Margot Becker is an artist, weaver, and educator based in Hudson, NY. Her work explores sense of place, the natural environment, and the connection between the individual and the communal subconscious. Through tactile processes, she questions society’s understanding of sustainability, the value of labor, and the role of handcraft in late capitalism. Her weaving practice originated from a desire to understand the origins of cloth and the lives affected by it. In 2010, Margot embarked on a study to understand the process of creating textiles from start to finish. Following the belief that to know your production line, you must be your production line, this project became an all-encompassing life practice–incorporating animal husbandry, yarn spinning technologies, and fine hand weaving.
In 2009, Becker received her BA in studio art from Bard College and, in 2020, her MFA from California College of the Arts, where she was awarded the Edwin Anthony & Adelaine Boudreaux Cadogan Scholarship and the Toni A. Lowenthal Memorial Scholarship for Excellence in Textiles. Her work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
To learn more about Margot Becker’s work, visit: https://www.margotbecker.com/
Photo by: Nicole Lobue.
Felicia Francine Dean is an assistant professor in the College of Architecture & Design’s School of Interior Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her creative work explores uncovering parallel approaches to reconciling space and place through the lens of her biracial experiences in her craft and design processes. The background she draws upon is based on growing up in South Florida and living in the Southern United States.
Born in El Paso, Texas, Juan Carlos Escobedo explores his identity as a brown, Mexican-American queer male, raised in a low-socioeconomic community along the US/Mexico border. His work addresses residual class and race shame that arises from living in a predominantly white, structured United States that favors light-skinned individuals and middle-class-and-above socioeconomic classes.
Ian Gerson (they/them) is a trans and queer interdisciplinary artist from Houston, TX. Working at the intersections of sculpture, installation, and community engagement, their recent work investigates climate injustices, trans consciousness, and personal and collective healing. Gerson is drawn to urban waterways and coastlines as in-between, ever-shifting spaces where impacts of climate crises are forced into high visibility. Weaving flimsy tapestries with ropes and plastic culled from Galveston Bay, dried plants, mylar, and clothing scraps, Gerson uses discards and detritus as a way of centering the refused, the invisible, and the marginal.
Originally from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, Guadalupe Hernandez examines his cultural identity by reinterpreting childhood memories and family stories that connect to his past and offer greater meaning to his present. Hernandez creates elaborate works of cut paper that require thousands of cuts using a combination of blades, woodworking chisels, and leather punches to produce complex papel picado-inspired works. As a resident at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Hernandez plans to focus on the use of traditional tools and materials to push the scale of his work.
Born in London, England, and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Ann Johnson graduated from Prairie View A&M University in Texas, with a BS in home economics. She later earned an MA in humanities from the University of Houston-Clear Lake and an MFA from The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, with a concentration in printmaking. As a professor at Prairie View A&M, she has received the distinguished Presidents Faculty of the Year award and repeatedly been recognized as “Art Teacher of the Year.”
Qiqing (pronounced Chi-Ching) Lin is a textile artist based in New York. She explores feminism, immigration, language, accessibility, and politics through materials and weaving. Her experience growing up and working as a journalist in China had a profound impact on her practice. Switching her medium from text to textiles, weaving has become her new language. Through spinning paper yarn and painting with threads, she looks into the complexities of family, mother-daughter relationship, class divides, and political depression.
