Daniel Fountain "Nest" (detail)

SDA Blog

Welcome to the Surface Design Association Blog! Interested in submitting a blog article? Click here.

Enter your email address to get notified when the blog is updated:

Allouche Gallery (New York, NY) presents “Operation Varsity Blues,” a group exhibition exploring the structural inequities of the American higher education system through the lens of the recent high-profile college admissions scandal. The exhibition features new, commissioned works by thirteen artists—Lindsay Adams, Debra Cartwright, Kevin Claiborne, Malaika Temba, Lindsey Brittain Collins, Alteronce Gumby, Lanise Howard, …

Read More »

2020 Hindsight: Breathe is a series of 52 unique masks representing the 52 weeks in 2020 and symbolizing humanity. During the most chaotic year of most our lives many of the things going on around us were out of our control. If we were lucky, we “learned” to BREATHE. I am a fiber artist who began …

Read More »

On Earth Day, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada and Ana Lisa Hedstrom, hosted the third episode of Slow Fiber Studio’s Conversations with Cloth online series to celebrate the artistry and skills of shibori artisans and artists who create textiles treasures in Asia. The episode traversed cultural landscapes from Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayas, to Southeast Asia and …

Read More »

I Wanted to Bubble… In a time of uncertainty, art is the first thing people think we can put aside. Who’s spending money on a painting when they aren’t confident about the economy, or fear their job is in jeopardy? Who’s adding to the beauty of their home when no one is visiting? Who is …

Read More »

This month’s SDA Book Club features a spotlight on the book The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry: Unravelling the Norman Conquest by David Musgrove & Michael Lewis. This new book from Thames & Hudson offers a definitive and fully illustrated guide to the Bayeux Tapestry, and the full history of the events leading up to …

Read More »

Surface Design Association is excited to announce Looped & Knotted: Contemporary Basketry, our Spring 2021 edition of Surface Design Journal. This issue, developed in collaboration with the National Basketry Organization and Guest Editor Carol Eckert, explores all the different ways artists express enthusiasm for basketry – a tradition that spans the globe and takes many forms. …

Read More »

Stepping out of their comfort zone and experiences with Japanese shibori, Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada and Ana Lisa Hedstrom, at Slow Fiber Studios, traverse Conversations with Cloth online series to Africa. As both artists and curators, they understand intimately, that compression-resist dye is a universal language and practice in many cultures worldwide. Shibori has become an …

Read More »

My current artwork is about the isolation, monotony and chronic stress that has been brought on by the global pandemic. For me personally, the distortion of time has been both challenging and inspiring. The shape of days, weeks and months over this past year sometimes seemed to be condensed and at other times stretched out. …

Read More »

This month’s addition to the SDA Book Club is Craft: An American History by Glenn Adamson and reviewed by contributing author, Faith Hagenhofer! Having just read a book that proposed Fibers as the window through which to view all progresses in Western Civilization, Craft: An American History, by Glenn Adamson, landed on my desk. In …

Read More »

SDA member Wini “Akissi” McQueen’s art draws upon many approaches of surface design in her mixed media work that include dyeing, shibori, quilting, wax resist, and painting. Her recent retrospective, The Covering, at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, Georgia reflects her life long relationship with cotton. She uses cotton to connect the …

Read More »