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.

The Hull-House Art School, established by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, with Enella Benedict as its first director, provided classes and studio space for youngsters and adults alike from 1893 onward to the 1960s. It was an important, but underappreciated, cultural phenomenon in Chicago. In this exhibition, artworks range from functional to fine art and include commemorative medallions, artist-illustrated books and calendars, novels, jewelry, metalwork, fabrics, ceramics, prints, maps, drawings, and paintings. These works — from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century — represent the deep impact contributed by a community art center and highlight the affiliated artists who made them.  While some are little known, several artists in the exhibition are prominent in Chicago collections (including the Art Institute of Chicago) and are found in museums, homes, and other repositories throughout the United States.

Michael R. Hill has curated the exhibit and is preparing an exhibition catalog. Dr. Hill has served as a docent at the Krasl Art Center and is an astute interdisciplinary scholar who is ever learning and engaging with the arts of Chicago and Southwest Michigan.