Humble: Cloth Stories

January 17, 2026 – June 27, 2026

Humble: Cloth Stories brings together artists who explore the quiet power of cloth as a keeper of memory, identity, and lived experience. Rather than focusing on fiber as ornament or technique, the exhibition honors everyday objects and pieces shaped by touch, use, and necessity. These works reveal how fabric holds the presence of past lives, how repairs become records, and how beauty often appears not in extravagance but in the modest, the weathered, and the mended.

Artists draw on practices such as natural dyeing, hand-stitching, upcycling, layering, and collaging. Through these methods, they examine ideas of sustainability, imperfection, emotional repair, and the deep human instinct to care for what is fragile. Many of the exhibition’s guiding ideas emerge from the rhythms of handwork:

• Living small and sustainably through conscious making and material stewardship
• Finding beauty in utility, modesty, and imperfection
• Foraging the codes of memory and identity, where scars, stains, and rips reveal a life lived
• Mending as evidence of survival, both material and emotional
• Cloth as a memorial of affection and importance, holding warmth, loss, protection, and transformation

Woven throughout the exhibition are several core principles that echo both the ethics and poetics of the work. The artists honor the long life of materials through practices of reducing, reusing, recycling, and respecting what already exists, while their work marks “the thread of the hours and the order of years” through visible traces of wear, touch, and time. Cloth emerges as a carrier of identity, linking outer form to inner experience, and mending becomes a powerful act of healing by repairing rupture, restoring connection, and nurturing community. In this way, the humble object becomes a site of meaning, where ordinary materials open to meditations on resilience, memory, care, and the quiet endurance of the everyday. Together, these ideas shape Humble: Cloth Stories as an exhibition about more than fabric, but about the lives embedded in it. The show encourages viewers to reconsider their relationship to consumption, attention, and the value of the ordinary. It proposes that through slowing down, mending, and honoring what already exists, we reconnect not only with materials but with one another, discovering strength, tenderness, and continuity in the humble act of clothmaking.

Exhibiting artists include Nadene Mairesse, Aaron Sanders Head, Jody Alexander, Sarah Marshall, Lotta Helleberg, Soude Dadras, Sheri Schumacher, Matthew Fasone, Cicely Hill, and Chiharu Takahashi & Douglas Baulos. The exhibition is curated by Doug Baulos, Yuko Kojima, and Sumiyo Iwasa.