Welcoming February's Visiting Artist in Residence, Amanda Browder

Wednesday Jan 26th, 2022

Amanda

On Feb 7, Erie Arts & Culture welcomes its first visiting artist of 2022, Amanda Browder.

In early 2020, Erie Arts & Culture launched a visiting artist residency program in collaboration with Long Road Projects. Through this program, Erie Arts & Culture and Long Road Projects provide contemporary artists with dedicated time and space to reflect, research, and create new bodies of work – outside of their usual environments. This program also creates opportunities for new perspectives and creative processes to be shared, which in turn positively impacts the cultural and creative landscape in Northwestern Pennsylvania. 

This visiting artist residency program is made possible through the generous support of a privately funded grant from The Erie Community Foundation. 

While in residence with Erie Arts & Culture, I want to explore ideas around women in the workforce. Through this exploration, I want to create opportunities to move beyond the default perception of women working in fabric as craft work; to confront the sexist undertones that surround the act of sewing and creative making as less important or valued. While in Erie, I'd like to engage in conversations with women who work in factory groups, are part of a union, or have advocated for worker rights. I'd also like to engage with local historians to learn more about Erie's history of women within the textile industry and women's work within those factories.

I'm excited to connect with women in sewing groups and build relationships over a shared interest in quilting history. I'm also looking forward to sharing time and space with teenagers to see where their interests are in relation to the arts. I love connecting with other artists, and hope to engage in some studio visits and discussions around practice and process.

Amanda will maintain a studio at Grounded Print + Paper Studio.

Amanda has already connected with members of our community and has solidified several community engagement activities. Including:

Inner City Neighborhood Art House
Saturday, February 26th, 11am-2pm.
Amanda will participate in a workshop with students at the Inner City Neighborhood Art House. She will deliver a presentation on her work. Then, Amanda will lead a class with the students, in which they will explore color, scale, and public installations. The workshop will culminate with students creating self-portraits on fabric and then hanging those portraits from the building.

Hands All Around Erie Quilt Guild
Saturday, February 19, 9am-2pm, Sew-In
Tuesday, February 22, 6pm-8pm, Artist talk and presentation
Amanda will attend one of the guild's group sew-ins. She will also meet again with the group to deliver an artist talk and presentation on her work.


 

AMANDAArtboard 8

About Amanda Browder

Born in Missoula, MT in 1976, Amanda Browder received an MFA/MA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York producing large-scale fabric installations for building exteriors and other public sites. She works primarily with the community, and sources all of her material from donations. She has shown nationally, and internationally including at the New Museum, Ideas City Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, FAB Fest in New York City; The Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn; University of Alabama at Birmingham AAHD, Birmingham, AL; Nuit Blanche Public Art Festival/LEITMOTIF in Toronto; Mobinale, Prague; Allegra LaViola Gallery, NYC; Nakaochiai Gallery, Tokyo; White Columns, NYC; No Longer Empty, Brooklyn. She has been published in books such as Unexpected Art: Chronicle Books and Strange Material; Arsenal Pulp Press. In 2019, she covered 6 buildings as part of the Art Prize: Project 1 Festival and was named a Transformation Fellow at UNLV. In 2020 she was working with Arts Westchester in White Plains, NY to cover one of her tallest buildings. In 2021, due to the pandemic Amanda made her first building-sized digital print using all donated digital photos of fabrics and objects from citizens of Belgium for the Triennale Brugge 2021. She will be working this year with art institutions in Milwaukee, and St. Charles, IL. She received her first National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2016 with the Albright Knox Art Museum and AK Public Art to drape three buildings in Buffalo, NY. Photos and reviews have appeared in New York Times to Fiber Art Magazine and she is a founder of the art podcast, www.badatsports.com which has led to the podcast Sewing Community stories of volunteers in Westchester, NY with Arts Westchester.

Artist Website

 

Erie Arts & Culture

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