark Newport explores the tender strength that occurs through knitting, picking apart ideas of protection and education (via Brooklyn Rail).

8) This video from How It’s Made shows you the process that goes into creating the always necessary pins and needles for textile works.

9) Counter-Couture: Handmade Fashion in Counterculture just opened at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. This article gives you an inside look into the exhibition as well as thoughts on counterculture from the curator, Michael Cepress (via WWD).

10) London-based artist Julie Cockburn ads colorful, bright stitching to vintage photographs, transforming the faces of strangers, layering the portraits with multi-colored dots, geometric patterns, or ovals in varying gradients (via Colossal).