Now 59, Xiyadie is gaining international recognition for his cut-paper art, which has come to look immensely different from traditional forms intended to adorn windows. His works record his experiences as a gay man in China, often showing intimate, candid encounters with lovers that are set within vivid environments teeming with plants and animals. Occupying delicate sheets as large as nearly 5-feet-square, the dense but harmonious scenes demonstrate how Xiyadie has harnessed traditional skills to his own purposes. Many are brightened with water-based dyes and Chinese pigments that are enticingly flamboyant as cake icing.

“He has this incredible technical dexterity,” Rosario Güiraldes, associate curator at New York’s Drawing Center, said. “And also this incredible way of subverting and estranging this ancient art form.” 

The Drawing Center is currently hosting Xiyadie’s first institutional exhibition in the US, which functions as a kind of mini-survey. Titled “Queer Cut Utopias”—a nod to the scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer utopias—it examines four decades of Xiyadie’s practice, featuring works from 1982 to 2021 spread across two floors of the gallery. The show, along with a documentary about Xiyadie by Anna Sophie Loewenberg and catalogue essays by Güiraldes, Hera Chan, and Alvin Li, distances Xiyadie from the trope of the inscrutable and isolated outsider artist.

Xiyadie’s biography might otherwise be easily fetishized, as is the case of many artists who have no formal art-school training. The artist, who is based in Shandong province, has rarely exhibited his works, in part because showing images of queer love in his home country risks government censorship. But he also made art covertly for years, for his eyes only, to express himself while hiding his identity from his wife and children.

The large-scale work Gate (1992) alludes to his double life and its tensions. It shows the cross-section of a house, where, inside, beneath a blanket of flowers, a woman nuzzles a child; just beyond a door that appears to be ajar, a man performs oral sex on another man, their bodies sprouting plants whose vines climb toward the roof. In Sewn (1999), a man confined by walls sits on a sword’s edge, sewing up his penis while gazing at a portrait of another man. Such works convey the artist’s “fractured sense of self, or even the guilt that I think Xiyadie had for many years,” Güiraldes said. “He really did feel like something was wrong with him.”

Xiyadie is open about this past, sharing how his misery and helplessness led him to undergo evaluation at a hospital. “This confirmed that I am gay,” he said. “Everything I went through proves that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon that cannot be changed. After this, I know who I am and became confident.” 

Creating his art is a liberating experience. “With scissors in my hand,” Xiyadie added, “I immersed myself freely in my ideal world. I feel free and in harmony, expressing the highest sentiment in my heart.”

Born in 1963 into a large farming family, Xiyadie has “beautiful memories of the spring” from time spent in his grandfather’s garden—which was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, due to the Communist regime’s forced redistribution of rural land. He knew he liked men from a young age, but it was only in the 1980s, when he moved to Xi’an for work, that he began making art about his desires. He married a woman, and they had two children. 

In 2005, seeking better opportunities to support his family, he relocated to Beijing, joining the swelling class of migrant workers moving to cities. In the capital, he discovered a new freedom as he began frequenting cruising spots like parks and bathhouses. He also gave himself a new pseudonym to protect his identity that means “Siberian Butterfly”—embodying his hope for surviving and living without restraint amid harsh conditions. 

Beijing is also where Xiyadie first exhibited his works. He met the independent curator Yang Zi and the editor of Gayspot magazine, Zhao Ke, who convinced Xiyadie to show his cuttings at the Beijing LGBT Center in 2010. “For the first time,” Xiyadie said, “I felt very lucky to be in Beijing.” 

But the exhibition, which included works by other queer artists, was censored by law enforcement. “Many artists’ works were taken away by the police, but mine remained,” he said. With a “haha,” he added, “The police mentioned that the paper cutting was very good. In fact, I don’t think they fully understood my work.”

In China, paper cutting is highly esteemed and widely seen. The medium, which has been named a form of Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, is “such a legible vernacular art form in China, there’s this sort of instant recognition of it,” according to Güiraldes.

The nature of the medium, where cuts through one sheet of paper result in interconnected lines, also tends toward complex positive and negative shapes that can take time to parse. In Xiyadie’s paper cuts, dynamic human figures are wholly entwined with plant life and ornate architectural motifs: tendrils sprout from toes, extending into blossom-filled trees; hair doubles as fecund soil from which flowers grow, their contours becoming those of fruit, birds, goats, roofs, the moon.

This living environment indicates “a harmony that is ecological,” Hera Chan writes in her catalog essay. “It naturalizes queer love into built structures and further encapsulates all that into nature. These are images that show the unity of all lifeforms flourishing, deeply embedded with each other, an antidote to environmental extraction.”

Many of Xiyadie’s earlier works, in particular, exist in their own blissful, verdant worlds. In Flowerpot (1991), two men have sex at the center of a flowerpot, their limbs evoking roots and their heads, seeming to radiate with light, amid flowers and birds. The image is of seclusion and freedom.  

“I am trying to search for a free and harmonious way to live,” Xiyadie told me. “In my dream world, there is a simple house at the foot of a large mountain with endless pine trees. In front of the house, there is a tiny stream with flowing water that you can see through to the bottom, where little fish swim languidly and freely.”

Every scene is based on Xiyadie’s own real experiences. As he started showing his art, he seemed to increasingly situate acts of love in more specific locations. Gate (Tiananmen), 2016, is an unabashed depiction of two men openly embracing at Tiananmen Square, the site where a government massacre had taken place 27 years earlier. 

There’s a voyeuristic aspect to it all—a fact underlined by a 2018 domestic scene in which a man appears to lust after his electrician under the indifferent eye of a cat. Xiyadie put it simply: “It is a record of nature and man.”

