For this exhibition, Sanchez Rocca focuses on ixtle (EESH-tleh), a fiber extracted from the lechuguilla plant, native to northern Mexico. Historically used for brushes, ropes, sacks, and baskets, ixtle is closely tied to agricultural labor, land stewardship, and resistance within ejido farming communities. Drawing from knowledge shared by farmworkers in Coahuila, Mexico, Sanchez Rocca traces the material’s significance across Indigenous cultivation practices, colonial economies, and contemporary labor systems.

Through sculptural furniture, screens, and immersive installations made from raw ixtle and Douglas fir, Sanchez Rocca transforms utilitarian tools such as brooms and brushes into forms that resist usefulness. The works challenge assumptions about labor, value, and beauty while honoring the many hands that shape materials. In Project Space, the exhibition becomes an environment for reflection, rest, and quiet power.

The works on view range from bold abstraction to nuanced representation, moving between politically engaged statements and more meditative explorations of gesture and form. Across sculpture and painting, the exhibition demonstrates the breadth and complexity of Black artistic expression.

By bringing together artists from two generations, the exhibition invites consideration of how ideas, techniques, and perspectives evolve while remaining grounded in cultural experience and artistic inquiry. Throughout, material and process serve as key points of connection, shaping how artists engage identity, history, and culture.

Through hand-built ceramics, bead-encrusted vessels, pony-bead tapestries, and meticulously carved relief prints, the artists in Material Memory examine how culture and personal histories are inherited, learned, and reinterpreted through labor, repetition, and intimate engagement with material. These works ask viewers to consider how objects embody memory, mediate identity, and carry stories across generations.

Featuring:

Chris Salas (Ceramics)
Salas’s hand-built ceramic forms emerge through intuitive, iterative processes informed by personal relationships, historical research, and the ongoing legacy of colonization in the Americas. Clay becomes a vessel for cultural reckoning, holding layered histories through time-intensive making and surface.

Katie Mongoven (Fiber, Beading)
Mongoven transforms found blue-and-white ceramic vessels with intricate beadwork and embroidery. Her labor-intensive practice explores diasporic memory, identity reconstruction, and the reclamation of Orientalist objects through touch, repetition, and bodily presence.

akeylah wellington (Sculpture, Tapestry)
Wellington’s pony-bead tapestries and mixed-media sculptures blend humor, endurance, and personal history. Drawing on childhood imagery, early digital culture, and found materials, her work preserves stories of displacement, resilience, and generational inheritance.

Ramiro Rodriguez (Printmaking)
Rodriguez’s woodblock and linoleum relief prints document familial and cultural narratives rooted in Mexican-American print traditions. Through carving and layered printing, his work embeds memory, transformation, and inherited knowledge into the physical act of making.

Together, the artists in Material Memory use material as language—foregrounding slow, analog processes as acts of remembering, learning, and transmission. Their works are deeply personal yet culturally resonant, tracing the invisible threads of inheritance that bind past, present, and future.

NOTEWORTHY DETAILS:

• Any Berrien County resident OR current or member of Krasl Art Center can participate.
• Existing KAC Member Artists who also bring a non-member to exhibit can receive a free Fan-level membership renewal for 2025 and a free Fan-level membership for their friend. 
• KAC Member Artists are eligible to enter for a special juried award. 
• All artists are eligible for the People’s Choice Award.

Inspired by the process of automatic drawing pioneered by surrealists in the 1930s, Lehtinen prompts his computer to generate random lines; a wall-mounted plotter – his own personal drawing robot – executes the lines. He then completes the artwork himself using crayon and other classroom materials that emphasize the crafted, tangible quality of human touch and hint at the relative “youth” of our new technologies. Just as AI-generated images are known (often comically) to distort the human hand, Lehtinen’s artworks exacerbate this distortion, twisting and contorting, creating something that is of the human body but is not human. 

Lehtinen is an MFA graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies, two artists revolutionizing the way we think about art, technology, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) return to Krasl Art Center to debut their most recent collaboration. Together, Nathaniel Stern and Sasha Stiles present large-scale installations organized around conversations of kindred technologies and featuring hybrid sculptures, prints, poetry, haptic experiences, and artist books – all born from collaboration with AI. Through explorations of how people and technology have always evolved together, the show invites us to probe the kindred, generative relationship between humans and the tools we create. It forges new ways of cultivating human imagination, while nurturing creative, technological inheritance.

Artist Talk on Calendar

Opening Party on Calendar

From micro artworks the size of your hand to mammoth, room-sized installations, the diverse roster of women artists in A Beautiful Mess: Weavers & Knotters of the Vanguard twist, tie and braid tactile, utilitarian materials to push the boundaries of fiber art and elevate the traditional status of weaving, knotting, and macramé. Mining a lifetime of experiences, the artists explore personal and political ideals and freely break the rules to create works that make a strong cultural and intellectual impact.

While the media and means of production vary tremendously for each artist in A Beautiful Mess, they find commonality in their pursuit to upend the status quo. Their works tell profoundly personal and powerful histories, not only about the artist, but about the traditions and norms we honor and those that need to be addressed and eradicated. The artists confront uncomfortable issues like racism, sexism, patriarchal systems, and climate change. They also reveal the brilliance of the natural world, the richness of tradition, and the power of self-acceptance, all while demonstrating extraordinary technical skill. 

As artist Kira Dominguez Hultgren puts it, “weaving is about strange combinations.” Whether by utilizing non-traditional materials, tapping into personal histories to untangle imperialist and colonial legacies, or using the physical process of making as a means to map emotion, these artists have revolutionized a previously marginalized genre. 

~Emilee Enders, Curator of Exhibitions and Programs, Bedford Gallery

Exhibition Artists: Windy Chien, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Dana Hemenway, Kira Dominguez Hultgren, dani lopez, Hannah Perrine Mode, Liz Robb, Meghan Shimek, Lisa Solomon, Katrina Sánchez Standfield, and Jacqueline Surdell.

A Beautiful Mess: Weavers & Knotters of the Vanguard was organized by Bedford Gallery at the Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA.