My work is grounded in historic material practices, rituals of grief and mourning, and the intimacy of textile in women’s lives. I work with donated repurposed lace and linens in site-responsive installations. The lace is alternately hand-dyed with natural dyes and sewn into shroud-like tapestries and installations. The pieces are layered with objects of lamentation, ex-votos, reliquaries, and other ritualized forms traditionally offered to saints in request, gratitude, or devotion. The labor of care by women is present in each action and work, through mending, remembering, collecting, preserving.

Recent projects began with family lace from my grandmothers, Emenegilda and Rebecca, and grew to include donations of lace sent from around the world. The donations include antique, vintage, and machine-made lace in animal, vegetable and synthetic fibers, and accompanying stories of the family and the maker. This has grown into an ongoing archive and research project, The Lace Archive. Each piece is photographed, measured, and collected before being used in a work. The community is invited to participate in the ongoing dyeing and sewing of the works. The care and generosity people have shared through their donations becomes instrumental to the work, through intimate stories about the lace, the makers, the family who preserved it, and the desire for it to live on in the work and in the archive.

The repurposed bio-degradable materials allow for monumental site-responsive works with a small ecological footprint. The dyes reflect back their long history; ancient, native, and invasive colors including mineral clay, oak gall wasp nests, and cochineal insects. The femininity of the lace exerts a trace of domestic labor; the visceral dyes retain a stain of their environmental origins. These materials act as witness, carriers of scientific, ecological and cultural histories in the work.

PATRICIA MIRANDA
A Repairing Mend
April 2- May 8, 2022

OPENING April 2nd, 2022
Reception 4-7pm

A Repairing Mend is grounded in research of historic material practices, rituals of grief and mourning, and the violence of environmental and gendered commodification. The works reflect the role of textile in the labor of care in women’s lives, and as a form that wraps our bodies from cradle to grave. Recent projects began with family lace from her grandmothers, Emenegilda and Rebecca, and grew to include donations of lace and linens sent from around the world. The donations include antique, vintage, and machine-made lace in animal, vegetable and synthetic fibers, and accompanying stories of the family and the maker. This has grown into an ongoing archive and research project, The Lace Archive. Each piece is photographed, measured, and collected before being used in a work. The community is invited to participate in the ongoing dyeing and sewing of the works.

About Patricia Miranda

Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, educator, and founder of the artist-run organization The Crit Lab and MAPSpace. She developed residencies at MAPSpace and in Italy for The Crit Lab. She has been Visiting Artist at Vermont Studio Center, the Heckscher Museum, and University of Utah; and been awarded residencies at I-Park, Weir Farm, Vermont Studio Center, and Julio Valdez Printmaking Studio. She received a grant from Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (2021); two artist grants from ArtsWestchester/New York State Council on the Arts (2014/21); an Anonymous Was a Woman Covid19 Relief Grant (2021), and was part of a year-long NEA grant working with homeless youth. In 2010 she was a finalist for an MTA Arts in Transit project in Brooklyn. Miranda has developed education programs for K-12, museums, and institutions, including Franklin Furnace, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Institution. Miranda is currently adjunct professor at Montclair State University and New Jersey City University, and mentor at the MFA programs at Leslie University and Massachusetts College of Art. She was core faculty at New Hampshire Institute of Art’s low-residency MFA program from 2016-20, and taught curatorial studies in the grad program at Western Colorado University 2017-20. She was Practitioner-in-Residence at Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts of the University of New Haven from 2005-19, and led the first Lyme study abroad program at the university’s campus in Prato, Italy, in spring 2017. She served as director and curator of the Gallery at Concordia College-NY from 2008-12.Her work has been exhibited at ODETTA Gallery, ABC No Rio, Wave Hill, and Rio II Gallery, (NYC); The Alexey von Schlippe Gallery at UConn Avery Point, (Groton, CT); the Cape Museum of Fine Art, (Cape Cod MA); and the Belvedere Museum, (Vienna Austria). Her solo exhibition at Garrison Art Center in fall 2021 was reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at 11 Jane Street Gallery in Saugerties, NY in April 2022.

EVENTS RELATED TO THIS EXHIBITION

SAT. April 9, 2022 4-6 pm
Lace Sewing Circles

Participants are encouraged to bring lace and linens to join together to sew the ongoing work with artist Patricia Miranda.

SAT. April 23, 2022 4-6 pm
Making Color from Nature

This family workshop for children and adults will explore natural dyes for use in painting and textile with artist Patricia Miranda.

SAT. May 7, 2022 4-6 pm
Lace Study Day with Patricia Miranda, Elena Kanagy-Loux, Co-founder of The Brooklyn Lace Guild

Elena Kanagy-Loux is a descendant of the Amish and grew up between the US and Japan, where she was immersed in both traditional Mennonite craft and the DIY fashion scene in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood. After receiving her BFA in Textile Design from FIT, she won a grant which funded a four-month trip to study lacemaking across Europe in 2015. Upon returning to NYC, she co-founded the Brooklyn Lace Guild, an organization dedicated to the preservation of lacemaking, and began teaching bobbin lace classes. In 2018 she completed her MA in Costume Studies at NYU where she based her thesis on interviews with lacemakers that she conducted on her European travels. Currently she is the Collections Specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and co-editor of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles, Volume 3, Cloth in Cultures: Non-Wovens.