Welcome to the TextileX resource guide—a growing effort created to map out and connect the vibrant textile community and resources in the Portland metro area and beyond. The foundation of this guide was built from the diversity of organizations that participate in the Portland TextileX Month festival every October.
Development of and funding for this guide have been provided by Textile Hive with additional funding from a RACC catalyst grant in 2019.
We encourage you to contribute additional resources through this form and consider becoming a member of TextileX to help further develop this resource guide as well as Portland TextileX Month.
Schools
Assembly | Gather + Create
Studios
Charlie Wilcox
Charlie Wilcox is a designer, animator, embroiderist, musician, artist, collaborator, and friend who hails from Lindstrom, Minnesota, also known as “America’s Little Sweden.” Charlie’s social practice involves exploring what it means to turn the creation of animation into a hands-on event that can focalize and generate community. By developing animation into a collaborative act that integrates qualities from textile craftwork and participatory art, Charlie explores new situations and purposes for animation as a method for collective expression and visioning. His work creates methodologies for representations of social design and collaboration that favor embodied realities beyond sheer logicism and consensus. Charlie makes his own embroidered animations, curates and organizes the Frombelow Microcinema, helps organize Portland Textile Month, works in the performing arts departments at Reed College, and plays tuba in the punk band Horsebag.
Studios
Felicia Murray
Felicia Murray is a fiber artist from Maine, who now lives and works out of her studio at NW Marine Artworks in Portland, Oregon. Her tactile work explores motifs from nature, while creating imagined landscapes of color and texture. She received her B.F.A. in Fibers from The Savannah College of Art and Design in 2019, and has since been continuing to develop her work through collaborations, commissions, community projects, and exhibitions.
Studios
Limei Lai
Limei Lai enjoys working with paint, fabric and clay. She is curious about how memories and experience work with objects to create cultural value and aesthetic value in spaces, thus addressing and commenting past and present to encourage good changes. Her interactive community engagement installation focuses on creating spaces and voices for intergenerational communication. Art as an experience not only visually critiques, questions, reflects, but also celebrates. Limei is the artist member at Blackfish Gallery. She was the founder and curator of Playground Gallery and the vice-president of Oregon Chinese Artist Association. Her works were shown in Local 14 Art Show, The Arts Center at Corvallis, Ashland Fiber Arts Collective, Newport Visual Arts Center, Paragon Gallery, Lansu Garden, The Place, PNCA, Red E Cafe Gallery, Playground Gallery. Her murals were in north Portland and Chinatown Portland.
Studios
Nicki Eybel
https://www.instagram.com/nickimakesart/
Nicki Eybel is a newly retired early childhood educator. She is now a mixed media collage artist, lately focusing on abstract stitching. As a member of the Columbia Fiber Arts Guild, she is active in the Handstitching Group and has enjoyed a daily stitching practice for the last 2 years. She has exhibited in local locations. She earned her Stitching Badge as a Girl Scout long, long ago.
Organizations
SWANA Stitch
https://www.instagram.com/swanastitchpdx/
Portland SWANA Stitch is a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic community event. We gather monthly to practice ancestral fiber arts and organize within the Southwest Asian and North African community. Our members practice traditional regional fiber arts like Palestinian Tatreez, mending, knitting, crocheting, Armenian Janyak, Marash, and quilting. We also organize classes and events, both for our members and the public. Portland SWANA Stitch is housed at SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center and organized by its members. Homelands Within is curated by Amirra Malak, Ali Leeds and Milla Prince