The Drawing Center exhibition’s largest and most recent work—measuring 4 ½ by nearly 10 feet—demonstrates this sentiment with full force. Titled Kaiyang (2021), it brims with dozens of figures of all scales performing sexual acts in gardens, outside temples, in a bathhouse. The panorama stands out for how it acknowledges Xiyadie’s own desires while situating himself within a broader community he is gradually coming to know.

Near the end of our conversation, he told me about an unforgettable experience he had while exhibiting in Sweden a decade ago. A man and his boyfriend were looking at his art and holding each other, weeping. “Seeing that brought tears to my eyes,” Xiyadie says. “I am moved and feel alive by this response. Through my work they have come to understand nature, including understanding and accepting my natural state!

“I am liberated, and I finally live to understand what and where I want to belong in my life. Truly, this is my motivation.”

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Tsai was in town this past February for the opening of her first solo exhibition in the United States, “A Mirror for the Romantic,” at Tara Downs gallery, where the London-based artist was surrounded by her own painted abstractions. Her work in pencil and oils invites us to wander between marks that boomerang freely across the canvas, with hard-edged lines and brisk smudges wending through eddies of flamboyant color. Her compositions are dense and seemingly limitless in dimension. They sweep you up in their relentless fervor.

Tsai describes herself as a narrator of motions, with a special concern for “the tension of searching back and forth.” This dynamic registers in her gestures’ trajectories, which morph wildly and resolve into harmony. Although her paintings offer no clear stories, they are as eventful as any drama. Word without End I Saw (2022) is a riotous encounter of pastel daubs that flit around a wispy spiral of purple, with exacting curves and ciphers subtly punctuating the chaos. Looking at the verdant First Day of Four Day Interlude (2023) feels like a fit of spring fever.

Tsai, 24, draws influences from lyrical texts of traditional Chinese literature, in particular the classic epic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the 1750s by Cao Xueqin. Growing up in a large family in Taiwan, she was attracted to the book’s story about the rise and decline of a royal family and its evocation of imagery and metaphors to delineate complex interpersonal relationships. Her ongoing fascination with the 120-chapter tale’s “ever-changing process of beauty and ugliness, temperance and obscenity, refinement and vulgarity,” as she put it, materializes in her approach to mark-making. She often begins by piling up paint on the edges of her canvas and then spreading it across the surface, drawing over certain layers, and obfuscating others with gesso. When she describes this process, she uses words like “distort,” “destroy,” and “re-create.”

This method of working laterally stems from Tsai’s training in gongbi, a realist style of traditional Chinese ink painting that she studied in high school. She adapted her skill in executing fine yet fluid brushstrokes in oil paint at the Taipei National University of the Arts, but turned to abstraction at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she received her MFA in 2022.

She was, and remains, interested in pushing spatial relationships and seeking layered emotional states: just as the diction and rhythm of a pithy Chinese idiom can impart a figurative meaning, so can the precise choreography of gestures on canvas unfold a nexus of events. “They’re all constructing and bringing to the viewer a broad worldview and inner spiritual space,” she said.  

The founding committee for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Sri Lanka convened in 2016. Among the members were independent curator and publisher Sharmini Pereira; Suhanya Raffel, now director of the M+ Museum for Visual Culture in Hong Kong; and Ranmali Mirchandani, former arts manager at the British Council in Sri Lanka. The MMCA, the island country’s first modern art institution, opened just three years later in Colombo. Below, Pereira, its chief curator, speaks about building an institution from the ground up.

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In February 2022, the museum moved to a new space. We were previously in a private building—a tower block, where visitors had to go up in an elevator. Now we are in a shopping mall. I jumped at the chance to get this site, because I think one of the most important principles behind MMCA Sri Lanka is that it should be for public benefit. In Sri Lanka, museums, which are mostly national endeavors, don’t look at public engagement the way we think they need to. We relish being in a space that isn’t commonly associated with art, so we can begin to break down conventional ideas of what a museum should stand for or look like. A museum is more than a building. It’s about a set of relationships that come from outside and inform its practices.

Right now, we’re in a developmental phase, training an entire team of professionals to work in a museum environment. In Sri Lanka, that’s a huge challenge, because we don’t have many such people. Art historians and curators educated in modern and contemporary art are few and far between. We have one experienced conservator in the country, but no one who can restore and conserve works on paper or photo-based work. We don’t have exhibition designers, assistant curators—I’m involved in training personnel for all these positions. My job is coordinating all the moving parts. And I like the way we’re building something from scratch.

We have a staff of 40, but just 10 are full time. And none has ever worked in a museum before, including myself. Twenty-five serve as visitor educators. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds and are the point of contact for our audiences, helping people navigate the exhibitions and engage in conversations, which is done in three languages. From the time we launched, we’ve taken a trilingual approach to our public programs, social media, press releases, exhibition didactics, and signage. Sri Lanka has three national languages—Sinhala, Tamil, and English—but no other cultural institution, out of 120, has implemented this practice. We’re building glossaries that reflect the untranslatability of certain terms. Language is one of the key ways we’re making what we do more accessible.

I hope this museum inspires creatives in Sri Lanka to think they can have a credible career in the arts. There is a community here that wishes to build a larger platform, where we can all be heard and seen. One of the reasons that some artists want to leave Sri Lanka is because they feel they can’t have an effect. I hope they will recognize us as an institution that wants to exhibit their work and listen to their stories, and that we can start collecting that work, so it can reach schoolchildren, tourists, and people contemplating careers in the arts.

In 2022 a people’s movement in Sri Lanka united individuals from all walks of life to protest economic difficulties, and bring down a corrupt regime. I believe the spirit of that movement will continue to activate the country. MMCA Sri Lanka has a place in a future where change is not just dreamed of, it is essential.

