Patricia Miranda

BIO

Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, educator. She has received grants from the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation (2022); Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (2021); ArtsWestchester/New York State Council on the Arts (2014/21); Anonymous Was a Woman Covid19 Grant (2021), and was part of an NEA grant working with homeless youth (2004-5). She has been awarded residencies at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation (2022), I-Park (2016), Weir Farm (2015), Vermont Studio Center (2001), and JVD Printmaking Studio (2015). Her work has been exhibited at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, (Peekskill NY), Spartanburg Art Museum (Spartanburg, SC), 3S Art Center (Portsmouth, NH), Jane Street Art Center, Garrison Art Center (Hudson Valley, NY); Williamsburg Art+Historical Center, Clemente Center, Wave Hill (NYC); Alexey von Schlippe Gallery (Groton, CT); and Belvedere Museum, (Vienna Austria).

ARTIST STATEMENT

I work with donated, repurposed, lace and linens in sculpture and installation. The aggregation of individual stitches into monumental works makes visible the hidden economic labor, and labor of care, in the lives of women. The work is a tangible act of mending, remembering, collecting and preserving. I respond to the machismo of big installations through a soft object — that is adaptable, collapses into parts, able to grow in scale without a corresponding destructive use of resources. Repurposed bio-degradable materials and natural dyes allow for site-responsive installations with a small ecological footprint.

The sculptures reference female bodies as architecture, and speak to the history of domestic and environmental labor through the complex form of lace and visceral natural dyes. In their exaggerated scale and insistent tenderness, they are manifestos of strength and femininity. I am interested in the slippage between an appearance of awkwardness, unfinish, and contingency, precariously held by sewing pins and thread, with an underlying architectural stability and strength. The works are created from donated repurposed textiles, documented in The Lace Archive, an historical community archive.

Interview with Patricia Miranda

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in becoming an artist?

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be an artist. Art is part of my DNA. Art is always in conversation with the world, it helps me to understand, to reflect, to rage, and to celebrate the confounding nature of being alive in a body in this strange beautiful heartbreaking world. My internal imaginary is constantly expanded and reshaped by art in ways that are surprising, challenging, and nurturing. To have the world reflected back at you through the eyes of another is a deep act of empathy, a thee-thou, a glimpse inside the mind and hearts of another person, whether from past present or future. Living among a community of artists, being continuously immersed in art and ideas, is endlessly fascinating. Being a working artist is not the easiest life, it doesn’t always make logical sense, and yet I can’t live without art. It would be like living without dreams.

Can you tell us about some of your most memorable early influences?

I am the middle child of a large and rambunctious brood of seven, a first generation college student, in a family that was not wealthy or particularly focused on education or art. My father did not have any formal art training, but he was always making, always creating. His main art form was music, he played the bass fiddle and was a Frank Sinatra singer and imitator, so our home was filled with an enormous range of styles of music. When I was a child my father cut out hundreds, maybe thousands, of images from old art history books and wallpapered the family bathroom. We children bathed surrounded by the paintings of western art history, decoupaged onto the walls, like living in a turbulent fever dream. I have a memory of my father taking our living room coffee table outside and beating it with a heavy chain to distress it, before staining it dark. The idea of taking your surroundings and inventing, adding, altering with simple tools seemed natural. My Nonna Ermenegilda had a marble sculpture of a young girl that still haunts me, though I haven’t seen it in decades. I sat at the feet of this sculpture as a child and marveled that cold stone could breathe so much life. She was alive to me, like a silent friend or confidante. Family relationships were complex and not always ideal, but I was surrounded by vernacular art, worlds where I could escape the chaos and get lost, could imagine and create my own realities. Which was mostly imagining quiet spaces where I could read obsessively without interruption from my six siblings!

Artistically there are too many influences to list- I continually encounter artworks that render me speechless, that take my breath away. From the quattrocento Siena paintings which speak to how painting can embody a deep interiority inside a recognizable world, to an artist like Doris Salcedo, who creates achingly beautiful objects of mourning, to the pioneering -mostly women- artists I am indebted to who paved the way for craft histories to be a vital part of contemporary art. I am omnivorous in my consumption and love of art.

Where are you currently based and what brought you there? Are there any aspects of this specific location or community that have inspired your work?

