For the Fine Arts Center’s fiftieth anniversary celebration, Artist/Fabricator reinterprets the University Museum of Contemporary Art’s inaugural show, Artist & Fabricator, which explored collaborations between artists and industrial fabricators.
Artist/Fabricator shifts the focus from artist-and-fabricator to artist-as-fabricator, emphasizing handcraft, tactility, and a rejection of industrialized production. Featuring eleven artists who integrate textiles into their studio practice, the exhibition explores fabric’s rich associations — textiles as objects, networks, or connections — and its flexibility, both physically and conceptually.
The artists highlight the use of fabric as a disruptive medium, manipulating it to reject stylistic conventions and to signal experimentation.
The artform has roots in the feminist movement. Fabric serves as a medium through which these artists innovate and address cultural and global themes, gender identity, maternal relationships and knowledge, concepts of home, and immigration.
The works of art blur artistic boundaries while highlighting the historical and allegorical significance of fabric in bringing people and ideas together. Artist/Fabricator redefines the relationship between art, material, and meaning in contemporary sculpture.
Featured artists include: Sara Stefana Smith, Nina Elder, Lisa Iglesias, Maria Molteni, Katarina Weslien, Bhen Alan, Andy Li, Ashley Page, Carlos Bautista Biernnay, Sarah Amos, and M. Sylvan Robinson.
This exhibition is supported by the Women for UMass Amherst.
Carlos Bautista Biernnay, The Queen of the Night, 2023. Weaving, embroidery, aniline dyeing, needle felting and acrylics.
Sarah Amos, Jug Jug, 2023. Acrylic and yarn on felt, 46'' x 56'' x3''.
Sarah Stefana Smith, Flag to the Abyss No. 8, 2025. Thread, bird netting, fiberglass screening, Paracord, spray paint.
Ashley Page, Black Seeds (Dispersal), 2024. Handmade abaca paper and wire.