Banner images, left to right: school students at the MMCA exhibition “One Hundred Thousand Small Tales,” 2019; Susiman Nirmalavasan’s installation White Curtain and Women ( 2016) on view in 2022; Sharmina Pereira [illustration by Denise Nestor]; visitors to the exhibition “Encounters”; title wall for “Encounters” [all museum images courtesy MMCA Sri Lanka].

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Opened in 2019 in Tamale, the capital city of Ghana’s northern region, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) is a multidisciplinary space founded by artist Ibrahim Mahama. With its sister institution, Red Clay—which also serves as Mahama’s studio—SCCA exhibits the work of Ghanaian artists, and facilitates research, workshops, meetings, performances, and publications. A.i.A. spoke with Mahama about turning once-remote visions into reality.

[As told to A.i.A.] The idea to build this space came to me in 2010, when I was at university in Kumasi. I was born in Tamale, and I always wanted to find a way to go back. I thought building a studio might influence a new generation of artists and thinkers. But I did not have the capital. I went back to school for my MFA and then, in 2014, took part in my first international exhibition, at Saatchi Gallery in London. With my proceeds from the show, I invested in Red Clay and SCCA.

I did not have a specific idea of what the institution should be; it’s purely experimental. Because we’re starting from … zero, we can do things most museums will not do. Sometimes we turn the space into a classroom. We invited Tracy Thompson, who makes artworks by cooking food, to turn it into a laboratory where she experimented with the help of students.

We want to exhibit artists who have practiced for several decades, but whose work is not very visible to the public. We work directly with artists—or the families of those already deceased—to organize shows and workshops. We’re currently planning to open a major retrospective of Professor [Yakubu Seidu] Peligah, a painter trained at the Kumasi School, who passed away recently. Our exhibitions go on for at least six months, so people from across the region can access them as much as possible. Many teachers are eager to bring students, even from faraway villages.

Ordinarily, no one would come to the north of Ghana for contemporary art—there was no foundation. The purpose of SCCA is to change that. Because the facility is a bit isolated, it allows a certain introspection. You have time to develop and produce work. For me, it’s important that more regional institutions are established, to allow artists to rethink their practices outside the big spaces of the capital. I am not interested in having an institution that just invites artists to make work. I’m interested in artists coming in and being influenced by the situation here to become different kinds of artists.

I recently bought some old train cars in the south of Ghana. The coaches are from the British colonial period, and I’ve been chasing them for years. I intend to use them now as classrooms, studios, and residency spaces, as I’ve already done with several airplanes. That way we can do long-term projects with kids from rural areas. I want to expand SCCA/Red Clay into an art school that encourages young artists to think beyond today’s dominant forms. There are brilliant curators, writers, and artists yet to be born. And it’s important that, when they are, the conditions for art are as wide-open as possible.

My philosophy is that if you’re from a place where things are not working, your best choice is to stay, contribute, and experiment. See what you can build; see if you can reshape the circumstances. If art is supposed to be about emancipation for all, why concentrate it in places that only a few elite people can access? If you want to test freedom, you should go to places where you think it might fail. The process may not succeed, but it could create a degree of liberation within. Failure is very important for me.

Banner images, left to right: exterior of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, Tamale, Ghana; students at Red Clay 2022 [© Ernest Sarkitey]; Ibrahim Mahama [illustration by Denise Nestor]; students and visitors at the Kofi Dawson show “In Pursuit of something ‘Beautiful’, perhaps…” at SCCA; students at Red Clay.

Sold via the NTWRK app, a livestream video shopping platform, the pan features a pixelated flower based on what was supposed to be Murakami’s first NFT. While that venture has been put on hold, the pans dropped as scheduled in mid December, with 275 units for sale at $40 a pop. Each features a sturdy, lightweight cast-iron base (induction cooktop–friendly!) that can make a pancake about five and a half inches in diameter, and a pale-turquoise handle graced by five cheery flower figures.

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I put one of these babies to the test on a recent weekend, particularly excited to try a sourdough discard recipe that a friend had recommended. But as the batter began bubbling, I realized the pan’s inherent flaw: Its jagged border that outlines a dozen angular “petals.” Because my spatula wouldn’t fit under the bronzing edges, I resorted to using a butter knife to lift up one corner before executing the flip. This bit of gymnastics can be tricky enough with a circular pan; attempting to land your pancake exactly within the pan’s angular contours is a grueling task no one should have to face before breakfast. (To the credit of Murakami’s team, they did release an edition of this flower pan that is perfectly round.)

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That said, I had no problem with batter sticking (I’d pre-slicked the pan) and managed to achieve pretty good definition on my second attempt—though don’t expect to get a perfect imprint on both sides of your pancake. The flowers certainly looked cute on my plate, but personally, I don’t love breakfast pancakes enough to bother with such painstaking effort. Given the pan’s pleasantly compact size, I’ll probably use it one day for my pancake of choice, okonomiyaki—though the 8-bit pattern is unlikely to transfer to a loaded egg.

Chien, who used to own San Francisco’s beloved record store Aquarius Records before working at iTunes, had left the corporate world with the express intent of exploring various arts. She took a macramé class and fell in love with the repetitive motions, the flow of morphing quotidian rope into patterns. But she wasn’t quite satisfied with the forms, which to her eyes looked rather one-note, largely because macramé designs tend to rely on just three or four knots.

That year of knot-learning expanded her perspective, shaping a fluency in not only knots—and she’s since invented her own—but also materials. In Chien’s hands, a simple rope (or line, in sailors’ parlance) can transform into meditative meanders—intricate sculptures whose contortions and textures reveal themselves the more you look. Highly dimensional, her large-scale pieces keep the eye moving over her consistent handiwork. “They mostly do what I need them to do because I never ask them to do anything that’s beyond their nature,” Chien says.

