Join artists and educators from Parsons and PSU for an online conversation on textile practice, experimentation, and resilience.
Join artists Freda Xinyue Xia and Vidushi Parashar, alongside educators Preeti Gopinath and Alison Heryer, for an online conversation exploring material experimentation, textile education, and the relationships that sustain creative practice. The panel connects the artists’ work and the academic programs at Parsons School of Design and Portland State University to this year’s festival theme, Layers of Resilience.
Freda will discuss her practice across weaving, experimental biomaterials, wearable forms, and installation. Her work explores the body as a shifting boundary, using material surfaces to express vulnerability, rupture, repair, and transformation. Vidushi will share how her woven textiles and knotted sculptures give form to thoughts and emotional experiences, inviting wonder, play, and connection as ways of navigating complexity and change.
Preeti, founding director of the MFA Textiles program at Parsons School of Design, and Alison, who leads the Textile Arts curriculum at PSU’s Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design, will offer perspectives on the programs they have helped build. They will explore how textile education brings inherited craft knowledge into conversation with emerging technologies, sustainable practices, and contemporary social questions, while supporting artists in developing their own approaches.
Together, the panel will consider how resilience takes shape through materials and making, and through the communities that support learning and experimentation. The conversation offers an opportunity to connect artistic practice with teaching and mentorship, reflecting on how textiles help us express lived experience and imagine new possibilities.
Moderated by Caleb Sayan, director of Portland TextileX Month and co-founder of Textile Hive.
Use this Zoom link to join at the scheduled time: https://pdx.zoom.us/j/85608102886