Laura Capriles Guardia is a Bolivian multidisciplinary artist whose work moves between textiles, print, and graphic systems. Using repetition, thread, and slow processes, she thinks through memory, care, time, and the accumulation of small gestures. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the Yale School of Art.
Artist Statement
My practice moves between textiles, print, graphic systems, and material experimentation. I am interested in repetition, accumulation, and slow processes as ways of thinking through memory, care, labor, and time. Through embroidery, weaving, and layered surfaces, I explore structure, ornament, and abstraction.
Pattern and repetition are forms of language and recording. Stitching and weaving become ways of holding traces of time, culture, and labor. I am drawn to processes that require duration because they make quiet labor visible while allowing forms and surfaces to slowly transform.
My work treats textiles not only as surface but as systems for carrying cultural memory and histories. I am especially interested in craft and forms of knowledge that are often overlooked or dismissed as decorative.
“I create art that explores the intertwined histories of pharmaceuticals and color. My pointillist, color-saturated paintings, sculptures, and videos, infused with actual pharmaceuticals and chemicals, utilize imagery from art history and advertising to explore the ecstasy and toxicity of our present moment.”
Originally trained as an anthropologist, Jeff has been a practicing artist for two decades. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT, Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, and the Mercy Gallery at the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, CT. His upcoming solo exhibitions include Ball & Socket Arts in Cheshire, CT (Fall 2026) and an exhibition at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT (2027). He has shown in numerous group exhibitions throughout New York, Los Angeles, Europe, and New England, most recently at Klaus von Nichtsaggend gallery in New York City.
Ostergren is a recipient of a 2026 Creative Capital Grant. He also has received a 2024 Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, where he exhibited work alongside other recipients in Spring 2025. Ostergren has also received support from the Puffin Foundation, the Connecticut Office of the Arts, and the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists.
Ostergren received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, in 2006, following a BA in a double major of anthropology and gender studies at Rice University in Houston, TX, in 1998. He lives and works in New Haven, CT.
Gabriella Mazza is an Italian-born artist, linguist, and performer based in Westchester County, NY. Mazza is an MFA in Studio Art and an MA in Art History candidate at Purchase College, NY. She is currently performing at DIA Chelsea in David Lamelas’s Office of Information About the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text, and Audio, which will run through January 2027. Former exhibitions include FORMah, the School of Visual Arts, Local Project Art Space, The Factory, and Paradise Palace in New York as well as Satellite Art Show in Miami. In 2022 she was an artist-in-residence at ChaNorth, in Pine Plains, NY, and received the Emerging Curators Grant from Local Project Art Space. Publications include New Visionary Magazine, Create! Magazine, Hyperallergic, Epicenter NYC, Mister Magazine, and The Los Angeles Press.
Artist Statement:
I make paintings, rugs, soft sculptures, and installations as a devotional practice honoring the Divine Feminine. My approach is syncretic, fusing the iconography of my Catholic upbringing in Italy with the Vedanta teachings I embraced in adulthood. Through my choice of subjects and materials, I explore the duality between past and present as well as the fierce and benevolent aspects of the Goddess.
Alongside Christian iconography, medieval painting, and Eastern religious art, I incorporate patterns and designs from contemporary fashion. I combine objects and fabric from craft and second-hand stores with family heirlooms, such as Sicilian lace found in my grandparents’ home and doilies crocheted by my mother. My process balances mechanical production with handwork such as embroidery, sewing, and knitting. These contrasts are not oppositional but integrated, forming a unifying visual language that reflects the multiplicity of the Divine Feminine across cultures. To convey the radiant abundance of astral realms, I create maximalist compositions with a highly saturated palette of bright and fluorescent colors. I prefer synthetic materials over natural objects, to differentiate the Goddess’ world from the earthly plane.
Sok Song is an interdisciplinary artist working across printmaking, textiles, sculpture, folding, and installation. His practice explores material as a site of memory, pressure, and transformation, often incorporating layering, stitching, and imprint-based processes. He holds an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Yale School of Art and has received fellowships from the Henry Moore Foundation through the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.
Song’s work has been exhibited internationally, with upcoming summer exhibitions at James Fuentes and Tina Kim Gallery in New York, as well as projects in Portugal and Seoul. He is currently working on a project for the Venice Biennale. His residencies include the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Arts, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, and MakerSpace NYC. He will be an artist in residence at Haystack Mountain School of Craft and Brandywine Workshop and Archives, and will be teaching at Penland this summer.
Artist statement
I work across printmaking, textiles, and installation to explore how memory is carried through material. My practice focuses on processes of layering, stitching, and folding as ways to hold and transform lived experience. Rather than treating fabric or paper as passive surfaces, I approach them as active containers that register pressure, care, and time.