Chien, who often describes herself as “omnivorous,” has always been fascinated with the oddities inextricable from the early days of tech, from the Whole Earth Catalog to Steve Jobs’s “fruitarian” diet. It comes as no surprise, then, that many of her works are inspired by the humble but mighty circuit board. She revels in the simplicity of the line to invent her own exceptional networks that are temptingly tactile, charming with their eloquence.

Chien’s bodies of work are each born from a single knot that she learned during her Year of Knots. Each one had “this life and vitality to it,” she says. “It was just begging to be further experimented with.” One, which she calls a spoke hitch, became the building block of her Diamond Rings works, which involve meticulous knotting around a web of rigid circles. These pieces play with the limitations of circles and the unbound possibilities of a singular path of rope; each is unique, showcasing a distinct journey. “Making them is a wonderful entry into the state of flow,” Chien comments. “A big part of the process is making it in the moment, not preplanning the line, but following it as I make it.”

Historically, the spoke hitch was tied around the large wooden wheels of wagons or stagecoaches to increase traction—the old-time equivalent of snow chains. Chien started working a series of hitches around a ring—a technique known as ringbolt hitching, which sailors traditionally used to protect deck rings from chafing. She gradually built up the number of rings to create sprawling, standalone wall works. “It was an experiment in figuring out how I could apply ringbolt hitching with an eye to aesthetics,” she says.

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The spoke hitch is a forgiving knot, in the sense that it can be executed with a braided rope that is soft or stiff, thick or thin. When Chien searches for materials, she seeks the perfect combination of pliability, feel, and aesthetics. Typically the rope in her Diamond Rings is made of cotton, but she has also opted for thicker and tougher manila rope, which can offer a more rustic look. Chien used to buy her line at hardware stores, but increasingly she has her rope custom made by Knot & Rope Supply or by Sunbrella. “So much of my work is about elevating the humble knot—these functional items invented by sailors to be workhorse objects—to really highlight what beautifully designed objects they are,” Chien explains. “One of the ways is to use really luxurious rope.”

Hitches have to be made around an object; lose this base and the knot will collapse. Initially, to maintain the integrity of her spoke hitches, Chien tied them around rings commonly used by macramé artists in plant hangers. She also found that wooden baby teether rings, widely available on Etsy, worked well. Many of her Diamond Rings use soft wood, but she has also produced them with translucent acrylic, which she favors for how they almost disappear against a wall to emphasize the path of the knotting. Currently Chien is using high-quality plywood that she sources from a provider in the Bay Area that uses a special computer-controlled cutting machine called a CNC to make her rings. “The world of CNC cutting is all men, and I called so many places and they were all so mean to me,” she recalls. “I finally found a woman-owned one, and they were amazing.”

Chien knots her pieces entirely by hand. Her vision requires that she otherwise interfere as little as possible with her line. A completed piece can be traced from start to finish, since she leaves the ends raw and visible. This signals to viewers that each Diamond Ring is made with one unbroken length of rope. “There’s a kind of conceptual rigor that’s very satisfying—that I’ve made this piece with 250 feet of a single line,” Chien says. To execute the snips, she favors Fiskars shears, which she sharpens regularly to maintain them in top shape.

Chien’s biggest challenge is often figuring out how to install her work, since her pieces don’t provide much surface area for installation hardware to latch on to. Depending on the substrate of the wall, she might use secure T-lock hardware or standoffs, which are often used for signage. The latter provide some distance between the work and the wall, which can enhance the viewing experience. “They create the most beautiful shadows,” Chien says of the Diamond Rings. “I want viewers to be able to stand sideways and look at what the back of the work and the sides look like. Because they’re all about texture and the traveling line. They’re little puzzles to figure out.”

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“I found out you can use avocado pits, onion skins, chamomile flowers, hibiscus, sorrel,” Greenidge-Sabral told ARTnews. “All these incredible things I had the whole time. It felt like I was a kid again—my inner child just sparkled.”

Two years on, she has dyed watercolor postcards, pouches, clothing, and more and has led her own dye workshops. Greenidge-Sabral is largely self-taught, and she exchanges knowledge with a network of artists around the world, from the Cordwainers Grow community in London’s Hackney district to plant dyer Gianna Christella Hayes in Australia.

“It’s all about doing your own research, testing, and trying what works for you,” she said. “Depending on where you are in the world, your climate, water, your materials will be different.” This can make the art of dyeing, and especially natural dyeing, seem intimidating. The lengthy procedure can also require meticulous processing, from regulating temperature to using a mordant (a chemical that helps color latch onto fabric), particularly if you are seeking a certain look or colorway. Before you even begin, it can also be challenging to choose your textiles and dyestuffs, which have different lightfastness and entail different extraction processes.

But practitioners say that dyeing is also a highly rewarding art form and, with relatively low barriers to entry, is ideal for those keen to experiment. Like many small-batch dyers, Greenidge-Sabral simply uses her kitchen as a dye studio, setting aside a dedicated space and ensuring that it is well ventilated. Her dyestuff is typically something commonplace, ranging from sorrel to buddleja (a flowering plant) to turmeric. So are her tools: an induction burner, stainless steel pots, a metal spoon, a stirring stick, a sieve. As for textiles, she recommends that first-timers dig through their closets for an old tote bag or a cotton T-shirt that’s been washed many times, which will help the fabric absorb the dye.

An-Phuong Ly, a textile artist based in Washington, D.C., describes dyeing as “a really accessible art form.” She began working with dyes 10 years ago and teaches natural dye classes hosted by the U.S. Botanic Garden, the Arlington Arts Center, and Smithsonian Associates. Informed by her graphic design background, she is drawn to highly structured patterns and cites textile artist Anni Albers as an influence.

