Join MAD’s Artist Studios program for Throughlines, a dynamic online discussion series in which artists unpack shared themes in their creative practices and examine current issues in contemporary craft, art, and design. 

In celebration of the conclusion of their year-long residencies, Jen Dwyer, Tali Weinberg, and Emma Welty will consider the role of vulnerability and tenderness in their creative practices.

Attendees are encouraged to join the artists on camera for this participatory conversation via Zoom. Participants can submit questions when registering for the program and during the conversation.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jen Dwyer’s playful ceramic sculptures and otherworldly installations evoke dreams, fantasy, and the desire to escape to a world of one’s own creation. Through ceramics, painting, and installation, Dwyer creates a uniquely powerful, caring, and intimate feminine world, underscored by the artist’s study of Paleolithic talismans, the decadent Rococo aesthetic, and contemporary girlhood culture. During her MAD residency, Dwyer will create a new body of ceramic work, such as vases, urns, sculptures, mirrors, and candelabras, and weave her reoccurring influence of Paleolithic figurines within these works. Dwyer earned her MFA in Ceramics from the University of Notre Dame and her BFA from the University of Washington. She has shown locally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include a solo booth at Spring/Break Art Fair in New York City, Maxon Mills Gallery in Wassaic, and GAA Gallery in Provincetown.

Tali Weinberg draws on a history of weaving as a subversive language for women and marginalized groups to create a feminist, material archive in response to the worsening climate crisis. Through sculpture, drawing, and textiles, Weinberg traces relationships among climate change, water, extractive industry, illness, and displacement; between personal and communal loss; and between corporeal and ecological bodies. Weinberg’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Surface Design Journal, the Tulsa Voice, and Ecotone. Recent exhibitions include the University of Colorado Art Museum, 21 C Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Center for Craft. Weinberg has taught at California College of the Arts, University of Tulsa, and Penland School of Craft.

Emma Welty’s research, weaving, and lacemaking practice interrogates her Armenian identity after two generations of assimilation in the United States. Welty's current line of research and writing explores the translations and mistranslations of Armenian lace as it has moved throughout the diaspora, lending itself to further gestures of material translation in the quest for preservation. During her MAD residency, Welty will explore Armenian lace knotting, and the role its portability played in saving the tradition during moments of violent exodus, which echoes loudly today. Welty earned her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her MFA in Visual Arts and MA in Art History from Purchase College, SUNY. She has taught at Westchester Community College, Purchase College, and the Textile Arts Center.

Images: (from left) Jen Dwyer, Persephone’s Vase, 2020, porcelain, glaze, 24k luster. Tali Weinberg, Petrification, 2019, Memories of future fires, organic cotton dyed with plant-derived dyes, cotton dyed with coal-tar-derived dyes, Photo credit: Philip Maisel. Emma Welty, Carpet Sculpture with Lace Veil, 2021, hand-spun wool ground, with white cotton yarn lace, tassel, and fringe. Photo credit: Emma Welty