Discover the innovative practices of three artists who have turned to textiles—incorporating or referring to them in their work—in this discussion moderated by BAMPFA Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, presented in conjunction with Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective.

Aaron McIntosh is a cross-disciplinary artist and fourth-generation quilt maker whose work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire, and identity politics. His work has been exhibited at numerous museums, including the Los Angeles Craft & Folk Art Museum and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art in New York, and in the 2021 exhibition Radical Tradition: American Quilts and Social Change at the Toledo Museum of Art. McIntosh also manages Invasive Queer Kudzu, a community storytelling and archive project across the LGBTQ South. He is a recipient of the 2020 United States Arts Fellowship in Craft.

Marie Watt, a citizen of the Seneca Nation, explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling with interdisciplinary work that draws from history, biography, Iroquois protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings. Her artwork is in the collections of major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. It was recently featured in a New York Times review of the exhibition Between Earth and Sky at Kasmin Gallery in New York.

Ebony G. Patterson employs opulent, hand-embellished surfaces and brightly colored patterns to seduce the viewer into bearing witness to violence and social injustice imposed on the invisible and the voiceless. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Patterson exhibits nationally and internationally. Her first major survey . . . while the dew is still on the roses . . . opened at Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2018 before traveling to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The first major solo West Coast exhibition of her work, . . . when the cuts erupt . . . the garden rings . . . and the warning is a wailing . . ., recently opened at the ICA San Jose. Patterson’s work is featured in this year’s Athens and Liverpool biennials.