I live in New York City, and also have a studio in Peekskill NY, about an hour north, where I am able to create my large work. My family came to New York City from Italy around the turn of the 20th century, my maternal grandmother came a bit later from Ireland as a young orphan woman. My grandfather and his brother had a restaurant in Little Italy before I was born, my mother grew up in Queens, something she is very proud of to this day. I have deep roots here — family, the large community of artists, the access to culture, the energy, are unparalleled and addicting. To be able to visit museums and galleries at any moment is nutrition for my heart, mind, body and soul. Being in an active community of artists means constant exhibitions and openings - a lucky problem that can also mean living in constant FOMO from not being able to attend everything. It can be hard to imagine living elsewhere. NYC is also in my DNA.

What is your studio space like? What makes your space unique to you?

My studio is almost always a mess- which feels fecund and full of possibility, and also challenging. I envy a clean organized space, but realize that I will never be different, so it is somehow part of my creative process. The chaos ebbs and flows depending on the projects, I try to keep the disarray at a productive level. While I now primarily work with vintage and repurposed textile, I also have a long practice working with historical dyes and pigments, with old books, creating gilded glass and graphite works, among other art forms. My practice is visibly reflected in the material of the studio, filled with textiles, dyes, vintage books, art materials of all kinds. I have trouble getting rid of “things”. I am a lover of the object world, always interested in the lives of my materials. And, with an active teaching process in all these topics my studio is a library of diverse forms and media. I love all these forms, and am inspired being surrounded by material culture and the histories of different making practices.

What is a typical day like? If you don't have a typical day, what is an ideal day?

Like most artists, I have a complicated work life. My days are changing all the time, the schedule is extremely varied from week to week. In addition to an active studio practice creating installations that take a lot of time, I run an educational organization for working artists, teach independently in my studio, at museums and K-12 institutions, in undergrad and grad school, as well as mentor and consult with artists on their practice and professional work. This keeps me very busy, and also always in conversation with artists, which feeds my practice. It keeps me honest, thinking about ideas, articulating and contextualizing my work and the work of others. The calendar is a collaborator, it controls the when and where, in ways that can focus as well as frustrate.

What gets you in a creative groove or flow? Is there anything that interrupts your creative energy?

In my studio I work in complete silence. This is a necessity for me. I take a lot from the monastic traditions of marking time, to stay centered, to navigate the natural frustrations of the studio. I need a ritual, a framework, a structure to develop consistency and depth. The main focus is creating the space to listen. In order to create I need to be fully present, so I can hear the interior mind, remain attentive to what shows up, and respond to the desires of the materials. Any exterior stimulus pulls me out of that interiority, out of deep focus with the work. Making is a call and response, a collaboration, that allows me to make work that is braver than I am. This is a crucial, that I make space for the work take risks my protective ego and brain might not otherwise allow. I am accountable to the work.

When doing mundane tasks I sometimes listen to my favorite philosophy or art podcast, otherwise the silence is monastic. Time slows, it feels measured instead of rushed, I can hear the rhythm of my mind and body, blood pulsing, heart beating, and let the work get as close to the bone as possible. If I have developed fluency in my materials, and am a close listener, the work shows me what I care deeply about, and how that can be explored in the material language of art. The wisdom of the hands is amazing, they know before the mind what the work will be. My job is to listen, excavate, and push the rigor of those ideas. This process helps make ideas visible while allowing meaning to float. I’ve learned to be both a tough parent and a radical listener to the work.

How do you maintain momentum in your practice?

Deadlines help! Mainly, I am voraciously curious about the world, and about where the work will take me. Over a long practice, you learn to trust the rhythms of production and research, the pauses and times for reflection, the gathering of ideas and the rigor of making. Moments of struggle, times where the physical making is not happening, are good times for new research, for reflecting on what was surprising, what I can learn from, expand on, iterate and reiterate. My bigger issue is time for rest- as an artist we are always working, whether its visible making or the observing and thinking that foments ideas. The mind also needs time to rebuild, rejuvenate. I have to tell myself- we are stopping work now! so as to demarcate time, or I would never stop working. We don’t stop being artists if we pause for a time. I am not always as good at resting as I am at working.

What medium/media are you working in right now? What draws you to this particular material or method?

I primarily work with donated, repurposed, lace and linens in sculpture and installation. Recent projects began with family lace from my Italian and Irish grandmothers, Ermenegilda and Rebecca. During the pandemic, I posted images on social media of dying the lace with cochineal insect dye. An outpouring of initially unsolicited donations of lace from around the world began to arrive, continuing today. These donations often arrive with letters, stories, and pictures of the family and maker. I recognized this as an historical community archive, and founded The Lace Archive, an ongoing library of thousands of pieces of donated lace and family histories. Each note and textile is documented— photographed, measured, and archived, before being sewn into an artwork.

