By the Work of Her Hands

Curators for the Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia

 

Christina Roberts:

Christina Roberts is the Head of Education at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) and has over twenty-five years of experience as an educator specializing in contemporary collaborative art making practices, textile printing techniques, and carrying out research to develop and implement programs for international and local community outreach initiatives. Roberts’ goals as an artist and educator are devoted to promoting an ethnically and culturally rich array of programs through working with diverse audiences and introducing students and teachers to the breadth of global contemporary art and teaching silkscreen techniques. Roberts Co-Founded Marafiki Arts, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that uses traditional textile techniques to intersect with culture, tradition, commerce, collaboration, farming and is working towards sustainable economic and environmental development in rural Wote, Kenya.  In 2014, Roberts was awarded a Research Fellowship Scholarship at Winterthur Museum and Library to publish a manual Plant to Print that investigates 18th century textile printing methods and bringing these traditional sustainable methods to contemporary practice. Roberts has traveled, lectured, and conducted workshops extensively throughout the world, including Papua New Guinea (where she researched the art of tapa bark cloth making with the Maisin Tribe, Oro Province), Japan (where she juried an international textile competition and was awarded a three-month visiting professor scholarship), Kampala, Uganda, (conducted a week-long screen printing and dyeing workshop at Makerere University), and Turku, Finland, (visiting scholar and lecturer at Turku College of Art and Design.)

 

 

 

Shelby Donnelly:

Shelby Donnelly is a fabric-based artist and educator working in Philadelphia, PA. Shelby holds a B.F.A in Printmaking and Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis (2002) and a M.F.A in Fibers from Tyler School of Art, Temple University (2008). Recently, Shelby has attended artist residencies at Millay Artist Colony in New York, Soaring Gardens in Pennsylvania, and Second State Press in Philadelphia. In 2012 Donnelly attended a four-month artist residency at the Cite de Internationale in Paris, France, awarded to her by Washington University and funded through an ambitious Kickstarter initiative. Ms. Donnelly primarily works with found and silk-screen printed fabrics that are sewn into two-dimensional and three-dimensional collages. Her work engages in formal conversations using image and contextual fragmentation that investigate a singular moment in time. In September 2012, Shelby started her own business, 2-Sided, as a way to explore themes of leisure in functional and unique artist multiples.