Parsons MFA Textiles

Introducing Vidushi Parashar’s (@vidushi_p12 ) capstone thesis project, Fibres of Thoughts. In a world that's attracting us to the constant chatter and noise, this project focuses on the tender mutation that one goes through to release the feeling of overstimulation. By using found material, I try to present the reality of overconsumption and its effects on our well-being. The aim is to let each form ask people to loosen their grip. To soften. To laugh. To linger. To remember what it means to be unguarded. I am interested in what happens when we are disarmed by delight. When laughter opens the body. When something playful can hold something devastating. When wonder becomes a method of survival. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Kaixin Zhou’s (@doarain_peachtoothpick ) capstone thesis project, Armored Lace. My work explores structural lace through the lens of modern women. I always think about how to combine traditional with modern. In my work, I want to reshape the image of women. The woman's image changes, moving from vulnerability and sacrifice to seeking self-wholeness. Using my work to show the rational, powerful, and beautiful side of women. I use lace to represent women, so I rebuild lace, I use new technology, 3D printing, and geometry shape to create a new style of lace to embody female strength. They are structural and a little bit hard. The open space of the lace is not only circular, but also square and triangular. And I combine 3D printing with traditional textile technologies, like crochet, knitting, and embroidery. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Arouge Salim’s (@_AROUGE_ ) capstone thesis project, 3 6 9. My practice explores what cannot be seen but is always felt — energy, frequency, and vibration. Through textiles, I translate these forces into form. Working with knit and constructed textiles, I use gradients to express movement and structural interventions to disrupt rigidity and introduce flow. The work exists between control and intuition, reflecting a tension between the physical and something beyond it. I approach textiles as a system rather than a surface — a medium capable of holding presence. The body completes the work, activating what is embedded within it and turning potential into something alive. I am not trying to represent reality, but to make the invisible felt. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Ana Martins’ (@aheneah ) capstone thesis project, Catenaries. These hybrid forms straddle the creaturely and the human. They hold themselves upright, firm in their posture. They are armed with their sacred geometries. The patterning found in biological human features meshes with the inhuman ghostliness of their delicate forms. Crochet–its regularity and repetition–is used to simulate the tesselation-like structures found in nature that humans have replicated in art for centuries. These architectural forms are translated into the intimate language of thread. They operate like a vaulted arch that defines a cavity and yet constitutes matter. This project references gravity, as the parabolic curves result from the downward pull of weights on the textile. They were first created upside down through suspension, then turned upright so their stretched bodies could be read as standing presences on display. Resin was applied to freeze the catenaries in space and time, to make them skeletal. The flesh of fabric transformed into bone. To look at ‘Catenaries’ is to see a porous cathedral, an “open mesh of possibilities,” as Donna Harraway put it. To regard them is to become immeasurably small, to experience the capacity of the scared to inspire awe. Feeling awe simultaneously erases the scale of the human. It is only after we have left the world, briefly, that our place in it can be restored. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Maham Akhtar’s (@mahkhtar ) capstone thesis project, Thresholds of Becoming. I work in lines that divide and lines that bind. I work in borders that separate and borders that refuse to hold. I begin with binaries, gold and silver, black and white, north and south, the languages through which value is assigned, through which bodies are measured, through which movement is allowed or denied. I have seen how closeness can still be distance, a river apart, a line enforced, a shared world made unreachable. Gold is taught to be higher. Silver is taught to follow. But I have seen sunlight on snow where gold dissolves into silver, where warmth rests on cold, where value cannot hold its hierarchy. I understand that opposites are never separate. They lean into each other. They become each other. So I weave. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Yuanlu Ma ‘s (@vvvic_lu ) capstone thesis project, After the Shell. This project explores the shell as a container for life, memory, and transformation. Once emptied, a shell does not lose its meaning but becomes a structure with new potential. I extend this idea to other container-like forms in nature, such as hollow trees and abandoned nests, which continue to hold space for new growth. I create soft sculptural forms where flowers emerge from shell-like structures. The work reflects cycles of protection, loss, and renewal. Through the contrast between softness and emptiness, it invites viewers to see absence not as lack, but as a quiet beginning for new life. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Annie McWilliams’ (@annie.mcw.designs ) capstone thesis project, Harlequin. Harlequin exists in a specific moment – when you yourself might be going through a chaotic internal journey but you have the opportunity to release some of that chaos surrounded and supported by those you trust to see you through it. When questioning one’s perception of the self and who you are, when trust is lost in memory, sometimes the most stabilizing forces can simply be getting to be mean with friends, throwing a party, and making possibly destructive decisions because they aren’t being made alone. Using hand, flatbed, and Shima Seiki knitting, as well as natural dyes and patchwork, this project explores the balance between tight and loose, feeling free and feeling trapped, structure and drape, what’s seen and what’s unseen. Coming from both a fashion and costume background, Annie looks to historical garment patterns as a foundation for her textiles – pulling from eras and garments that she feels matches the world she envisions for each project. Annie also looks to narratives and media, finding the overlapping elements from places seemingly unrelated and connecting them through textile. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Fatima Mendez Reynoso’s, (@hushfatima ) capstone thesis project, Mariposas Calladas / Hushed Butterflies. Silence is not absence. It is strategy, protection, inheritance. In a country that relies on immigrants yet erases them, silence becomes political—shielding but also containing what cannot be risked. Lips in my work act as thresholds, holding and releasing, concealing and revealing. Butterflies trace another language, crossing borders freely, embodying migration and transformation. This work lives between speaking and withholding, asking what survives in silence—and what it means to finally break it. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Crow Chen’s (@suuuuuperf ) capstone thesis project, Whispers of the Mulberry. Natural dye, embroidery, weaving, ikat Silk, Wool, Bead, Shell, Stone, LED light Whispers of the Mulberry grows from Crow’s family’s history with sericulture. Her grandparents cultivated mulberry trees and raised silkworms, and her mother worked as a silk reeling laborer, leaving her with vivid memories of mulberry trees, silkworms, and silk. This personal connection shapes her project’s exploration of natural dyeing and weaving as both ecological practice and cultural remembrance. Using mulberry leaves and berries to dye yarn, she creates textiles that trace cycles of memory, labor, and regeneration. At the center of the project are hand-dyed silk tassels made from 100% silk, whose form is inspired by the traditional straw structures that support silkworms in cocooning. Gathered together, these tassels become a material link between herself and her family, while also reflecting the intimate connections among mulberry trees, silkworms, and silk. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Kelsey Lujan’s (@wearykels ) capstone thesis project, Home-making. Working with knitting, crocheting, and weaving, Lujan transforms intangible emotions into tactile form. The repetitive gestures of textile making become ritualistic, demanding presence and opening the door to spiritual transcendence. Within that ritual, tenderness becomes the vessel of sacred memories, offering safety, warmth, and comfort. Each stitch holds a conversation, a laugh, a doorway; the connections made with friends, family, and strangers along the way. Coming from a photography background, Lujan’s photographs tend to inspire their textiles: emotion translated from image to thread, memory stitched into form. This is a cycle of remembering and searching. The image feeds the textile, the textile returns me to the image. Around and around, until longing becomes something they can finally hold in their hands. These works lean into the experiences held closest to the heart, embedded within the work through metaphor. This reconstruction is a generative act of home-making. It argues that belonging is not found in a single place but built, slowly by hand. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign

