Collaborators and Instructors
Taylor McVay (she/they) is an artist, designer, and educator, focused on slow fashion, sustainability, and the history of making/wearing. She has been teaching sewing, pattern making, and fashion design in the Boston area for over 10 years. She creates one-of-a-kind designs using sustainable and recycled materials and often works as a pattern maker and fabricator for local designers and artists. Since 2014, she has produced a line of architecturally inspired clothing patterns for home sewists (Blueprints for Sewing). Her most recent project, Patchwork Community Craft, is a series of slow fashion pop-up workshops and craft nights.
Blueprint for Sewing (www.blueprintsforsewing.com)
Patchwork community craft (www.patchworkcommunitycraft.com)
Samantha Fields is drawn to the materials and processes that have historically lived outside of an “Art” context, she strives to make work that can live in and speak to the different worlds of 'high' and 'low.' “I make--slowly--with/through craft. Making slowly is a personal act of resistance against the fast-paced, multi-tasking, product-driven world in which I find myself.” As a multimedia artist, Sam engages with textils and craft based processes as a survival mechanism, aesthetic, and a conceptual strategy. Through these modes of making, she is able to explore different social constructs associated with the decorative: gender, class, professional/hobbyist, and the hierarchical categories of taste and morality. Sam received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and her undergraduate degree from Massachusetts College of Art; and is currently Lecturer of Sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts |Tufts University.
Courtney Stock (B. 1987 Malden, MA) is an artist based in Boston, MA. Throughout her work, Stock explores material juxtapositions as a way of discussing duality, identity, and shared humanity. Stock draws her materials from traditional realms of painting, sculpture, textile, and craft, though approaches them intuitively and divergently, resulting in the creation of hybrid objects. Stock is the founder and a co-director of BOSSCRITT, a critique and curatorial club for emerging artists.
Faith Johnson (she, her, hers) is a contemplative and healing arts facilitator, herbalist, Reiki practitioner with experience working at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and owner of Full Circle Healing Arts. She is an internationally exhibiting multi-medium artist with an MFA from Tufts University specializing in collaborative and meditative art making.
https://www.full-circle-arts.com/
Lani Asunción (they/she) is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist creating socially engaged art in both private and public spaces, independently and collaboratively. Weaving a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance connected to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx-American. Asunción integrates new media technologies and transmedia storytelling through ritualized performance to encourage conversations that magnify connections to facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives.
Perla Mabel is an Afro-caribbean interdisciplinary artist. They were born in Boston, MA, and grew up both there and in the Dominican Republic. They deeply identify with their Dominican heritage, channeling themes of survival and recalling historical events and figures from their culture. Their practice reclaims their Blackness by incorporating satin fabrics used in rituals practiced in Santeria; they honor the people they paint by using the fabric as their canvas. Along with other fabrics, beads and objects in their paintings and installations in order to incorporate practices passed down from generations before them and throughout the African Diaspora. From reclaiming spaces of vulnerability and trauma to highlighting joy and resilience, Mabel’s portraits expand the possibilities of Blackness in art as a healing and empowering act. Now they are expanding their work into armor and public art challenging the ways in which their art can be accessed. Their Rhinoceros Armor project encompasses all the layers that make their paintings, but now taking the form of garments to act as the armor. They want their muses to embody that radical self love that is liberating to the soul. This project is inspired by Assata Shakur’s, Rhinoceros Woman poem in her autobiography. Mabel is motivated and inspired by the many witnesses that came before them. Documenting and caring for the narratives of light through the act of creating and holding space for all layers of their identities.
https://www.instagram.com/arteperlamabel/
Maggie Ruth Haaland (she/they) is a queer mender, natural dyer, herbalist, and foot bath devotee. They came to all of these practices via the world of plants, and wanting to find more ways of incorporating their healing and magical properties into our everyday lives. As someone who has moved with chronic illness throughout her adult life, she has come to find the value and necessity of slowing down and tending within, to being with what’s right here and offering repair. Maggie believes in softness, rest, and vulnerability and cultivating these things in community.
