Pannepacker’s work in Philadelphia has always blended artmaking with compassion and community. She has spent years working with marginalized people—folks navigating housing insecurity, recovery, grief, or a tough change. Fiber becomes a way to pause, breathe, touch something soft, and find a moment of grounding. Weaving gives structure. Drawing gives immediacy. Her practice moves between those two places, a rhythm of slow/fast, tactile/expressive.
For Wells, sketchbooks are a “record of curiosity.” They act as maps of creativity, containing clues and signposts to her own artistic preferences. Looking back through her books has become a kind of treasure hunt. She finds herself pulling techniques, colors, or compositional ideas from different pages and combining them into something entirely new, informed by the past but alive in the present.
Multi-award-winning textile artist Sandra Junele works out of her studio in Dundee, Scotland, where she turns discarded fibers into minimalist wall panels and installations. With a background in interior and textile design, she developed her own plant-based binder that enables her to transform recycled textile waste into sculptural forms.
In 2004, artist Liz Alpert Fay created a portrait of Ruth Spring—a 92-year-old naturalist, organic gardener, and painter who had deeply inspired her. At the time, she didn’t realize this one portrait would spark a project spanning two decades.
Ruth Asawa’s work has been exhibited widely in San Francisco and New York since the late 1960s. She also had a mid-career survey at SFMOMA in 1973. She was known for unique and creative suspended sculptural works that made use of fiber techniques and fibrous materials in new and surprising ways that expanded the field of sculpture. Her works were created entirely by hand from metal wire, usually brass or copper, that she used like thread.
“Ahead of her time.” This was one of the first things that Nancy Hemenway Barton’s son, Bill Barton, said about his mother during a lecture last month withJill D’Alessandro, curator of the Denver ArtMuseum’s Avenir Institute of Textile Arts & Fashion.
Through fiber, metal, and process, Beatrice Atencah transforms history into form, weaving together stories of resilience, migration, and cultural continuity. Her sculptures invite us to see textiles not just as fabric, but as vessels of memory and transformation—where tradition and identity shift and evolve.
“At its core, this initiative is about taking action—if we want change, we must create the opportunities to make it happen.”
California-based artist Andrée Carter invites us to see cities through the eyes of an artist, where texture, color, and needlepoint come together to tell layered and evocative stories.
As the founder of the Fiber Art Network, former publisher, editor-in-chief of Fiber Art Now magazine, and author, Marcia Young has tirelessly championed the visibility and value of fiber arts. Now, as the executive director of the Society of Arts and Crafts, she brings her passion and vision to a broader creative community.
In the creative journeys of Alice Fox, Leslie Rottner, and Bonni Brooks, tools are far more than functional items; they’re as expressive and essential as the art itself. Each artist repurposes or crafts their tools from everyday and natural materials, transforming them into something personal and powerful.
Experimentation is also key for me. I improvise during the printing process, allowing my inspiration to guide me, resulting in a unique piece each time. I have never used printmaking in a very classical way, except when I studied it. I use printmaking more like a painter who works on a canvas.
