Join Craft Front and Center: Conversation Pieces artists Kira Dominguez Hultgren and Vadis Turner for a virtual lunchtime conversation moderated by Elizabeth Koehn, associate curator at MAD.  In this talk, each artist will offer insights into their unique practices, exploring how their works are both inspired by and challenge the histories of fiber craft.

Kira Dominguez Hultgren (b. 1980, she/they, Oakland, CA) studied postcolonial literature at Princeton University, and studio arts and visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts. Dominguez Hultgren weaves with the material afterlife of a so-called multiracial family: Chicanx-Indigenous-Indian-Hollywood Hawaiian-Brown-Black. Instead of being passed down, weaving and textile processes are brought up, resurrected from family stories and fabrics. Questions about cultural appropriation and codeswitching, exoticism, and performing cultural misrecognitions occupy their practice.  When not in the studio, Dominguez Hultgren teaches weaving as an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies.

Vadis Turner’s (b. 1977, Nashville, TN) textile-driven sculptures and mixed media works challenge narratives traditionally imposed upon female archetypes. Growing up in the conservative landscape of the American South, the artist was raised among generations of women navigating a culture wrought with behavioral expectations. In her practice, Turner considers those experiences in the broader context of women’s history, employing domestic materials liberated from their intended functions, formal natures, and gender associations to rewrite the tale. Ribbons, bedsheets, and curtains coupled with concrete, steel, and ash take shape in misbehaving grids, unruly vessels, and mercurial braided structures, often titled after maligned female figures from classical folklore and mythology.