MADE: Contemporary Fiber Arts

Arts + Literature Laboratory presents, MADE: Contemporary Fiber Arts, an invitational exhibition curated by Hannah O'Hare Bennett, from Tuesday, September 16, 2025, through Saturday, November 8, 2025.

A reception for all current exhibitions will be held on Friday, September 19, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm, with a closing reception on Friday, November 7, from 5:00pm to 9:00pm.

MADE: Contemporary Fiber Arts brings together recent works by emerging and established fiber artists and embraces utilizing fiber art to honor diverse histories, cultures and practices. The exhibition features a wide range of techniques—including weaving, basketry, lacemaking, and surface design—highlighting the expansive potential of fiber as a contemporary art form.

From birth to death, textiles are present in our daily lives. Through this presentation of textiles as fine art, the project elevates the appreciation of craft and the dedicated labor inherent in these creations, encouraging contemplation of the making process and a reconnection with handmade work. The exhibition invites viewers to reengage with the handmade, to reflect on sustainability, and to explore the generational knowledge embedded in fiber traditions. Through a full-building installation and a series of workshops and community programs, MADE fosters cultural appreciation, sparks dialogue on craft and sustainability, and deepens our understanding of textiles as both personal and collective expression.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Marquette Neighborhood Association.

Eleanor Anderson

Eleanor Anderson statement: Through my art, I engage in world-making through the process of play and material-errantry. My form of world-making uses craft traditions as a flexible constraint; I collaborate with materials and colors to achieve a coherence and consistency finely attuned to my intuitive judgment. I look for openings in the making process where I can ply confident imperfections and deviations, subverting fixed expectations of the tradition or technique at hand. I often use bright colors and repeating patterns as a way of injecting each project with evidence of the exuberant aliveness I feel when making art. My practice seeks to alleviate daily doldrums and spiritless ways of living - instead, transforming objects and spaces into paratelic experiences. I gift these works to the viewer as an optimistic nudge towards joy, connection and a playful awareness of how the larger world could be.

Kyong Ae Cho

Kyoung Ae Cho is a fiber artist who is engaging in a conversation with nature, respectfully incorporating natural elements, recycled matter as well as low-valued materials, mostly which she has gathered, dealing with not only the beauty but also the fragility. In this show, Cho presents some of works created incorporating the recently passed her parents’ clothing. She has been exhibited in national and international venues. Her work has been reviewed and published in numerous publications such as American Craft; Surface Design Journal; Fiber Art Now; Fiber Art Today (Schiffer Publishing Ltd); Masters: Art Quilts (Lark Books); The Ultimate Guide to Art Quilting (Sixth & Spring Books); Quilting with a Modern Slant (Storey Publishing LLC); The Best of Contemporary Quilts (Lark Books); Fiberarts Design Book IV, VI & VII (Lark Books); Art Textiles of the World: USA (Telos Art Publishing, England); and No: Nouvel Object (Design House, South Korea) and the... Read More

Layla Nk

Layla Nk is a holemaker and artist. Klinger’s work interweaves installation work with textiles and physical computing. The focus of her practice is redefining the boundaries of the body, space and garments as queer abstraction. Combining traditional fiber techniques with light and interaction, she explores how the space affects the body and how the body affects the space. By employing a feminized craft, bobbin lace, Klinger examines how centuries old lace patterns can be used to create immersive environments. Meshing together electricity and lace, she creates lace environments and sculptures using electroluminescent wire - a light emitting bendable material. Through the use of sensors, Klinger codes and codifies her works into living light emitting lace bodies, in dialogue with our own bodies of flesh. She earned an MFA in Textiles from Parsons School of Design in 2021... Read More

Shradha Kochhar

Shradha Kochhar (b. Delhi, India) is a textile artist and an educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Best known for her home spun and hand knitted ‘khadi’ sculptures using ‘kala cotton’ - an inherently organic cotton strain indigenous to India, her work is at an intersection of material memory, cotton legacies and intergenerational healing. Focusing on generating a physical archive of personal and collective south asian narratives linked to women’s work, invisible labor and loss, the work is large scale and exists as sculpture beyond whispers over generations. She is also the founder and creative director of Imli Dana, an independent textile studio based between Brooklyn and New Delhi. Previous collaborations include Coachtopia, ASHISH, Marshall Columbia, Tory Burch, Collina Strada and others.

Kochhar received her MFA in Textiles from Parsons School of Design, New York. She is the recipient of... Read More

Lars Shimabukuro

Lars Shimabukuro (b. 1991, Honolulu, Hawai’i) is a biracial and trans artist whose work expands ideas of homelands, family, and memory to include the queer landscapes that raised them. They earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from Yale University in 2013, an Associate Degree from Haywood Community College (NC) focusing on weaving in 2019, and completed the Core Fellowship program at the Penland School of Craft in 2023. Lars has shown nationally and internationally, and teaches weaving at craft schools. He is currently pursuing a Design Studies MFA at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology in Madison, on unceded Ho-Chunk land.

Jo Stealey

Jo Stealey is a full-time studio artist, Professor Emerita, former Chair of the Department of Art, and founding Director for the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Stealey’s work over the years has spanned and combined numerous fibers media, including basketry, papermaking, and assemblage. The work presented in the September Exhibit represents an extremely informed exploration of materials and techniques, applied to conceptually-laden forms that represent and honor the domestic, the everyday, and the tools that bear out simple rituals by virtue of daily use. She says, “Celebration of the artifacts of life make the temporal long-lasting and memorable, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.” (Source: Sager Reeves Gallery)

Casey Whittier

Casey Whittier received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is interested in the metaphorical and philosophical power of visual art and the ways in which the ceramic material creates direct connections between the geology of the earth, basic human needs, and complex metaphysical desires. Repetitive processes and systems of reliance are often used as metaphors for interconnectedness. Whittier teaches ceramics and social practice at the Kansas City Art Institute and works from her home studio. Whittier works with The Land Institute through their Ecosphere Studies Program cohort and as a participant in their Silphium Civic Science Community, where research into new perennial and sustainable food and oil seed production is ongoing. Whittier was named a 2020 Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly Magazine. She serves as President for Artaxis.org.... Read More

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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

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