Kiki Aranita
Grey Palaka Bun
2020
Mixed fiber crochet sculpture
16" x 13.25" x 3"

About the Work
With advanced degrees in Classical Literature and Comparative Literature and a previous career teaching Greek mythology and Ancient Greek language, Kiki can't help but see the world through the lenses of myth, often malleable at the hands of many ancient authors. As a classicist, her research focused on dismemberment in epic poetry and especially "sparagmos" - the act of being torn limb from limb - and the reception of classical epic in Renaissance Italian epic poetry. She frequently subjects her crocheted bunnies to similar epic fates.

Bio
Kiki Aranita is a fiber artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She primarily works with scrap yarn, sourced from neighborhood buy-nothing groups, grandmothers gone to heaven and knitters who quit. She crochets freehand, treating yarn and string as sculptural components. Now a chef and restaurateur by trade, she also incorporates found kitchen objects into some of her works: foam used to pack olive oil bottles, containers from food, the occasional plate.

Abbey Muza
Falling, Obscured
2021
Silk, dye, cotton
13.75" x 18"

About the Work
This group of weavings encompass ideas of light, image, and environment. I took the photo this piece is based on at a very good lesbian bar in Cuzco when I was in my early twenties. The resulting work is warp-printed and hand-woven and based on a velvet weave structure. I intentionally distorted the original photographs in a CMYK screen print/warp-printing process and wove them into this textile image. I was thinking about this piece and the others in the series as film frames, like an image stand-in for narrative or larger experience.

Bio
Abbey Muza uses weaving as a methodology for image-making centered in queer identity, haptics, and sensuality. Muza received their MFA as a University Fellow at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have shown their work throughout the United States and internationally, at spaces including Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia, Threewalls, and LVL3. Their residencies include ACRE (Artist's Cooperative Residency and Exchange), and Alternative Worksite (supported by the Robert Overby Foundation), and Artist-In-Residence Sefrou (Morocco). They are currently a fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art and a 2022 Fulbright France-Harriet Hale Wooley Awardee.

Caroline Lathan Stiefel
Mill
2019-2022
Fabric, wire, thread
19" x 31"

Courtesy of Sandler Hudson Gallery (Atlanta), Galleri Urbane (Dallas)

About the Work
Here is a statement about my recent show "Pieces", which was at Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta in 2021. The piece I am donating, "Mill", relates to these works.

Pieces
The technique of piecing is an inherent part of my work: creating textile structures covered with sewn assemblages of fabric, plastic, wire and found objects. More broadly, piecing, to me, is a conceptually and culturally-rich methodology. I began this body of work thinking about flags, emblems, and banners and how flags claim and proclaim space, nature, country, and identity, but also communicate distress, emergencies, or secrets. For twenty years, I have worked with lightweight textile materials and commonplace objects to create large-scale sculptural installations that play with weight and mass, creating pattern, color and light. I have been inspired by the movement (breakdown and regrowth) of biological and architectural systems. Recently, I began making wall pieces and suspended works which incorporate unusual variations of traditional textile and craft techniques like weaving, wire wrapping, and quilting. Working with surfaces-cutting, pinning and stitching, is a slow, labor-intensive process, like a kind of surgery, but one that is idiosyncratic. Many of the materials I use to create these works come from my daily life: plastic juice and milk bottles, glass science lab containers, family clothing and bedding, and private property signs and refuse found on walks in my Pennsylvania borough neighborhood.

Bio
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel has exhibited her work in numerous galleries and museums, including The Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville in Florida, The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, Suyama Space in Seattle, The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta, Galerie Articule in Montreal, The Philadelphia Art Alliance and Tigers Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia, Gallerie Urbane in Dallas, Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami and the West Collection in Oaks, PA. She has installed large- scale permanent works at the Liberty Property Trust building in Malvern, PA, the Saint Kate Arts Hotel in Milwaukee and Temple University in Philadelphia. In addition, Lathan-Stiefel is a 2015 Pew Fellow in the Arts and the recipient of an Independence Foundation Grant (2009), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2008), a Creative Capital Foundation Grant in Visual Arts (2005), and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Grant in Sculpture (2003). Lathan-Stiefel was born in Atlanta, GA and received her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University in Providence, RI and her MFA from the Maine College of Art in Portland, ME.

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Melissa Maddonni Haims
IED #9
2016
Upholstery textiles, various threads, yarns, cassette tape, leather, suede, postindustrial, pre consumer waste. Stuffed with the shredded fabric of humanity.
10" x 8" x 5"

About the Work

IEDs are soft sculptures based on the behavioral diagnosis "Intermittent Explosive Disorder," a disorder characterized by sudden episodes of impulsive, aggressive, violent behavior or angry verbal outbursts that are disproportionate to the situation. IED is usually associated with additional mood disorders, such as Bipolar Disorder and Manic Depression.

Using divergent materials such as the shredded fabric of humanity and machine knit poly cotton yarns, I bind and coil, cinch, sew, and truss my work into awkward shapes to symbolize the physical embodiment of internal rage and discomfort. Each organ-like sculpture personifies an individual expression of the daily stresses and frustrations we accumulate and push down into a tightly bound knot of smoldering fury. These soft sculptures represent the knotted stomachs of the 5.7 million people in America (18+) who are living with Bipolar Disorder.

Bio

After attending a long list of East Coast art schools studying sculpture, painting, and printmaking, her career began in New York City in the 1990s. Eventually, life led her back to Philadelphia, where she now lives with her husband and daughter.

Melissa's work has been held and displayed in galleries, museums, and in private collections throughout the United States. In 2014 she was featured on an A&E network television program about artists who make work out of unusual materials. She has been yarn-bombing internationally since 2010.

Since 2012, Haims has focused on creating work about death, dying, and mental illness. She draws viewers in with color, texture, and the promise of a tactile experience (every piece of work is meant to be touched, loved, and handled). They then deliver a "one, two punch" with a challenge to think and talk about difficult subjects. More specifically, her work has largely focused on America's endemic gun violence and its impact on our communities.

Her latest large-scale installation was with March for our Lives in 2020. She crocheted a 25' flag for a voter registration event on the iconic Philadelphia Museum of Art's staircase.