As an immigrant, artist, and mother, I navigate the tensions between tradition and transformation, where multiple cultural influences intersect and evolve. This ongoing exploration informs my artistic practice, shaping my approach to materiality, adaptation, and belonging. As reflected in Thinggy of Their Town, I examine cultural identity in the face of the climate crisis. Drawing from my upbringing on a Korean family farm and my experiences in the U.S., I integrate repurposed materials to reflect the contrasting consumption patterns of my two cultures—from minimalism to maximalism. Through fiber-based sculptural techniques, I create immersive environments that invite dialogue on sustainability, consumerism, and identity. By reshaping familiar materials into new forms, my work challenges perceptions of cultural adaptation and encourages deeper engagement with the spaces we inhabit.

Hyunsuk Erickson is a multidisciplinary Korean-born, American artist who cultivates a platform for discussions on culture and consumerism. Her perspectives have been shared through exhibitions, residencies, academic endeavors, and community contributions, culminating in a multi-faceted artistic practice. Erickson’s academic journey includes a significant period in the MFA Program at American University from2020 to 2022, where she explored new techniques, media, and ideas, aligning her artistic practice with a diverse arts community. Participating in local shows and AU Museum thesis project exhibitions marked pivotal moments in her academic pursuit. Her recent residencies at the Banff Centre and the Vermont Studio Center in 2023 fostered valuable connections and artistic growth through collaboration with fellow residents. She also benefited from a fully funded residency at Anderson Ranch in 2022, where she received invaluable feedback from renowned artists and critics, profoundly sharpening her artistic vision.

Arianne Ohara is a curator dedicated to sustainable practices with a focus on uplifting emerging contemporary artists. As a Mexico City native with Japanese-American roots, Ohara centers her research-based practice on the exploration of cultural heritage and intersectional history, examining how the construction of cultural memory shapes our understanding of the past and its lasting resonance in the present. She has a particular interest in tactile and multidimensional objects that create immersive experiences and interactive installations. Ohara currently works at the American Museum of Ceramic Art and the Pitzer College Art Galleries, where she curates student exhibitions such as “Sensorium” and “(re)Location: Real and Imaginative Displacement”. Previously, she held curatorial and collections roles at the Institute of Contemporary Art, LA, and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Ohara is earning her BA in Art History and Environmental Analysis at Pitzer College.

Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida

The process of creating salt sculptures is a process of creating rubble; it is dependent on the evaporation of salt solutions and contingent upon the assemblage of light, heat, and aridity. Salting therefore represents a process that indexes how materials become memories, and how objects become artifacts. The soft sculptures in this show are textures. Using traditional Chilean materials and techniques, they congeal and materialize what it feels like to live a life in the emergent trans-Pacific diasporas following twentieth century dictatorships—a life after apocalyptic violence, loss, grief, and unknowability. "Salt the Earth you Leave Behind (I)" uses copper and wool to show pacific oceanic textures. "Pacific Feelings" abstracts satellite photography from Rocas de Santo Domingo, a torture site in the Valparaiso region of Chile, using salt, wool, and cotton.

Davvon Branker

Using light and lens-based materials, my work navigates the tension between belonging, memory, truth, and the passage of time. I create artwork inspired by Afro-Caribbean aesthetics and Black vernacular photography. Through staged portraits, cyanotypes, and collage, I explore memory’s role in shaping identity, truth, and communal consciousness. Rooted in the intimacy of home, my practice reflects my Trinidadian heritage, drawing from cultural traditions like Carnival—both a celebration and an act of resistance. Social spaces, heirlooms, and artifacts become touchpoints for uncovering personal and collective histories. Starting in 2022, I have been experimenting with my personal archive of images created to address the inherent weight of an image, pushing beyond conventional presentations to spatialize its content. By engaging with both archival and contemporary imagery, I deconstruct narratives of diaspora, forging conversations on how history, memory, and visual culture intersect to define who we are.