Emily Auchincloss is an artist and educator who lives and works in Boston, MA, and was born in New York, NY. She received her MFA and a Master’s in Art History from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She currently works as lead museum educator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Auchincloss’s weavings and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include In the Fourth Trimester, at the Schwamb Mill in Arlington, Shape Shifting Support Systems at Praise Shadows Gallery, Brookline, and A Wild Note of Longing: On Albert Pinkham Ryder and his Influence at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Beckett Brueggemann (he/him) a weaver, quilter, and installation artist currently working in Boston. He graduated with his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and is currently pursuing his Masters of Art Teaching at Tufts University. In his practice, Beckett explores safety and healing in structure, pattern, and soft escapism. His work encourages gentle touch, fluid time, and steps into otherworldly spaces. He engages with the histories of craft in conjunction with the developing aesthetics of glitch art as he studies the language and observations of astrophysics. In this, he finds inspiration in the descriptions of the universe: the fabric of reality, the warping of time, and the holes in our space/time continuum.
https://beckettbrueggemann.wixsite.com/artist
Stephanie Irigoyen is a multi-media artist & designer based in Boston, MA who is passionate about making the world a more colorful and fun place. While she primarily works in fiber & textiles these days, she dabbles in other mediums such as digital illustration, blockprinting, and paper crafts.
Lyndsi Schuesler, a studio artist based in Salem, MA. Her creative work focuses on the use of wool felt to investigate normative forms of interaction and interdependent relationships. Her research interests include the complex material histories of textile objects and their cultural implications. She has shown nationally, including at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI and participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Charlie Dov Schön, a found-object and textile artist. Her work creates artifacts and embodies ritual. Her practice in textiles and soft sculptures draws upon Jewish tradition, environmental datascapes, and the natural world. Charlie's pieces have been shown at Boston City Hall, the Brandeis Kniznick Gallery, Cambridge Art Association, and the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College, among others.
Molly C. Meng studied literature with a personal minor in collecting other people's lives. An obsession with old ledgers, vintage photos. and every single discarded book that exists, her work reimagines the untold stories behind the otherwise forgotten items of everyday. A self-taught artist, the medium of collage in both paper and textiles is Molly's dominant form of communicating. She successfully weaves the elements of ephemera and storytelling in to each piece she creates. The spectacular beauty of the ordinary is elevated with detail in her work. Molly's work has shown nationally in both museums and galleries located in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Wisconsin and Montana. She has produced large scale commissions for interior designers, personal homes and a number of Prometheus apartment complexes in Northern California. Other than creating her own artwork, Molly helps adults and young people lean into their unique talent by teaching creative workshops around the U.S. as well as on an annual retreat in the South of France. Molly C. Meng is currently living and working in New Hampshire.
Sam Toabe is a curator, art historian, and artist based in Boston, Massachusetts. They are the Gallery Director of the University Hall Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Boston, as well as the Director of Arts on the Point, curatorial posts they’ve held since 2017. In the fall of 2023, they designed and taught a graduate level course at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design entitled Curatorial Practices. Their research and writing focus on alternative curatorial practices across a variety of periods and geographies (looking specifically at artist curated exhibitions and events), non-canonical art histories, and the advancement of cultural plurality in our global, visual lexicons. Toabe’s recently rekindled art practice explores social practice art, acts of subversive service, and gift-giving, as well as ephemeral and installation art. Toabe earned their M.A. in the History of Art, Architecture, and Museum Studies from Boston University in 2015 and B.F.A. from the Studio for Interrelated Media at The Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2011.
https://www.umb.edu/liberal-arts/the-arts-at-umass-boston/university-gallery/
Simon Jiang is a weaver, spinner, and knitter working in Boston. He received his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. He is interested in the mechanics of all types of looms and spinning wheels.