Friday, February 21, 2025

UCLA Campus

Gather with fellow academics, researchers, artists, designers, technologists, and architects to discuss the re-emergence of a textile-based education as part of a vibrant and future-facing pedagogy. This inaugural half-day conference will kickoff a regional focus on the role of textiles in a contemporary education. Hosted by UCLA's Department of Design Media Arts, Thinking Through Textiles: Future Pedagogies will explore the intersections of aesthetics, textile technique, cross-disciplinary studies, and new material insights, while introducing opportunities for collaborative engagement.

Thinking Through Textiles is a series of multidisciplinary talks that explore the transdisciplinary nature of textiles, fiber as shape-shifter, textiles as embodied meaning, and various related points of praxis.

Confirmed speakers to include Fritz Horstman from Anni Albers Foundation, scholar Michael Beggs, artist-educator Christy Matson, artist and advocate Porfirio Gutierrez, educator and faculty Emily Silver, innovative material specialist Kristine Upesleja, artist and educator Fafnir Adamites, and more to be announced.

Our interest in textiles comes at a time of profound alienation from their means of production. In the West, many have little idea where the fiber that makes their clothes comes from, much less the labor, energy, carbon, and water necessary to produce them. Parallels between computers and weaving are almost trite, but never more true. We are living at a time of the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, itself an alienation from computation, and the resources it requires. In both cases production is outsourced to a “cloud,” and in both cases that “cloud” is typically located in a poor and under-privileged neighborhood (in the US) or a developing nation, enabling the exploiting of labor and the environment. By thinking through these parallel histories together, we gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of contemporary global capitalism, its history, and how Indigenous and craft practices provide modes of resistance and knowledges of ways forward into a world threatened by the environmental and human casualties of Anthropocene.


Learning to make and work with textiles shifts our minds from the abstraction of screens and networks, of thinking only with the eyes, and engages our thoughts on systems of production, material histories embedded in practices and tools, and thinking with and through the hands about the concrete reality in which we live.

The history of textiles indexes the history of capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and globalization. Nearly every step in the development of modern capitalism, the slave trade, colonization, industrialization, and offshoring is tied up with the insatiable development of manufactured textiles at the expense of local and Indigenous, often women-led, making practices. The Industrial Revolution in England was primarily a revolution in cotton textile production, one that depended for profitability on the enslavement of humans in the American South and the exploitation of Britain's colonies. Without slavery in America, the Industrial Revolution would have looked very different. 

Our intent is to foster an ongoing conversation and collaboration. Future convenings may include

• Panels from international scholars

• Roundtables with artists, designers, and academics

• Exhibition / library showcasing traditional and innovative material / equipment

• Optional studio visits

Speaker Bios

  • Bio to come

  • Michael Beggs is an architectural designer, artist, independent scholar, and occasional weaver. In 2023, he co-authored the book Weaving at Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez and Their Students, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville, NC. A former staff member at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, he has written extensively about Black Mountain College and Josef Albers. His other research interests include architectural daylighting, midcentury prefabricated construction techniques, modernist and experimental art and design pedagogy, vernacular architecture, and the films of Éric Rohmer.

  • Porfirio Gutierrez is a Zapotec - American artist based in Ventura, California. Born and raised in the richly historic Zapotec textile community of Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico. He grew up immersed in color and surrounded by the wildness of Oaxaca's mountains, and by the knowledge of plants for healing and for color. His life's work has been revitalizing and preserving traditional Zapotec natural dye techniques with a focus on reinterpreting traditional textiles and materials.

  • Fritz Horstman is a curator, educator, author, and artist based in Bethany, Connecticut where he is Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. He has curated exhibitions across Europe and the United States, including Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper last year at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin. He has lectured and given workshops at Yale University, Harvard University, l'École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, The Royal Academy of Art in London, and many other institutions. His recent book Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers’s Color Experiments was published by Yale Press in 2024. Current solo exhibitions of his sculptures and prints are on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, and Planthouse Gallery in Manhattan.

  • Christy Matson is a Los Angeles-based artist specializing in woven, wall-mounted works created with a hand-operated Jacquard loom. Her process integrates watercolor, ink, and collage into digital compositions that guide her weaving, blending precision with improvisation. Matson has had solo exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Cranbrook Art Museum, and the Long Beach Museum of Art, and her work has been in numerous group exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Renwick Gallery. Her works are in several permanent collections including LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Mint Museum in North Carolina. Matson has held academic appointments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, California State University Long Beach and Harvey Mudd College and is a former board member of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. 

  • Kristine Upesleja is the founder and president of consulting firm MADISONS – Innovative Materials. She is an educator, researcher, connector, curator, and visionary. With more than 25 years’ experience in fashion and design, Kristine has a profoundly shaped love for materials. She has been featured as an expert on wearable technology, smart fabrics, and sustainable fashion on several panels and in such publications as French Vogue and LA Magazine.