Thousands of textiles and personal letters have come to my door; including lace, linens, skirts, aprons, napkins, handkerchiefs, tablecloths and duvet covers, embroidered in colorful threads, crocheted in complex patterns, or with unfinished needle work, from mothers, aunties, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. The ties of aprons read as forlorn arms in search of a body to wrap around, an anthropomorphic reflection of domestic autonomy, care, and strength. An intimate form that touches our bodies from birth to death, textiles protect and adorn, comfort and cover. These intimate items, with no commodity value, are tangible acts of love, a labor of private care circulating inside a domestic sphere. These textiles were made by women for women, outside the objectifying influence of men. Today the field of textiles has happily expanded, so these conversations continue to shift. For the moment, I am committed to speaking to the hidden histories of women.

Can you walk us through your overall process in making your current work? Does drawing play a role in your process?

The donated and repurposed lace and linens are used in the form I receive them, or they are hand-dyed with historic natural dyes such as cochineal insect dye. The cochineal makes a rich red dye evocative of the body; the red lace is then hand-sewn together, aggregating the minute stitches into large shroud-like wall works. The monumental sculptures are built like enormous hope skirts, with an interior scaffold structure on top of which textiles are draped and layered. The engineering of the armature allows its to collapses; all the works are portable, flexible, and can be folded into quilt boxes, minimizing the environmental and monetary cost of materials, transport, and storage.

I make schematic drawings to work out ideas and especially for designing the very particular shape and form of the sculpture. And, I think of lace and sewing as drawings in space. Punto in Aria, the title of recent exhibitions, is the name of a kind of lace, and literally translates from Italian into point or stitch in air. This refers to lace that is threaded without a substrate, and I love the innate reference to drawing.

What is exciting about your process currently?

Textile references the body, recording history in its fibers. The engagement with material that has history visibly stored in its fibers feels like being in constant conversation with women and their hidden histories of making. It loops past, present and future into the work. The sphere of women’s influence and economic autonomy is intertwined with textile histories. I am acutely aware of the shoulders I stand on, and on how I might contribute to preserving these legacies in future. The Lace Archive honors those women and their unrecorded histories. I am excited each day that I can make work that is materially and aesthetically satisfying, that can touch on the subjects of women’s histories, as well as on environmental concerns. Also, I just love the act of sewing! And creating sewing circles to sit around a table to share stories and sew together

Do you pursue any collaborations, projects, or careers in addition to your studio practice? If so, can you tell us more about those projects, and are there connections between your studio practice and these endeavors?

As the middle child of seven, perhaps this makes me naturally predisposed to collaboration, to creating with others, whether making art, curating, teaching, or working in collectives. Like many artists, I have been teaching in undergrad and graduate art programs for many years, and in community arts organizations, as well as developing art education programs for K-12 and museums, for most of my working life.

The Lace Archive, founded in 2021, has become a community project as well as a fundamental aspect of my current work. I have also founded and cofounded several art organizations and collectives. In 2013 I founded The Crit Lab, graduate level critique seminars for working artists, which currently has between 50-60 artists joining each semester. The Crit Lab now also includes a Fellows program, a residency in Italy at the Biennale and the Italian Alps, and one in Peekskill NY, as well as an intensive conference, the AltMFA, with visiting artists and critics, lectures, small group critiques and collaborative projects. Very soon out of undergrad I founded MAPSpace, a gallery and project space in Port Chester, NY that has gone through multiple iterations over many years, with exhibitions, workshops, talks, and a workspace residency program. I curate exhibitions independently in institutions and galleries, and at MAPSpace. Curating is a joy- an extension of my studio practice and my community work. Bringing diverse artists’ work together under a thematic framework is like creating a new artwork, one that both highlights the individual works and makes new ideas visible through unexpected juxtaposition.

I am a cofounder of two collectives: the London Calling Collective, a group of seven women artists founded after a trip to London. We have worked on exhibitions and collaborations since 2019, including a pandemic project where we wallpapered a gallery with artworks on top of (part of) our 4000 page pandemic WhatsApp conversation. The other group, the Murmuration Collective, with five women artists, began in 2012 while sitting around a table sharing experiences on the personal and community politics of harassment and violence against women, as well as our shared history as women artists. Both led to collaborative exhibitions and lifelong friendships. When artists, and especially women, sit around a table, powerful things happen.

I love working with artists, brainstorming projects, and bringing them to fruition. I am an advocate of artist-run culture, of artists supporting and creating opportunities with and for one another. I try to live with that ethos, and the result is a wide network of amazing friends and collaborators. I don’t have money, I don’t have investors, but I have loads of energy, I have space, I can share these resources. