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.
Miles Gracey uses the vocabulary of furniture to translate sculptural forms by activating a once-passive relationship with the participant. Functionally, his furniture attempts to refocus attention on craftsmanship within sculpture, while conceptually undermining the art form’s functional and practical concerns. Gracey describes his work as playful and curious, prompting a participant to suspend their beliefs as it reveals or obfuscates their perspective or relationship with it. One of the artist’s driving forces is his weariness of standing behind ribbons to view art, not being able to touch or taste what he is looking at. Informed by this feeling, his work is concerned with all the senses: touch, smell, sound, and even taste are at the forefront of his practice. 
In order to understand the art, history, and culture of ceramics in Korea, Yeonsoo Kim worked with Korean masters at various onggi factories and ceramic studios as a way to secure a strong foothold in the field of Korean traditional pottery. Kim’s artistic identity began developing as his life experiences and values were shared with other artists and workers. He began tasking himself with creating a new hand-built vessel each day. These works, when amassed, act as a type of diary or a visual record of listening to his inner voice. His works explore identity and psychological conditions through the processes of making and daily life.
Based in her hometown of Winston-Salem, NC, Lakea Shepard is a mixed-media designer, sculptor, and milliner. Being raised by a mechanic and a textile worker birthed the artist’s passion for designing “head-sculptures,” using traditional, African textile techniques, including beading, weaving, and basketry. Her work is submerged in symbolic universal objects speaking to obstacles within Black America. The ideas for her work are developed through dreams, historical traumas, and personal life events. Each sculpture Shepard creates incorporates her visual signature, red thread, symbolizing vitality and womanhood. The red thread is also metaphorical for veins, which is her effort to bring her ideas “alive.”