Textiles & Tea, hosted by the Handweavers Guild of America, is a series of conversations with some of the most respected fiber artists in the field today. Throughout Textile Month and beyond, enjoy these interviews with Southern California artists Peggy Weidemann, Cameron Taylor-Brown,Gene Shepherd, Nazanin Amiri Meers Julie Kornblum, Dougall Paulson, Kira Dominguez Hultgren and Michael Rohde.
Peggy Weidemann is well known for extraordinary basketry art and using a variety of mediums with a strong preference for natural fibers.
Peggy Wiedemann grew up in Long Beach, California. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles earning a degree in Fine Arts with an emphasis on drawing and painting. After college, she experimented in a variety of art mediums including oil painting, pen-and-ink drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and ceramics. Peggy found basketry and was hooked. Although Peggy uses a wide variety of materials, she has a strong preference for natural fibers. Part of the process for her is gathering many of these materials, such as pine needles. To these natural materials, she adds metal, beads and “found” objects to form unique pieces.
Cameron Taylor-Brown was introduced to textiles by artist Ed Rossbach at the University of California, Berkeley. She studied textile design at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, where she subsequently taught design and weaving. Since1985, she has lived in Los Angeles where she is active in arts and education, and founded ARTSgarage, a textile resource center. Her work is widely exhibited and has been featured in American Craft, Handwoven, Fiber Art Now, and Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot. She teaches workshops at schools, guilds, museums and conferences throughout the United States and at ARTSgarage in Los Angeles. She is a past president of California Fibers and serves on the advisory boards of the Fowler Textile Council and Textile Arts Los Angeles. In 2019, she curated the critically acclaimed exhibit Material Meaning: A Living Legacy of Anni Albers at the Craft in America Center in Los Angeles.
Although Gene Shepherd did not start rug hooking until 1998, it has been his only outside interest since that time. Described as a “self-taught artist who hooks by ear,” Gene hooks, does commission work for individuals and museums, designs, dyes, develops tools, teaches and writes about rug hooking. His work has been featured many times in Rug Hooking Magazine, ATHA Newsletter and A Celebration of Hand Hooked Rugs.
As a way of developing and refining his own artistic journey, Gene has written three books. He has also written and appeared in over 125 instruction videos on dyeing, rug hooking, proddy and a various topics related to the art form. A prolific blogger, Gene has written thousands of blog posts on topics concerning the techniques, tools, inspiration and experiences that compel him to create fiber art–a venue that has allowed him to connect on an almost daily basis with fiber artists around the world.
Nazanin Amiri Meers studied Textile Design and Print and received her Masters in Design Technology. Immigrating to the United States in 2014 and earning an MFA in Fiber Arts at the University of Kansas was a turning point in her artistic life. Nazanin has worked as an Art Instructor and a Research Assistant since 2014, instructing various summer camps, kids workshops, adult classes, and managing various art projects at the Lawrence Arts Center, University of Kansas, and Kansas State University.
Nazanin currently lives in San Diego, California, and is making large-scale installations and mixed-media 2D work, combining various techniques and media to address the importance of privacy and quietude in public spaces.
She currently works as an Art Instructor and Mural Assistant at the ArtReach San Diego. Nazanin's artwork has been exhibited internationally.
Julie Kornblum earned her BA in Art, with a concentration in fiber and fabric art, at California State University Northridge. But being a fiber artist was hereditary. She learned sewing, knitting, and crochet from her mother and grandmother. She attended fashion design school at Los Angeles Trade Technical College, was a patternmaker in the garment industry and taught at Otis College of Art and Design. Julie teaches fiber related workshops, and her woven wall and basketry work has won numerous awards. Her work addresses environmental crises - habitat preservation, plastic trash, and pollution.
Sean Dougall and Andrew Paulson are the co-founders of multidisciplinary art and design studio Dougall Paulson. They seek beauty through new forms of weaving, furniture, lighting, and objects. Using narrative as the thread that binds ideas together, their unique take on visual storytelling is the starting point for the creation of objects that straddle the fine, decorative, and graphic arts. Based in Southern California, Dougall Paulson approaches their practice with a focus on curiosity and discovery.
Will air Sept 7th
Kira Dominguez Hultgren is an artist and educator. She studied French postcolonial theory and literature at Princeton University, and performance and fine arts in Río Negro, Argentina. With a dual-degree MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts, her research interests include material and embodied rhetoric, decolonizing material culture, and analyzing textiles as a performative critique against the visual. Her work was featured in the July/August 2020 issue of Architectural Digest. Dominguez Hultgren is part-time faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber and Material Studies.
will air October 5th, 2021
Michael F. Rohde has been weaving since 1973. His formal training in drawing, color and design was at the Alfred Glassel School of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. His activities include lectures, workshop teaching, juror, exhibition organizer and exhibitor in many local, national and international juried and invited shows.
