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.
Galleries
1122 Gallery
From 2018-2020, 1122 was in a backyard garage in the Montavilla neighborhood of Southeast Portland. As of May 2021, 1122 is an outdoor space in the Tabor neighborhood. 1122 is a community art gallery located in Portland, Oregon. It offers workshops, hosts events, and is open to collaborations of all kinds. It is inclusive, immersive, and aims to support people in the creative process. 1122 is a platform for all voices and stories and is committed to helping people generate art. We believe in responding to the world through creative acts, and support the community of makers, thinkers, dreamers, and imaginationists that make this happen. Jen Denrow and Lauren Wallig, creative humans and cousins, have been dreaming about creating a space like this for years.
Schools
Assembly | Gather + Create
Businesses
BlackSheepMade
Alyssarhaye Graciano is a trilingual, POC fiber artist. Once in the tech industry as a linguistic specialist, she left her day job to pursue a creative career. While she mainly knits, crochet, macramé and weaving are also part of her everyday life.
She started BlackSheepMade as a way to fund an internship abroad while in college, but since 2014 it has evolved into large public installations, long-term pop-ups and traveling workshops. You can find her latest mural in her hometown of San Jose, California at The Berryessa Flea. She wove a 15 x 8–foot (4.5x 2.5–m) mural with her dad, Francisco, as an homage to her late abuelita and hometown culture.
In 2018, she ran a two-month long pop-up in downtown Portland via a city-funded program. She was able to test out her idea of a “deli for knits”: choose a style of beanie or scarf, pick your colors and she’ll knit it up in a week. In 2019, Travel Portland and My People’s Market brought Alyssarhaye to Japan to discuss life as an entrepreneur and teach a macrame workshop. In January of 2020, Alyssarhaye published her first DIY knitting book, Chunky Knits: Cozy Hats, Scarves and More Made Simple with Extra-Large Yarn.
Today, she continues her art career as a designer for various fiber brands and local businesses and she teaches fiber workshops in both English and Spanish. Alyssarhaye now lives in San Jose, California where when she’s not knitting, can be found sewing, cycling, or on a hike.
Galleries
Blackfish Gallery
Combining a mentor-based approach with an exceptional visiting artists program, students work one-on-one with nationally and internationally recognized designers, makers, and scholars in a self-directed curriculum that challenges them to bring to life the full strength of their ideas and skills.
Studios
Charlie Wilcox
Based in Portland, Oregon, with roots in small town Minnesota, Charlie Wilcox is a designer, embroiderist, filmmaker, writer, and tubist. In combining these practices, he uses the constraints of a hand-embroidery approach to examine the possibilities and test the limits of stop-motion animation. The first gallery show of his work took place in May 2022 at Dorsa Brevia Art Gallery in Portland, with shows at the Hallberg Center for the Arts in Wyoming, MN and PLACE Studios in Portland, OR, following. He spends business hours at Reed College as an Administrative Coordinator (and de facto Graphic Designer) for the performing arts departments and is working towards a Master’s Degree in Design Systems from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. When he’s not doing all that, he’s probably trying out different punch recipes for his friends.
Galleries
Elizabeth Leach Gallery
Established in 1981, the Elizabeth Leach Gallery presents prominent Northwest and internationally established artists working in a wide variety of contemporary media. The gallery's mission is to create a dynamic dialogue between the local community and the global art world.
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. She has created large-scale fiber art for clients worldwide, and has worked with brands such as NIKE, Gallagher Designs, SCAD, and Wieden and Kennedy.
Galleries
Fuller Rosen Gallery
Fuller Rosen Gallery was founded in 2018 by artists EM Fuller (she/her) and BriAnna Rosen (she/her) as a collaborative curatorial project. The gallery exhibits regional, national, and international emerging artists who address urgent, contemporary issues.
Galleries
HOLDING Contemporary
HOLDING Contemporary presents exhibitions and programs by emerging and established visual artists across disciplines. Through a deliberate curatorial vision and a strategic business model, we position ourselves towards challenging the economical and social privilege of the art world.