“The important thing is to keep your eye open to what’s around you on an everyday basis,” Ly said. “Find a shirt you want to refresh. Use flowers you might have thrown away. I love kitchen compost, commons things like onion skins, turmeric, or paprika. Although those are not lightfast, they are really great introductions to the process.”

Ly also purchases dyestuff from established vendors such as the Seattle-based Botanical Colors and the Vancouver store and school Maiwa. But spending time outdoors foraging for natural materials, from lavender to walnut tree leaves, is part of why she loves natural dyeing.

Early in the pandemic, Ly converted a sliver of soil in the parking spot behind her house into a dye garden for marigolds, indigo, and coreopsis. She was taking a cue from artists she met through Baltimore Natural Dye, an initiative at the Maryland Institute College of Art that treats natural dyes as a tool for healing humans’ relationship with the earth.

“I was shocked at how much I could squeeze into that small space,” Ly said. “It doesn’t take a lot of effort, and it’s super satisfying. You can also have a windowsill garden—that’s a great way to start.”

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In the United Kingdom, Greenidge-Sabral has also developed a closer relationship with nature through dyeing. She does most of her foraging for fruits and berries at the end of summer and uses apps such as PictureThis to identify plant species and save their names, which she will often then log in a dye journal. “Living in a city, I thought I didn’t have many green spaces, but there are over 1,000 green spaces in London,” she said. “I started really looking at the world, really paying attention to Mother Earth. Now I have this entire archival guide of things that can help me.”

Alex Reynoso, a fiber artist who lives in the Bronx, has been experimenting with natural dyes during the pandemic, but he still finds himself gravitating toward synthetics. He finds that the colors they produce are more vibrant—vital for an artist who is known for creating multicolored garments and accessories with ombré and speckled tones.

“You need a lot of dyestuff to get a great color as opposed to, like, half a teaspoon of powder,” Reynoso said. “Otherwise the process is super simple. Once you meet the requirements of heat, water, acid, and coloring, you should be able to dye wool or nylon.”

Reynoso, 24, has been crocheting since age 13 and began dyeing yarn because he was tired of the natural white fibers he bought from farmers markets. “It’s a different way to express yourself, to play around with color,” he said. Also self-taught, he learned how to dye by reading books and watching YouTube videos, including ones on color theory. He now uses videos himself to teach others: On Skillshare, he offers an eight-lesson introduction to hand-dyeing wool yarn, covering several techniques in just under 30 minutes.

Working with synthetic dyes can offer more control—you can dip-dye a portion of a knitted hat, for instance—but Reynoso also appreciates more spontaneous techniques, like simply adding dyes to bunched up fabric and setting the colors in a microwave. Another easy way for beginners to get their feet wet, he said, would be to try kettle dyeing, which involves immersing textiles in a large pot of water. “You just mix your dye in, dunk in your yarn, and everything happens in the pot. It will get you a semisolid depending on how many colors you add, and when.”

Even though dyeing—whether with synthetic or natural dyes—follows a basic set of steps, Ly said that its unpredictable nature is still the main reason why she loves the craft. “Every time you make something, it’s so unexpected, even when you think you have the factors constant.” The coolest part, she said, is “that acceptance of surprise and inconsistency and lack of control. It’s just this constant unknowing, this letting go.”

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For Sekules, whose repairs extend to frayed or holey sleeves, collars, pants, or what have you, the ancient darns are “completely familiar,” as she writes in her mending guide Mend! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto. They remind her of some of her own sewing—conspicuous stitches that not only fix but also transform the original item. Take, for instance, a pair of trousers she’s donned frequently over the last year. Worn and torn, their seat has become a veritable color explosion of patches and little cross-stitches.

Sekules, who shares projects on her Instagram account @visiblemend, is a lodestar in the visible mending movement, a growing international network of sewers who use creative stitching to repair old clothing and other threadbare textiles. First popularized by Tom van Deijnen, a Dutch sewer known in stitching circles as Tom of Holland, the term has been embraced in recent years by crafters, vintage textile lovers, and eco-conscious proponents of slow fashion. There is no single mending style, but a core philosophy: to celebrate the aesthetic potential of mends rather than conceal them. Beyond exercising the creative mind, mending also extends the life of garments that might otherwise end up in landfills.

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“Mending has always been essential, and the way we’re bringing it back reclaims an invisible labor throughout history, turns it on its head, and makes it a new art form,” Sekules said. “I sometimes say it’s a scrappy art form—it’s really as creative as you want to make it.”

Today, those interested in visible mending have a vast sea of resources to explore. Mending kits featuring deadstock fabric, ready-to-use patches, and naturally dyed or vintage textiles are readily available for purchase. Virtual workshops or mending clubs, such as one organized by instructor Erin Eggenburg, can be an excellent way to learn directly from artists. Many menders also share tips and tutorials on social media, posted under hashtags such as #visiblemending and #makedoandmend.

Among them is Arounna Khounnoraj, a Toronto-based artist who sells mending kits and other design objects through her studio Bookhou. Her popular video tutorials cover mends from a straightforward stitch-up of ripped denim to needle felting a moth-eaten beret into a quirky polka-dotted accessory. Khounnoraj, who grew up in a household where mending was a necessity, said she shares techniques not only to show the vast creative possibilities of mending but also to emphasize how simple visible mending can be.

“You just need a needle and thread, which makes it very accessible and achievable,” she said. “ I think it’s something that people feel is hard at first, but it’s really not. And it becomes addictive—you just start trying to find things to repair.”

