VISITING ARTISTS 

During Nehal El-Hadi’s residency, she will continue research, reflection, and writing on topics that consider the following: Crafted objects contain histories, geographies, temporalities, and meanings inherent in their existence. Narrative complexity is the ability to tell stories that provide historicity, highlight connections, convey context, and suggest implications—it is both understanding and a communication, and requires an engagement with the object that acknowledges and elicits multiple knowledges, contends with various chronographies and futurities, complicates space, site, location, and scale, and accounts for paradoxes, counterintuitions, and inherent tensions.

Nehal El-Hadi (she/her) is the Editor-in-Chief of STUDIO Magazine, a biannual publication dedicated to contemporary Canadian craft and design.

No chairmakers, past or present, have woven seats quite like the Poynors of Central Tennessee. This multigenerational family of formerly enslaved chairmakers harvested white oak splints, a labor intensive process typically used in basketry, to weave the seats of their distinct ladderback chairs. Over 150 years later, many of these intricately patterned seats still remain intact yet the knowledge of how they were constructed doesn't. My hope is that I, and workshop participants, will recreate and document this process in order to preserve this incredible tradition.

Robell Awake (he/him) is a chairmaker, teacher, and researcher based in Atlanta, GA.

Throughout this residency, Jen de los Reyes will focus on LAND, a project merging history and environmental conservation. She will engage with session participants, discussing the intersection of art, ecology, and contemporary education while creating an outline for a newly developed course that addresses environmental activism’s role in art education, urging participants to rethink their practices.

Jen de los Reyes (she/her) is an artist, educator, and community arts organizer.

Throughout this residency, using a selection of five traditional Palestinian headdresses in the Tatreez Institute Collection from Yaffa, Jerusalem, Gaza, Al Khalil, and Bir Saba from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wafa Ghnaim will create a digital map of the Palestinian embroidery (tatreez) designs and other material aspects that instruct future reconstruction and builds social, economic, and political historical contexts. This material analysis will be a culmination of work that began in 2023 during her fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Wafa Ghnaim (she/her) is a Palestinian dress historian, researcher, writer, archivist, curator, educator, and embroideress.