Introducing Ariel Mannie’s (@studiomauzi ) capstone thesis project, Spirit in Motion. Patchwork, Quilting, Weaving This body of work explores cultural memory and connections between West African and African American communities. At the center of the work is the Bakongo Cosmogram, a spiritual diagram from Kongo cosmology that represents the cyclical relationship between life, death, the ancestral realm, and rebirth. Guided by the themes of spirit, movement, and symbolism, the work reflects how spiritual philosophies and cultural knowledge have traveled, transformed, and endured across the African diaspora. Practices such as the Ring Shout inform the circular structures and rhythmic repetition present throughout the work. Mirrored shapes, radial compositions, and shifting color relationships create a sense of motion and vibration across the surface. Through geometric patterning and symbolic visual language, the work examines how cultural practices were preserved and reinterpreted from Africa to the Americas. The work honors ancestral knowledge while imagining futures shaped by these enduring traditions and cultural legacies.

Introducing Hao Wen Esther’s (@estherw7777 ) capstone thesis project, Soft Ruins. Soft Ruins is inspired by the Yungang Grottoes in China, where centuries of weathering have transformed sculptures into softened and fragmented forms. Time reshapes surfaces, creating a dialogue between loss and beauty. This project translates these changes into textile language through tufting, knitting, embroidery, and 3D printing. The project explores erosion, layering, and reconstruction, where soft fibers contrast with structured elements, reflecting the tension between fragility and permanence. Rather than replicating history, Soft Ruins focuses on transformation. Materials act as living surfaces that hold memory and touch, revealing how the past continues to exist in the present through constant change. . . . #parsonstextilesmfa #textiles #thenewschool #fiberart #crafts #textiledesign