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Last winter, Khounnoraj published Visible Mending: A Modern Guide to Darning, Stitching and Patching the Clothes You Love, a book that showcases how one can use materials already on hand to repair, reuse, and renew garments. It is just one of many how-to guides for mending enthusiasts. Also on shelves: Joyful Mending: Visible Repairs for the Perfectly Imperfect Things We Love! by Noriko Misumi, Visible Mending: Artful Stitchery to Repair and Refresh Your Favorite Things by Jenny Wilding Cardon, and Denim Mending + Visible Mending for Beginners by Gina Harper.

Sekules’s book, also published last year, examines the historical and contemporary context of visible mending and features step-by-step instructions for stitches, including mends of her own design. Her “Periodic Table of Mend Elements” categorizes methods in a convenient visual; a supplementary chart helps menders figure out the best ones for different garments and damages. Still, she adds, “The only advice you need is: Just start.”

And as for mistakes? “It’s already broken so you can’t make it worse. If it looks horrible or goes all puckery, I say double down, or put something on top instead of trying to unpick it. Patch on patch on patch.”

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Unsurprisingly, many in the visible mending community are self-taught. Lily Fulop, who describes her mending style as “experimental and intuitive,” picked up mending a few years ago when she was in college learning about sustainability in fashion. “Mending shows people your values—that you care about reducing your waste and using things for longer,” she said. “It’s also a way to express personal style and create a connection with your clothing.”

Last spring, Fulop published Wear, Repair, Repurpose: A Maker’s Guide to Mending and Upcycling Clothes, a brightly colored, heavily illustrated volume ideal for beginners who want to learn how to mend and refresh everything from socks to jackets. She also posts video tutorials and tips on TikTok. While Fulop takes a maximalist approach in her mends, incorporating an abundance of color, patterns, and texture, her instructions aren’t prescriptive. Instead, her approach aims to “empower you with basic skills so you can continue from there.”

“I emphasize throughout that there’s not really one way to do things,” Fulop said. “People think their stitches need to be in a perfect straight line, and I don’t think that matters. If it works, it works.” To ease yourself into mending, she advised, start with simple patching and thin fabrics like cotton before working up to darning and heavy cloths like denim.

One widely favored style of visible mending is Sashiko, a Japanese hand stitching tradition. But the rhythmic stitch, which can result in mesmerizing, intricate patterns, is more accurately a form of “invisible mending,” said Atsushi Futatsuya, a third-generation Sashiko stitcher who has written extensively on the form.

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In fact, Sashiko is more concerned with utility over aesthetics. During the Edo period, those too poor to purchase new fabrics used this kind of stitching to maximize the life of clothing. “The result is like visible mending, but the core essence of Sashiko is the opposite of showing off,” Futatsuya said. “It’s about trying to hide, based on the Japanese culture of shame.”

Futatsuya offers both in-person and virtual classes on Sashiko and also sells Sashiko tools and supplies. His mission is not to gatekeep but equip people with a proper understanding of the centuries-old techniques and complex culture of intention and care for the process. “You can do whatever you want, as long as you understand the basic essentials,” he said.

For the most part, visible mending is appreciated as a casual, low-stakes hobby: something you can pick up as a mindful practice but execute as a relatively mindless task. “Mending has a meditative quality,” Khounnoraj said. “The gesture and movement of fixing a hole can also make us psychologically feel better because you can see it physically coming together. It has a sense of gratification.”

For Fulop, mending is “an antidote to stressful modern times.” As people continue to be on lockdown and seek distractions away from screens, she has not been surprised to see a surging interest in an old-time custom. “It’s a great way to reduce anxiety, and it’s satisfying to do,” she said. “Sewing is fun.”

“It wasn’t made for people in the tribe but for their white audience, for people obsessed with pioneer culture,” Steph Littlebird Fogel (Grande Ronde, Kalapuya), an artist and writer, said. “It was completely outdated and problematic.”

The same might have been said of the museum itself—now known as the Five Oaks Museum—just two years ago. Founded in 1956 as a history museum to showcase artifacts of pioneers collected by their descendants, it remained stuck in the 20th century despite having expanded its focus, subjects of more recent shows being as various as the Hubble Space Telescope and steampunk art. Its website was unnavigable, its technology was ancient, and most troublingly, it struggled to attract nonwhite visitors. By the spring of 2019, the small museum was on the brink of closure, caught in a maelstrom of high leadership turnover and clashing agendas.

“The institution was facing, essentially, total failure,” Molly Alloy, the museum’s community engagement coordinator at the time, said. “It had reached a critical point where everything had to be done differently.”

Five Oaks Museum codirectors Molly Alloy and Nathanael Andreini.

That May, after the Washington County Museum director officially resigned in lieu of termination, the board appointed Alloy and then-education director Nathanael Andreini—the only full-time staffers, both of whom are also artists—as codirectors. “We shared a kind of absurd vision of what the institution really could be for the community and for the museum field,” Alloy said. “We had a year to come up with this new way of being that was responsive to the community, about being imaginative in fusing genres like art and history, and empowering the staff.”

One of the pair’s first actions was to invite Fogel in as a guest curator to overhaul and critique “This Kalapuya Land.” Working with scholar and Grand Ronde tribal member David G. Lewis, Fogel directly annotated wall text, introduced contemporary art by 17 Native artists, and gave the display a new name: “This IS Kalapuyan Land.” The title doubled as acknowledgment of Indigenous presence and sovereignty across time. Changing displays to address historically ignored narratives is nothing new: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, for one, has invited Native artists and historians to write additional didactics for certain works in its American Wing. But Five Oaks’s reform ran deeper. As a whole, “This IS Kalapuyan Land” heralded the start of a new chapter of institutional unlearning and rethinking.

