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.
Organizations
Babaran Segaragunung Culture House
Babaran Segaragunung Culture House (BSG) is a non-profit arts organization located in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The mission of BSG is to explore cultural traditions of Indonesia and the world in order to gain a greater understanding of the application of the rich cultural heritage of indigenous cultures in this era. BSG facilitates educational programs teaching the ancient creative process of Nusantara, collaboration and cultural exchange, publications, exhibitions, cultural tours, workshops, as well as documentation of creative process. Serving artists, artisans, cultural lovers, both locally and abroad, BSG intends to increase the creativity and interconnections of all aspects of Indonesian art.
community textile design textile history textile printing textile traditions
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.
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.
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.
Organizations
Gather:Make:Shelter
Gather:Make:Shelter is a new collaborative model of engagement, connecting people experiencing houselessness and poverty (PEHP) with collaborators in creative professional fields. The project builds relationships and ongoing partnerships with PEHP, fostering opportunities through teaching and leadership skill-building. Gather:Make:Shelter was founded in 2017 in Portland, Oregon to create consistent, authentic connections between people which recognize our shared humanity.
Organizations
Green Anchors PDX
Green Anchors is a center for community engagement through the arts, business, and ecology. Situated on a historical shipbuilding site along the Willamette River, our 7-acre property is a model for brownfield remediation through ecological restoration. We are a local business incubator, collaborative arts center, educational forum, and site for eco-innovation.
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.
Organizations
JCC Denver
The JCC Denver is a non-profit organization whose mission is to serve, strengthen, and inspire community guided by timeless Jewish values.
Organizations
Ko Falen Cultural Center
Ko-Falen Cultural Center, located in Bamako, Mali and Portland, Oregon is the inspiration of Baba Wagué Diakité, a Malian artist and writer now living in Portland. It has been his dream to share the culture of his homeland with the people of his adopted home. In Bambara, the word ko-falen means “gift exchange.” Ko-Falen Cultural Center seeks to promote cultural, artistic and educational exchanges between the people of the United States and Mali through art and educational programs. We believe that a greater understanding and respect between people can be reached through these personal exchanges.
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.Studios
Mo Geiger
Mo Geiger is an artist. Her work includes sculpture, performance, and experimentation, with a focus on interdisciplinary processes. Trained as a theatrical designer and technician, she values tactile learning in collaborative environments. Living material histories, scavenge, discard, and transformation connect all of her artwork and research. She develops projects using context-specific perspectives, which consider active and potentially overlooked elements wherever she is.
Mo’s artwork, research, and designs have appeared in public spaces, local organizations, galleries, theaters, and museums. In each of her projects, she uses de-centralized collective methods to make space for art in unconventional places. Recently, she received an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University, where she honed skills in collaboration and site-awareness. She makes work within a personal art practice and as a member of the south-central Pennsylvania performance collective Valley Traction.
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.
Organizations
Pacific Northwest Feltmakers Group
carlilekovacs.wixsite.com/pnwfeltmakers
We are a group of professional fiber artists located in Oregon and Washington. We primarily work in feltmaking, but enjoy other media as well. We formed to share experiences, to further our understanding and knowledge of felt making, to support one another in our creative endeavors and to act as a resource for others to help them learn this craft we love so much.
Schools
Portland State University Textile Arts Program
The Textile Arts program provides a critical investigation of clothing and textiles with a focus on craft, sustainability, and community engagement. Students learn techniques in weaving, surface design, and sewn construction towards fashion, costume, and contemporary art.
community fashion sewing sustainability textile art textile design textile history weaving
Organizations
Rewild Portland
Rewild Portland is an environmental education focused non-profit organization serving Portland, Oregon and the surrounding wild and rural communities. Our mission is to create cultural and environmental resilience through the education of earth-based arts, traditions, and technologies. This mission comes to life in the form of educational workshops and programs, community-building events, and ecological restoration.
Schools
Social Justice Sewing Academy
Founded in 2017, the Social Justice Sewing Academy (SJSA) is a non-profit organization that aims to empower individuals to utilize textile art for personal transformation, community cohesion, and to begin the journey toward becoming an agent of social change. Prior to COVID-19, youth workshops and programs were at the core of the organization.Through a series of hands-on workshops in schools, prisons, and community centers across the country, SJSA used social justice and art education to bridge artistic expression with activism. Many of our young artists made art that explored issues such as gender discrimination, mass incarceration, gun violence, and gentrification. The powerful imagery that youth created in cloth demonstrated their critique of issues plaguing their local and larger communities. These quilt blocks are then sent to volunteers around the world to embellish and embroider before being sewn together into quilts to be displayed in museums, galleries, and quilt shows across the country.
While youth programming remains at the heart of SJSA, the civil rights movement of 2020 and the concurrent COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted SJSA’s programming. Due to no longer being able to provide in-person programming and limited virtual youth workshops, SJSA launched a series of new initiatives to critically respond to the times. With each project, SJSA bridges the differences between age, race,and socioeconomic status to facilitate conversations about and encourage action toward social justice issues in households across the country.
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.
Organizations
The Soul Restoration Center
www.thesoulrestorationcenter.com
The Soul Restoration Center is housed within the location of the former Albina Arts Center, which was established in the 1960s after Black youth advocated for a safe gathering space where they could take free creative arts, dance and music classes, taught by Black professionals. The building became a significant Black community hub until the 1970s. Several organizations occupied the building over the decades. Yet, it had been completely closed for about 16 months before it was temporarily reactivated by a few Black artists in late 2021 through January 30. In February 2022, I Am MORE signed a 2-year lease and transformed the neglected space into a healing-centered, arts-focused Black respite that collaborates with heart-centered individuals, donors, organizations and other partners who value Black lives.
Studios
Vo Vo
Vo Vo (they/them) explores support strategies and models of community care within a post-traumatic social landscape, focusing on the resilience of BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ and disabled communities. They are editor of an internationally renowned publication, speaker, educator, curator, artist and musician who has exhibited and toured in Australia, Germany, Indonesia, The Netherlands, Singapore, Croatia, Mexico, Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Vietnam, Sweden, Malaysia, and the States. In their transdisciplinary art, they work in textiles, embroidery, audio, video, weaving, and furniture building. Their installations seek to interrogate power dynamics, structural oppression, challenge histories and realities of imperialism, white supremacy and colonization.