About this Event
(Image: 2019 Chicago Textile Week of visitors to The Weaving Mill, browsing for artist-woven textile goods.)
Tour open studios across several Chicago neighborhoods. These creative participants working with and adjacent to textiles make up the life-blood of Chicago’s fiber community, including The Weaving Mill, the Passementerie Mill, and the studios of artists Melissa Leandro, Bryana Bibbs, Robert Paige, Aubrey Pittman, and Hope Wang & LMRM. Please refer to each individual studio description for address information.
(Courtesy of The Weaving Mill)
1801 N Spaulding Ave, Chicago IL 60647
Free parking available
The Weaving Mill is an artist-run industrial weaving studio that blends design, production, textile education and research-based practice. They produce small runs of fabrics, home goods and apparel, self-publish zines and other research-based publications, host an annual experimental artist residency program, and in partnership with Envision Unlimited, run textile education programs for adults with developmental disabilities. In all these realms, they aim to fill the space between the hand and industrially made and bring the mechanics of textile production into wider view.
(Courtesy of Hope Wang, photo by Will Quam/Brick of Chicago)
Mana Contemporary 2233 S Throop St. Chicago, IL 60608 Studio 211C
Free parking available on the east side of Mana Contemporary. Capacity limit 30 people at a time.
***Please note: Her studio is a shoe-free space. She requests that you kindly remove your outdoor shoes when entering her space. Shoe-coverings will be provided as well.
Hope Wang is a Chicago-based artist and arts facilitator. She runs LMRM “loom room”, a floor loom rental studio for Chicago fiber artists. Wang is also a co-organizer of Chicago Textile Week 2019 and 2021, Chicago's first textile exposition featuring a week-long program of events highlighting work spanning interiors, architecture, fine arts, and fashion. She received her BFA (2018) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a 2021 recipient of the gener8tor Art Accelerator Grant as well as a 2022 DCASE Chicago recipient of an Individual Artist Grant. She has attended the Digital Weaving Lab Residency at Praxis Fiber Workshop (Cleveland, OH); The Weaving Mill WARP Residency (Chicago, IL); and Spudnik Press Cooperative Fellowship (Chicago, IL). Her work has been exhibited nationally at McHenry County College (Crystal Lake, IL); Savannah Center Gallery for Contemporary Arts (Gary, IN); Friend of a Friend Gallery (Denver, CO); Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL); and Elijah Wheat Showroom (New York City, NY), amongst others.
(Courtesy of Aubrey Pittman)
Mana Contemporary 2233 S Throop St. Chicago, IL 60608 Studio 661
Free parking available on the east side of Mana Contemporary.
Aubrey Pittman-Heglund (b. 1995, Chicago IL) is an American artist based in Chicago, IL. They earned their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 with a focus in Fiber Material Studies and Art Therapy. As a working artist, their body of work explores the relationship between climate change and contemporary textile production, by utilizing research into quantum physics and the history of textiles and design. They embrace a material language of recycled objects to satisfy an obsessive need to balance their unethical contributions within late capitalism. Their work has been shown internationally and they have previously facilitated workshops through Haystack Mountain School of Craft and the Textile Art Center. Aubrey is the Head of Textiles at Studio Herron, a bespoke textile and furniture company in Chicago.
(Courtesy of the Passementerie Mill)
2101 N Monitor, Chicago IL 60639
Parking is available on Churchill only.
Please be sure to dress appropriately for the Passementerie Mill, as there are large and heavy machinery operating in an old space. The mill has an indoor capacity of 30 people; tours will be led in groups of 10. They will be demonstrating weaving, warp knitting, circular braiding, cord plying, indigo dyeing, winding.
(Courtesy of Bryana Bibbs)
Bridgeport Art Center 1200 W 35th St, Chicago, IL Studio #5
Free parking available
Bryana Bibbs (b. 1991) is a Chicago-based artist who works at the intersection of textiles, painting, and community-based practices. Bibbs earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the founder of “The We Were Never Alone Project - A Weaving Workshop for Victims and Survivors of Domestic Violence” and serves on the Surface Design Association’s Education Committee.
(Courtesy of Melissa Leandro)
4200 W Grand ave Chicago IL 60651
Free street parking available on Grand or Keller Avenue. Indoor capacity is 15 people at a time.
Melissa Leandro (b. 1989, Miami, FL) explores her cultural identity and family memories to create vibrantly layered, topographical textile works filled with her drawn and collected imagery. Her textile works are vibrant, animated and heavily layered through traditional and non-traditional processes of stitching, quilting, weaving and batik dyeing. By mirroring often personal moments of daily life, she manifests thoughts of family history, remembered childhood fantasies and nostalgic cultural ephemera. These works are specific to Leandro’s hybrid culture as a first-generation US Latinx artist moving between Costa Rica, Miami, Chicago and abroad. Leandro holds a BFA and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and is currently teaching at the Art Institute as a Lecturer and Advisor. She was awarded the Artadia Prize (2021), the Craft Fellowship Grant, from the Illinois Arts Council (2020), the Wingate Artist Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center Residency (2019), the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship (2017), and the Luminarts Fellowship (2017) from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, Union League of Chicago. She has exhibited at The University Club of Chicago, The University of Nebraska Omaha, Rockford University (Rockford, IL), the Wright Museum of Art (Beloit, WI), DePaul Art Museum (Chicago, IL), Andrew Rafacz Gallery(Chicago, IL), Frieze Art Fair NYC (2020+2021) among a variety of other venues.
(Courtesy of Hyde Park Art Center)
Hyde Park Art Center 5020 S. Cornell Avenue Chicago, IL 60615
Parking available
Robert Paige grew up on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930’s and studied design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a painter of textiles, whose work focuses on experimentations with vivid color schemes and abstract geometric concepts inspired by West African art and design. Paige’s work emerged at a time of cultural richness in Chicago, alongside other Black artists within the AfriCOBRA collective, which he was a founding member and his “kool aid” colors inspired bold graphic representations of people and power. He is well known for his Dakkabar fabrics collection that was available in Sears department stores for several years during the 1970’s. Paige viewed the collection as an opportunity to include Black culture in home design. After the international success of his interior collection, he left Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and turned his focus towards youth art education. He believes designing is an organic process and does not continuously churn out mass collections to satisfy the demands of capitalist production. Rather, he is invested in creating beauty that exists beyond the confinement of the museum or gallery space, recognizing that it should be accessible all around us for everyone to experience.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Various Locations, 1801 N Spaulding Ave, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00