Cross Threaded: Connecting Threads in contemporary art

KCAC is overjoyed to present Cross Threaded in our Main Gallery this August. This is a group exhibition of 13 regional artists, for whom textile and fiber are central to their practice. Cross Threaded highlights the growing presence of textile as a expressive medium in the art world.

Cross Threaded was born out of a clear trend. Each year, KCAC hosts an open call for exhibition proposals. I (The Director of Exhibitions, Thayer Bray) assesses the submissions, mostly solo proposals, and build an exhibition schedule from that, for which the entire KCAC staff discusses and votes. While building the schedule for 2026, art made from, or heavily featuring textile as an explicit part of its physical and conceptual content, kept appearing again and again in the submission packets. Building this group show, from the field of solo exhibitions, was a way to get the work of as many of these artist in the gallery as possible. It was also a way to reveal the immensely varied ways textile art is approached in contemporary practice, even within similar textile media, Like weaving, Patchwork, Embroidery, sewing, Felting and crochet.

The variety of ways artists approach textile arts in Cross Threaded is impressive. Artists Ashleigh Robek, Anne Xavier Heide, Elizabeth Luna, and Harper Newell are all weavers, but approach weaving in different ways. Newell makes robust bi- and trichromatic weaves, reminiscent of formalist colorfield works, while Robek’s weavings, with their loose Warp talings and at times chaotic looking wefts can look like shredded cloth, but reveals, the more one spends time with it, a masterful handling of material and composition. Heide and Luna present their work as sculptures occupying space, although that is where the similarity ends. Heide’s weavings, made from agglomerations of thread, yarn, golden filament, and strips of dress shirt, are suspended from anxiety-inducing constructed and carved legs. In Luna’s The Dancing Relic, suspended from the ceiling, two drooping arches of predominantly red and blue lengths of hand woven textile, dominate the space in spite of being relatively modestly sized lenghts of cloth. This piece garners appreciation both from a distance and up close, as close scrutiny reveals hidden treasures of a wide variety of colors, textures, and patterns that are not evident when looking at the piece from afar.

Nathan Ford, Linda Jurkiewicz, Lizzie DiSilvestro, and Jaedyn Roberts build off of a tradition of patchwork and quilting, legitimizing the utilitarian craft of quilting as a Fine Art mode of production. Ford’s Three Dimensional quilts, with their bulging and taut blocks, built from vintage flour sack fabric, remnants of workwear, and old tee shirts, displays a mastery of the history and production of quilts, as well as addressing the idea of gendered and queer work. DiSilvestro’s reclaimed and altered quilts, displaying phrases like “Guilt Should Help,” address ideas of the psychological impact of being a woman and a worker in society. Jurkiewicz’s work also investigates ideas of woman in society, Especially as it pertains to a woman’s challenge of self-determination. In her patchwork-and-embroidery pieces, Women are shown in traditional labor tasks: harvesting grain with a scythe, and bending down en masse to gather. In her piece Some Girls Are Built Like This, cartoonish mass produced embroidery patterns of poppets engaging in traditional womens work, left in states of partial finish, are contrasted with free-embroideried outlines of nude women in various exuberant poses. Are these figures liberated from the restrictive patterning of traditional roles, or are they stuck in the same system of how women (or “girls”) need to perform in society? Roberts’ work is a mélange of styles, combining patchwork, quilting, embroidery, along with naturalistic painting and drawing. Her works are pregnant with memory and retrospection, and a beautiful sense of things gone missing. In her statement, she says “These works walk the line between past and present, joy and grief, lost and found, attesting to how these opposite things exist alongside, not in spite of each other. My work delivers the truth that love is everything and everywhere.”

Nancy Tillson-Mallett and Cole Vacek investigate ideas of the essential sewn plane. Vacek’s installation Boy Meditation, features a large sheet, with an opaque fabric sewn onto a sheer fabric in an inverted arc. behind this sheet is a double socketed light glowing through the pink sheer. In Tilson-Mallett’s Mandala: Microscopic Images of a Mouse Retina, we see a hand dyed mandala in black, green and pink, reminiscent of a giant iris, sewn onto black canvas in ladder-stitched green and pink. Circling the dye-work is magenta sequins in trailing patterns.

Cherline Phiolgene, Ellie Fowks, and Kylie Tilley build their art from wool. Philogene’s felted wall- and pedestal pieces “collect the emotional residue of displacement in the Afro-diasporic, the joy of women who keep their communities alive, shards of grief, and textures of survival.” Fowks addresses ecological calamity in her felted work, like Blood in the Colorado River, a painterly pictorial felted piece in which a floating yellow figure with a bone in its mouth is lactating blood into the river, which then curls around to form a birds-eye view of the river that has become the irregular border of the piece. Tilly’s work is displayed as three monumental crocheted wall tapestries. Each piece contains a scene of a peasant woman, a forest, and a giant horse. This seems to be a gargantuan sequential narrative, like a magic peasant woman summoning her familiar. This is underlined in the third tapestry, Night Descends, where the woman is holding a staff topped with a skull with red light shooting from its sockets. This work is simultaneously playful and imposing, eldritch and warm.

With this exhibition, KCAC is acknowledging an increasing trend in the Fine Art world of supporting traditionally disregarded media and showcasing the dynamic, powerful and varied ways artists are entering into the art world discourse with textiles.

Artists Featured: Lizzie DiSilvestro, Nathan Ford, Ellie Fowks, Anne Heide, Brenna Jean-Paul, Linda Jurkiewicz, Elizabeth Luna, Harper Newell, Cherline Philogene, Jaedyn Roberts, Kylie Tilley, Nancy Tillson-Mallett, Cole Vacek.