Using recycled textiles, hanbok fragments, and sheer patchwork structures, my work engages questions of inheritance, migration, and cultural continuity. I am interested in how personal histories intersect with broader material traditions, and how those histories remain partial, fragmented, and in flux. Through accumulation and interruption, the work resists fixed narratives, allowing memory to remain present but unresolved.
LEV is a queer poet and multidisciplinary artist based in Seattle, Washington. They are self taught in their journey with embroidery. They have had poetry shown across a dozen publications, including Ergi Press, Verge Journal, and Querencia Press. Lev has also shown textile work in shows within the Eastern U.S.
Artist Statement:
I focus my work on the basis of my queer identity.
I am driven by the questions that surround the modification of an individual in life through their experiences in community, human and non-human nature, and relative time.
Shown through the slow, meticulous process of hand embroidery and design- I believe nothing can be created or said without confession.
Statement about piece in “Soft Landing”:
The birds as my muse and my reflection. This piece is a touch on my ongoing gender exploration and the antagonism that comes with it.
The two birds, almost a mirror, but not quite, forever set to fight. Which one is more perfect. Which one feels correct.
The poem, originally a stand alone titled ‘swan song’ but later incorporated, touches too on the boundaries in place with a forever fruiting existence, no matter the circumstances or humanity.
Ana Espinal was born and raised in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She currently lives and works in the Bronx, NY. Through self-portrait photography, she reflects on the intersection of femininity, identity, beauty standards, and womanhood. She received an AAS degree in Commercial Photography from LaGuardia Community College and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited in New York City, including group shows at SVA Chelsea Gallery, Field Projects Gallery, and The Bronx Documentary Center.
Love & Fear is a series that explores the vulnerability of womanhood and the fragility of life. I am inspired by my mother’s strength and unconditional love as she navigated the difficult battle with her physical and mental health. Through this project, I use flowers as a narrative tool to show the representation of beauty, a mirror for the human condition, and how life can be
simultaneously vibrant and fragile.
In my practice, I use self-portraiture to tell my own personal story. Using my own body as the main subject is a challenge that I find deeply important. Every photograph is carefully thought out and created in its own unique way, especially through my use of color, clothing, and lighting.
My ideas are mainly inspired by Haute Couture, fashion design, and art history, such as the painting Ophelia by John Everett Millais, and the beautiful composition of Judy Dater’s photographs.
The photograph My Mother’s Grey Hair is more than just a representation of beauty and empowerment. Here, the floral lace acts as a support system. It symbolizes the connection between mother and daughter, the weight of personal history and aging. In the photograph Rebirth, I explore the journey from birth to the end of life through the acts of giving, sustaining,
and honoring existence.
Ultimately, I believe that beauty can be found in any form that transmits a sentiment left by the challenges we face during different stages of life. My work aims to reveal the beauty that is often overlooked or undervalued.
Margaret Roleke is a Brooklyn- and Connecticut-based artist originally from Long Island, New York. She is currently an Artist in Residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, where she will work through June 2026. Roleke earned her M.F.A. from Long Island
University, C.W. Post, and her B.A. from Marymount Manhattan College. She also studied at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the
Katonah Museum of Art, Pen + Brush Gallery, and WhiteBox in New York City. In 2024, she received an Artist Respond Grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Past residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, Teton ArtLab, ArtPort Kingston,
and 4Heads Portal on Governors Island. Roleke will have an upcoming residency in 2027 at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass, Colorado.
Artist Statement:
America is at a crossroads, facing intertwined crises—systemic racism, gun violence, climate change, wars abroad, and the dismantling of truth. My work is an urgent response to these issues, aiming to provoke thought, dialogue, and action. Working across mediums; cyanotypes, prints, sculptures, and installations, I explore how these forces shape our collective experience. Living near Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a mass shooting occurred in 2012, has deeply informed my artistic approach. I believe art has a role in advocacy, which is why a percentage of all my sales supports gun control organizations. I move fluidly between mediums—blending silkscreen, monoprint, collage, and sewn elements—each choice reflecting the layered complexity of our time. My hope is that my art becomes part of a larger conversation about
healing, resistance, and the urgent need for change in America and throughout the world.
63 Audubon is excited to announce our next upcoming programming on May 1, 2026 5PM-6:30 PM Kathleen Quaintance (@dreamkitsch ) , Yale History of Art PhD will be leading a weaving workshop! Attendees will had the option to do weaving on a handheld frame loom or paper weaving
Advanced registration required - RSVP HERE (15 spots)
(link on profile)
https://forms.gle/qMH8EGaRkTMH4BDd8
Due to limited spots please only RSVP if you can attend and stay for the full workshop.
Alexzandria Robin is a self-taught artist based in Connecticut who blends digital and traditional mediums to explore themes of identity, memory, and futurism. Drawing from her ancestral heritage in doll-making and storytelling, she challenges conventional narratives and reimagines the roles of race, gender, and history in miniature scale. Her award winning work has been featured in numerous galleries in CT, NY, and CA.
