September 20 – November 9
Artists: Liv Aanrud, Lisa Marie Barber, Hannah O’Hare Bennett, Bryana Bibbs, Phoenix Brown, Ella Clemons, Natasha Das, Alexis Lee Ortiz-Duarte, MFA Candidate Kate Flake, Gigi Gastevich, Elnaz Javani, Anika M. Kowalik, Ray Materson, Judith Mullen, Rosemary Ollison, Melissa Scherrer Paré, Heidi Parkes, Rosy Petri, Eden Quispe, Monica Rezman, Helen McBride Richter, Josie Love Roebuck, Divyangi Shukla, Anne Grgich, and Della Wells
Opening Reception: Friday, September 20, 5-7pm
Location: Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art, Historic Third Ward, 207 E Buffalo St, Ste 526, Milwaukee, WI
Dedicated to fibers and textiles, Criss Cross explores a broad theme of journeys, travels, and border crossings. It also alludes to the path and movement of stitching and weaving as threads leave map-like marks of an artist’s journey. The exhibition includes more than 20 regional and national artists who stitch, weave, or build with fabric. Milwaukee-based artist Heidi Parkes (currently the Pfister Hotel artist-in-residence) frequently travels to explore the cultural traditions of textiles or to lead sewing/quilting workshops. In response to the places she has visited, Parkes has created a series of travel quilts that record her impressions. In a new large-scale work, Anika M. Kowalik pieces together sec[ons of canvas to construct a surface for painting, scraping, and sculpting textures, building a landscape of accumulation and erasure. Milwaukee-based artist Ella Clemons produces small-scale stitched drawings that act as pages of a sketchbook recording unlikely places such as the bathrooms of dive bars. Rosemary Ollison is a textile artist and clothing designer who is working on new large scale composite pieces of repurposed fabric. Ray Materson’s artist journey began in prison when he started making tiny embroidered works by unraveling the threads in socks. Now released and living in Michigan, he continues to create these elaborately intricate works that have brought him national recognition.