On January 1, 2020, Five Oaks Museum relaunched with a new look and a new name that connected it to a nearby historic site of trees where Kalapuya once gathered. It embraced a new mission (the words “Moving history forward” crown its “About” page) and diversified its board. It has steadily infused its programming with art, mounting “Gender Euphoria,” a show of contemporary trans and genderqueer artists and, most recently, “DISplace,” an exhibition of artwork and historical research that represents generations of Hawaiian life in the Pacific Northwest. With these changes, not only has the museum’s audience rapidly diversified (the museum is closed during the pandemic but has seen clear shifts on social media) but its membership has increased tenfold since 2019. Furthermore, its five-person staff operates in a workplace committed to equity—one that provides them with family health care and incremental raises to address existing pay gaps.

In 2019, Five Oaks Museum’s first guest-curated exhibition, “This IS Kalapuyan Land,” marked a turning point in the institution’s approach to presenting Indigenous culture.

In a year in which art museums around the United States have been forced to reckon with the reality that systemic inequities are lodged in their structures, Five Oaks’s metamorphosis offers a picture of what real institutional reimagining can look like regarding diversity, access, and inclusion. “Radical is the correct word,” said Mariah Berlanga-Shevchuk, who last year became the museum’s first cultural resources manager. She had moved to Portland to take the position, leaving her curatorial job at a museum in Los Angeles. “I knew I’d never find a museum like Five Oaks there,” she added. “I have worked at museums run by well-intentioned white women, by bad-intentioned white men, by leaders who like to represent the community but have no museum expertise. Now I work at a museum where the directors have experience, and care about the staff being their whole selves. The board actually listens to us. It has been radically different, in an extremely nourishing and generative way.”

Five Oaks Museum’s achievements stem, in part, from a considered structuring of its budget around five values: body, land, truth, justice, and community. “These very humane values—versus institutional values that keep people at an academic arm’s length—are intentionally infused, line by line, into the budget,” Andreini said. Nearly half the $485,900 annual operating budget is funded by Washington County, which owns the museum’s collection and archives, the rest coming from grants, donor contributions, admission ($5 for adults), and other revenue. “Somebody asked how we managed to do so much with so little,” Andreini said. “All we did was make choices. Anybody empowered to make choices ostensibly has the power to make choices that are kind.” When the pandemic forced the museum to close, the codirectors followed through on planned raises even as they reduced staff’s weekly hours.

Don Bailey’s Everyone’s a Winner, Too, featured in “This IS Kalapuyan Land.”

Also crucial to the museum’s model is the belief that it can better serve its community by flexing as little institutional power as possible. The codirectors, who are both white, view their collaborative leadership as one way to break down traditional hierarchies. “We did not enter into this with a desire to hold power,” Alloy said. “We see our success criteria as decentering the directorship and the museum’s authoritative voice, and leveling hierarchies to create more access and more voice for people.” A similar structure exists at the board level, with members voting last fall to replace the president and vice president positions with cochairs. “We’re figuring out a way that’s more collaborative, where people who might not be experienced in the museum or board world can be mentored,” Five Oaks board secretary Ameena Djanga, who joined last spring, said. “One thing I like is, we are so diverse in age, socioeconomic status, professional experience. It brings different perspectives and helps us understand the landscape of who lives here.”

Five Oaks also has a guest curator program in lieu of a permanent curator position (previous curators had departed, leaving the role empty). The strategy is simple: “Divest, divest, divest,” Alloy said. “It’s about trusting the community, knowing they have important stories to tell and rich competencies around how to tell them. And it only follows that they will draw people in.” Guest curators are chosen through an open call for proposals for two annual exhibition slots, and a panel of community members reviews applications. So far, the process has yielded explorations of long sidelined narratives, as in the ongoing “DISplace.” Five Oaks’s current guest curators, Kanani Miyamoto, an artist and arts educator, and artist Lehuauakea, used their term to cast an even wider net for artists by holding their own open call, the results of which represent diverse Hawaiian voices, from elementary school–age children to elders, who address notions of displacement and diaspora in wide-ranging media.

“Molly and Nathanael are radically reforming how the institution grants agency to Black, Indigenous, and people of color to hold space for their communities,” Lehuauakea said. “We had freedom to bring in voices that may not have ever had this platform. A lot of submissions came from people who never had any institutional engagement.”

The museum is dismantling barriers to access in other ways. It has invited students from Portland Community College, whose campus it shares, to visit and critique three of its past exhibits (many wanted to see more exhibits focused on Indigenous peoples). Education programs became free last fall to embrace an agenda of equal opportunity over revenue creation. On its Instagram account, biweekly takeovers by community members flood the platform with myriad voices. “I think that changes the idea of who participates in history, who is part of history today,” Five Oaks learning coordinator Victoria Sundell said. Internally, the museum has avoided traditional hiring practices such as requiring higher degrees or years of industry experience. Its guest curators and resulting staff, though small, are diverse in race, age, and perspective. “I’m 24, and I don’t have a degree in museum studies, but the directors place a lot of trust in me,” Sundell said. “At a different museum, I would be fighting to have my voice heard.”

Museum guests learned the steps to an Aztec dance with Huehca Omeyocan dancers at a free family event at Five Oaks Museum in 2019.

Similarly, although Berlanga-Shevchuk has never previously worked in archives, she is in charge of managing the museum’s collection. One challenge she faces is making it more representative and respectful of diverse communities. In addition to removing objects that no longer serve the museum’s mission, editing offensive descriptions, and reinterpreting objects, Berlanga-Shevchuk is working with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde’s cultural resources manager on the potential repatriation of Indigenous materials—mostly baskets, bowls, and arrowheads. “The deaccessioning work is one of the large ways that we’re trying to decolonize this museum,” she said. “At the same time, it’s impossible to decolonize museums. They are inherently colonial structures.”

