Transformative exhibits

I’m pleased to announce three shows that feature my work:

Bipolar Prison is currently on display at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles as part of their exhibition The Woven Pixel. That exhibit is up until May 10, 2026.

Renewal will be in the show Text Machines: Scarlet Thread of the Digital Order (1883-2025) at Stanford Libraries (Green Library), which will run from late May through the end of the year.

And Eternal Love (aka my wedding dress) will be exhibited at The Henry Ford June 7 through September 13 in Fabric of America | Our Fashions, Textiles, and Technologies. (It might also be coming to the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles in late fall – stay tuned!)

I’m delighted to have so many exhibits – and especially excited to have my wedding dress on display at The Henry Ford. The Henry Ford is a major museum – they get over 1.5 million visitors a year. And to have my work selected out of the 1,000,000+ items they have in their collection is a huge honor.

Beyond that, it’s also an opportunity for me to see and reflect on a piece that has deep meaning for me. As my wedding dress, of course, it would have meaning anyway. But it was also my turning-point as a maker. I spent over 1,000 hours creating the dress, over the course of a year, and it is as near perfection as I have ever gotten. Up until then I had seen myself as a dabbler in this and that, but when I saw the completed dress, I thought, “This is a masterpiece. I can do more.”

And that, in turn, spawned a whole series of more ambitious work – Bipolar Prison, for example – and a lot of research into various things artistic. And, finally, led to my changing careers to teach visual design and color in weaving.

Despite all that, though, I still didn’t think of myself as an artist. A researcher and teacher, but not an artist. The researcher runs deep in my blood – both my parents were scientists, and I went to Caltech. And while I had an exhibit here and there – including one or two museum exhibits – I thought of them more or less as flukes.

But with three works on exhibit this year, it’s getting progressively harder to dismiss them all as happy accidents.

After looking back on the things I’ve made recently, my work isn’t just about creating technical perfection. It’s about saying something – which, to me, is the differentiation between art and craft.

I felt that my work was scattered, though, without a uniting theme (which is what I would expect from a working artist).

After much thought, though, I’ve realized that it actually does have a uniting theme: transformation. Bipolar Prison is about the rapid changes from depression and mania; Eternal Love, of course, is about stepping across the threshold to marriage, making a lifetime commitment. Renewal is about rebirth, both on a personal level and as a universal theme. Unraveling is about the conscious decision to transform oneself.

So that, artistically speaking, is a theme on which I can build a body of work.

As an artist, I’d naturally like to do more exhibits – so I am thinking about how best to accomplish that. Still noodling and researching, but I feel like I’ve crossed the threshold. Given my theme of transformation, perhaps that’s another work, waiting in the wings!

On a much more mundane (but very pretty!) level, I’ve finished dyeing my second set of sheets. You may recall the Fire & Water blanket that I dyed in my last post:

(Hi, Pepper! She is an inveterate photobomber, but a delightful one.)

I had planned to do two sets of sheets, one in fire colors and one in water colors, to go with the two halves of the blanket. In my previous blog post, I’d finished the Fire sheets:

I LOVE them.

But, of course, the set wouldn’t be complete without Water, so I dyed a second set in blues and greens:

And here’s what it looks like with the bed made up (astonishingly, without any photobombing cats!):

I LOVE these. So much more fun than plain old white sheets.

And, since no blog post would be complete without a cat or two, here is Nutmeg, hanging out in her kitty hammock. She’s grown up into a beautiful cat!

That’s all for today – stay tuned! I hope to be posting a bit more frequently.