Kayla Dantz

Originally inspired by archived family photos from the 1970s, I discovered that using methods of "inlay" can create new textile dynamics that reestablishes the remembrance of my ancestors and redefines classic patterns and wardrobe staples. Both plaid and the physical makeup of a woven fabric represent connections and transitions. My recent work highlights these semiotics at a deeper level, calling out my documented family relationships and questioning the transition of generations. Viewing past moments—ones I did not experience firsthand but shape my identity—becomes a meditation on inheritance and belonging. My latest work showcases "inlaying" images through hand-woven renderings of the original photographs with careful consideration of locally sourced, and in some cases, recycled materials. Despite the intimacy of working with my own photos, the detached perspective and muddled result of the images in the textiles translates to a broader audience's experience of connecting with images of familial history.

Hùng Lê

Memories are fragile and can easily be manipulated, making it an essential site of investigation to consider what we actively choose to remember and forget. My practice examines the aftermath of the American War in Việt Nam, in particular how personal memory is retained within objects, photographs, and oral traditions are compared to how collective or national memory is created and preserved through education, archives, and propaganda. Utilizing fabric, photographs, and found objects, memories are excavated and manifest as installations, “piecings,” and collages as a means to define and redefine individual identity. Through these processes, personal and collective memories become physical spaces where their credibility is questioned, manipulated, and pieced back together. Unearthing and re-creating memories are employed as a method of resistance by centering neglected narratives that challenge the authorship of history and raise questions of who gets to be the keeper of history and who is left behind and forgotten.

Annais Morales

I am a Mexican-American artist based in La Puente, California. Utilizing craft as a form of expression, I explore themes of nostalgia and tradition through familiar images of Mexican iconography, ranging from cartoons to religious motifs. With an emphasis in fiber arts, I use these images as a way to connect with my cultural roots and experience. Through my art, I seek to connect with my audience on a deep and personal level, inviting them to explore their own experiences of nostalgia and tradition, and to celebrate the rich cultural heritage that makes us who we are.

lyra purugganan

My practice explores the translation of digital images into fiber, primarily working in filet crochet, a technique of lace-making. I’m interested in the inherent degradation and distortion of a digital image when translated into fiber: how does an image stretch or fold, how does it further abstract? There’s a push and pull that exists when translating an already-degraded jpeg (something widely shared, handled, screenshotted over and over) into a medium that is slow, meditative, and antiquated. With these fiber-translated images at the center, I build supports out of steel that further stretch and distort the subject matter. My work aims to understand the relationships between object-making, selfhood, desire, and joy-making in the midst of displacement, damage, and loss. In the ongoing discussion of artists in the diaspora, I am interested in centering complexity, hybridity, and transversity in diasporic identity.

Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida

Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida is an experimental ethnographic researcher and textile artist based between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. His work uses traditional fiber craft techniques to explore the emotional topographies of post-dictatorship political transition in Chile. Borgsdorf's work has been exhibited at Glen Echo Park Partnership for the Arts in Glen Echo, MD, Room 3557 in Los Angeles, Launch LA, and Mile 44. Borgsdorf is currently a Bresler artist in residence at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland and was an Iburra Arts and Research Resident at Blue Light Junction in Baltimore, Maryland. His research has been published by the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, Chile. He has held curatorial and collections positions at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and multiple NPS institutions. Borgsdorf earned a BA in Anthropology from Pitzer College with training in fiber arts and ceramic sculpture.

Davvon Branker

Davvon Branker is a Trinidadian-American lens-based artist whose work explores memory, identity, and cultural heritage through photography, cyanotype, and collage. Inspired by Afro-Caribbean aesthetics and Black vernacular photography, Branker’s practice examines the fluidity of home and belonging within the diaspora. Davvon earned a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2019. After graduating, she returned home to Florida to continue her photographic practice. Her work has recently been featured in exhibitions in Atlanta, Casselberry, and Orlando, Florida. In 2023, she presented her first solo exhibition, “Windows and Mirrors,” in her hometown. As of September 2023, Branker is one of 30 awardees of the Google Creator Labs Photo Fund, recognizing her commitment to visual storytelling and cultural exploration.