Does Five Oaks—a small regional institution born out of unusual circumstances—present a scalable model for art museums that are awakening to systemic issues? “Theoretically—absolutely. There’s a lot here museums could take on board and do within themselves and their own communities,” Susie Wilkening, an independent museum consultant said. “Realistically, it seems they had three magical things come together: Humble leadership, a willing and engaged board, and a community that embraced what they were doing. Having those three things is going to be less likely for a lot of institutions around the country.”

What’s most unusual, Wilkening added, is the museum’s “huge pivot” away from white-centered history in such a short time. “And they are fortunate that they’re in a community that embraces that. There’s a lot of communities in this country that aren’t there yet.”

Fogel, the inaugural guest curator, acknowledged that, with “This IS Kalapuyan Land,” the new codirectors could very well have alienated their audience from the start. “But they took a risk in opening themselves to feedback,” she added. “They realize that the world is moving in a different direction.”

A version of this article appears in the February/March 2021 issue of ARTnews, under the title “What’s in a Name?”

The Chicago Tribune first reported the cuts just days after an announcement that the museum’s chief curator Michael Darling was stepping down. The week before, senior curator Naomi Beckwith revealed that she would be leaving to become the Guggenheim Museum’s deputy director and chief curator.

In a statement to ARTnews, the MCA Chicago said, “Throughout the pandemic, we did our best to protect both the well-being and financial security of our employees. We continued to pay all of our employees, including part-time staff, during the first four-month period of closure. However, as the pandemic dragged on with a second and third wave of cases, the museum was forced to close again in the interest of public health in mid-November.

“The unavoidable consequence has been a reduction in revenue,” the statement continued. “To compensate for this, we continued to seek every non-personnel avenue to tackle the shortfall and optimized our operations as efficiently as possible. We are now undergoing a restructuring that includes reducing our office staff.” The museum said that the layoffs were part of “pivot towards long-term sustainability.”

Like many museums, the MCA Chicago has been severely impacted by the pandemic. Initially closed to the public in March, it reopened in July for four months under strict guidelines—a decision that some employees said risked the health of onsite staff—and closed again in November. According to another email sent to staff Thursday that was also obtained by ARTnews, the museum is “facing budget challenges including a significant deficit—the first time in the MCA’s history—a rapid spend down of our cash and 10 months of almost zero revenue.”

The museum had previously avoided layoffs and furloughs during the pandemic, which, by last summer, led to mass staff reductions at many major art museums across the U.S., including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center. In some cases, laid-off workers alleged that the cuts disproportionately impacted BIPOC staff and went on to form crowdfunding campaigns to support themselves—a measure the laid-off MCA workers have also undertaken.

In April, the MCA received a $2 million Paycheck Protection Program loan to sustain operations through the end of the fiscal year. However, last August it introduced an employment model that resulted in what a spokesperson called a “reduction in force.” All part-time visitor experience positions were converted to full-time ones, effectively squeezing out more than 20 employees. The change, which provided front-facing positions with improved wages and benefits, was intended to “help evolve the museum towards being a more equitable institution,” MCA director Madeleine Grynsztejn told ARTnews at the time.

Last week’s layoffs occurred just six weeks before the museum plans to reopen to the public on March 2. “It was completely out of the blue. Another colleague described it as ‘intensive whiplash,’” John Harness, a former employee affected by the cuts, told ARTnews. “Literally the day before, my department had meetings planning the next few months. We were all revving up for the next period.”

Harness is among the dozen part-time artist guides—the entire team—who were laid off. Their duties typically include giving tours but shifted during the pandemic to focus on creating materials for educators to use for distance learning. The museum said that the guides often work with school groups that it did not anticipate returning this year.

Also affected were part-time technicians, full-time employees in visitor services, learning, and other departments—including several who were part of the Armory Club, an honored group of staff who have been with the museum for more than 10 years. The museum has offered severance to those who sign a separation agreement that includes a mutual nondisparagement clause.

The layoffs also come at a time when the museum is facing criticism. Dozens of employees, organizing under the collective name MCAccountable, have called on the museum to demonstrate transparency between leadership and all staff. (According to a representative for the group, just two of its members are still employed by the museum following its recent round of layoffs.) Their demands include a plan for more equitable hiring practices and a commitment to restructuring pay scales. In November, close to 100 Chicago artists, many of whom are in the museum’s ongoing exhibition “The Long Dream,” sent Grynsztejn, the board, and curators their own letter in solidarity. Several, including Aram Han Sifuentes, Folayemi Wilson, and Maria Gaspar, declined to participate in the exhibition. And on Saturday, artists Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương canceled their scheduled performance at the museum in support of those who were laid off.

In a November letter published on the MCA’s website, Grynsztejn wrote: “I am grateful to every artist that demands that the MCA be a living example of equity. We want nothing less than that for ourselves and for every community that we are a part of.”

Arts workers say the museum has failed to properly address their demands while publicly pledging its commitment to equity within staffing practices. “When something happens, the MCA can be very quick to respond with a message that feels like it’s using all the correct language—all this neoliberal speak that’s softening the blow,” said Marcela Torres, an artist guide who was laid off Thursday after four years of employment. “But at the same time, they won’t meet with organizers.” (An MCA spokesperson declined to confirm this.)

For months, staff have proposed solutions to help the museum weather the financial blows of the pandemic, including pay cuts from leadership. In an email from April that was obtained by ARTnews, Grynsztejn said that 10 senior leaders at the museum, including herself, had taken pay cuts. Grynsztejn told employees in a meeting last week that high earners saw their salaries return to their original rates at the beginning of the fiscal year, in July, according to multiple people present. (The museum spokesperson declined to comment on this.) According to publicly available tax forms, the director earned $625,908 in compensation in 2019.

“I’ve been working with museums for 10 years,” Harness said. “This has squeezed out of me the very last of my hopes that museums are some kind of change vehicle. Institutional critique is over. We need to move on to dismantle the institution.”