Artist statement:
This ball-jointed doll draws from the African American tradition of doll making. Constructed from antique and contemporary cottons, lace, and quilt fragments, the figure transports us to the time of Biddy Mason. Biddy was brought across the country in bondage and later purchased her freedom in Southern California, where she dedicated her life to philanthropy. The doll is inspired by the question “what is the aesthetic language of freedom?”
The exhibition Soft Landings brings me to the work of Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi and the long history of African American quilt making. Quilts are not just functional but also bearers of story, design, and high aesthetic achievement. The idea of a “soft landing” speaks to something made, not given, in a world that can be difficult to move through. That understanding is rooted in the work of quilters like those of Gee’s Bend.
Heather Hope Gendron is a contemporary multimedia artist whose work explores figuration, materiality, and narrative.Through a dynamic sense of color and bold, cartoonish shapes, she describes everyday and metaphysical experiences, myths and lived truths particularly from a feminine perspective.
Featured work in the “Soft Landing” exhibition:
Title: Pin Pricked
Year: 2026
Size: 22”w x 28” h
Medium: fabric dye, watercolor, ink, needlepoint tapestry, heirloom pins, canvas
This work is part of a larger series investigating shapeshifting as part of human experience, but that has also been expressed through mythology and fiction. Shapeshifting is not only a mythological motif but also reflects real human transitions, such as those experienced by women in menopause or gender non-conforming individuals who are often maligned by society for their shapeshifting.
To ground these concepts in material form, I use textile tactics and traditions. Cloth is meant to be lived with and within. In these works, the cloth substrate is made evident by remaining unprimed. It becomes an object rather than a painted flat surface. Needlepoint tapestries reference traditional woven tapestries, which were historically used to adorn walls and insulate interiors. Developed as a cost-effective and efficient alternative to tapestry weaving, needlepoint has primarily been practiced by women in domestic environments for centuries.
“Pin Pricked” is a darkly humorous take on the labor of needlework, injury, and healing and makes flesh from cloth. All materials used in this and related works reference domestic activities and traditions but are liberated through their transformation into purely aesthetic, non-functional forms.
For the rest of the “Soft Landing” exhibition period, we will be doing spotlights of the featured artists and their works in the show. First up is Reggie Woolery!
Statement about works in exhibition:
TRONIE - is a series of works that deconstruct conventions of tourist art portraiture, in particular the work the “Girl with the Pearl Earring.” Weathered and distressed cotton fabrics are pulled tight across circular hoops, mimicking the original, while hoping to generate new likenesses.
Bio:
Reggie Woolery is an artist, educator, writer, and native of Detroit, MI., living and working in North Haven, CT. Reggie’s multimedia work World Wide Web Million Man March, premiered in “Translocations” at The Photographer’s Gallery, London and is part of “Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art” in the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University. It is also featured in the essay, “Black High Tech Documents” by Erika Muhammad, part of the anthology Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary published by Indiana University Press.
Reggie Woolery was a critical studies fellow at The Whitney Museum of American Art ISP and was an invited fellow to the Society for Humanities at Cornell University for the year-long seminar, The Virtual: Old & New. He has participated in residencies at Banff Centre for the Arts, and Studio Pass at Harvestworks. Woolery received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in Photography and Illustration and MPS in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
His writings on photography, film, and culture have appeared in BOMB, TRANS, Felix, NKA Journal of African Art, Black Film Review, Artscope, and FUSE: Arts & Culture Journal in Toronto, where he served as contributing editor.
Soft Landing Artist Panel this Thursday!
Moshopefoluwa Olagunju will be in conversation with Heather Hope Gendron, Inkpa Mani, Alexzandria Robin, and Sok Song.
Moderated:
@yournameissolong / @omolastudio
Panelists;
@heather_hope_@inkpa_mani_art@alexzandriathegood@origamisok
Hope to see you there!
Soft Landing brings together artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, and textile-based practices to explore fabric as a site where comfort, memory, and history intertwine. From bedding and clothing to quilts and coverings, textiles exist in proximity to the body. Drawing from the legacy of Gee’s Bend quilts, the exhibition situates contemporary practices within a lineage of textile-making as storytelling. Here, fabric operates not only as material, but as metaphor: a surface that holds intimacy, carries cultural knowledge, and reflects personal and collective histories. Across the exhibition, artists engage textiles as both physical and conceptual frameworks through processes of stitching, layering, fragmentation, and repair. Some works center on domestic and familial memory, while others address broader themes of identity, labor, resilience, and power. Materials range from traditional cloth and thread to unconventional substrates such as plastic and Kevlar, expanding the language of textile beyond its expected forms. Rather than a passive backdrop, fabric emerges as an active material, one that protects records, and transforms. Together, the works invite viewers to reflect on the materials that hold us, and the histories they continue to carry.