Kayla Dantz

Kayla Dantz is a textile designer from Southborough, Massachusetts. Her work is influenced by her close-knit family as well as her love and experience with photography. She specializes in creating multidisciplinary pieces, often combining film and digital images, painting/fine art, and traditional fiber arts. Kayla previously studied darkroom and digital photography and became enamored with this method of storytelling. Over the course of her undergraduate years at Parsons School of Design, she became fascinated with handmade textiles and craft, learning and working in knit, weaving, and jewelry. Her work in fashion reflects something she would wear herself, bridging comfort and individualism. Since graduating, Kayla has taken her "woven photo" materiality methods from her thesis collection and developed it into a fine arts practice. She transforms old family photos and her own photography portfolio into woven depictions to display them as art pieces that she shares and sells online.

Hùng Lê

Hùng Lê is an interdisciplinary artist born in Đồng Nai, Việt Nam. His family immigrated to America when he was seven, settling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Immigrating at a young age has caused a lot of dissonance within his identity, which fostered his interest in memories, American culture, immigration, language, and citizenship as a means to understand himself and the history that precedes him. Lê earned his BFA and Asian Studies Certificate from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2022. He has received multiple awards including the Windgate-Lamar Fellowship Award in 2022, the Jesse-Howard Fellowship in 2022, the Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Residency in 2022, and the Lead Bank Emerging Artist Award in 2020.

Annais Morales

Annais Morales is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in fiber art. Through textiles, weaving, and sculptural forms, their work explores themes of identity, memory, and cultural narratives. Morales draws from personal and ancestral histories, using fiber as a medium to connect past and present while challenging traditional boundaries of craft and fine art. Morales has exhibited at Junior High LA, San Francisco Gallery, PinkBox Studios, and Tlaloc Studios, among other spaces dedicated to emerging and experimental art. In 2024, She participated in an art residency at the Arquetopia Foundation in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she deepened her engagement with materiality, traditional textile techniques, and the cultural significance of fiber arts.

lyra purugganani

lyra purugganan (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Manila, Philippines and raised in Columbus, Ohio. They earned a BFA in printmaking from The Ohio State University in 2021 and a MFA at UC Santa Barbara in 2024. lyra is based in Southern California and Central Ohio, and was named the UCSB College of Creative Studies 2024-2025 Teaching Fellow. Influenced by craft and materials, queer culture, and the midwest DIY music scene, lyra explores selfhood and their intersecting identities, disrupting systems through the misuse and misplacement of materials. As an emerging artist, lyra has exhibited at OSU Urban Arts Space, 934 Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, UCSB Architecture, Design, and Art Museum, and the Greater Los Angeles MFA Show at CSU Long Beach. Recently, lyra is a co-recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Center artist project grants and has attended the Haystack Mountain School summer sessions.

My vision is to explore individual character within the world in which we live. Through internal, person-centered narratives, my drawings ask how we define ourselves within our social context, such as how we carry our past with us as the lens through which we view the present, and how we seek human connection.

Drawing is everything to me. I work within a narrative, a moment in a story, an internal exploration of an external event. I focus on contemporary, social justice/humanist themes with both intimate and broad implications, stories experienced through life in Washington, DC, through my former work in a community mental health clinic, or what I’m reading.

The result, I hope, is thoughtful, intriguing, truthful, and a bridge between self-exploration and how to translate such understanding into action in our present world.

Jeffrey Berg has drawn all his life: he is self-taught. Formerly a counselor in a community mental health clinic, he currently works full-time in his art studio in the 52 “O” Street Studios in Washington DC.  Berg’s artwork has been exhibited in numerous solo and juried group shows in the DC area (including two regional museum shows) and several open studio events, and has been reviewed by The Washington Post and The Hill Rag.

Berg’s work is in private collections as well as in the permanent collections of commercial and public venues. He has thrice been awarded an Arts and Humanities Fellowship by the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities.  His work has been published in five international collections and on the cover of a regional publication. He has participated in two artist residences.