Galleries
Helen's Costume
Helen's Costume is a contemporary art gallery in a modified domestic setting, in the Montavilla neighborhood of Portland OR.
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.
Galleries
Lumber Room
The lumber room is a space for contemporary art in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 2010, it is dedicated to an ever evolving approach to the exhibition and discussion of emerging as well as established artists and their work.
Galleries
MK Gallery
The Art Building at Portland State University is home to the MK Galleries.
MK Gallery brings world-class exhibitions and events together with pioneering learning and community programmes to Milton Keynes.
An independent café and shop, cinema from Curzon, and spectacular views over the park feature in this new building, which launched in 2019. Three major exhibitions are presented each year across five elegant and spacious galleries, from thematic group exhibitions to in-depth solo presentations. Alongside our exhibitions, we offer music, dance, talks and conferences, mixing emerging and locally based talent with established names. We also deliver a weekly film programme featuring the best of independent cinema in partnership with Curzon. We offer schools and family activities throughout the year and our artist-designed play area is open 365 days a year.Galleries
Nationale
Nationale is an art space established in 2008 by Owner/Director, May Barruel. Nationale is dedicated to the promotion of culture through exhibitions, performances, and a selection of carefully chosen goods.
Galleries
Nine Gallery
https://www.blueskygallery.org/nine-gallery
Nine Gallery was founded in 1987 by nine artists interested in working periodically outside the context of the commercial gallery. It is an artist-run cooperative and is administratively and financially independent from Blue Sky, funded solely by its members. Each member of Nine Gallery is in charge of the gallery for one month each year. Usually members show their own work, however, they are also welcome to curate shows of other artists’ work. Periodically the members of Nine Gallery, present work together in group exhibitions, and at other times they collectively invite other artists to show. Beyond the general interest in creating a largely non-commercial exhibition environment with a minimum of bureaucratic and institutional structure, the members of Nine Gallery have no collective ideological program or philosophy.
Schools
Pacific Northwest College of Art Applied Craft + Design MFA Program
pnca.willamette.edu/academics/graduate/acd
Connecting design thinking to design doing, the MFA in Applied Craft + Design program is grounded in hands-on making, entrepreneurial strategies, and social and environmental engagement.
With a curriculum focused on the development of a strong artistic voice, the realization of work for a specific community or client, and entrepreneurism that connects making a living with making a difference, the MFA in Applied Craft and Design is the only graduate program of its kind.
Combining a mentor-based approach with an exceptional visiting artists program, students work one-on-one with nationally and internationally recognized designers, makers, and scholars in a self-directed curriculum that challenges them to bring to life the full strength of their ideas and skills.
Encouraging a cross-disciplinary studio environment in which the workshop is a lab to collaboratively explore design and making processes, the mentor-based MFA in Applied Craft and Design welcomes students from a wide range of creative backgrounds to make original work with an applied purpose.
Organizations
SWANA Stitch
https://linktr.ee/swanarosepdx
Stitching is connection. Working with our hands creates connections between our bodies and our minds. It literally lights up neural networks and somatic memories. It calms nervous systems. It connects us to each other. It connects us to our ancestors and lineages. SWANA Stitch is a monthly cultural space hosted at The SWANA Rose Center, for SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) textile artists to practice their traditional craft in community. Those of us in the diaspora have grown up with these beautiful historic images of SWANA folx stitching together. They’re getting water at the well, stitching. They’re forming collectives, stitching. They’re supporting their families in forced exile, stitching. They’re laughing, talking, learning, plotting, stitching. Always, stitching. Our mission is to be together in radical spaces, to make art as revolution, to keep our traditions alive, not as they were, but as we are now. Rediscovering and reframing our art and craft is our way to stay connected to ourselves, our community and our ancestors. Being together outside of colonial time, productivity and pressure, is one way to build radical community. Our cultures are resistance.
Organizations
Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation
Stelo illuminates the power of art to invite conversation and build community. We are dedicated to responsive models of support via partnerships, collaboration, and exchange.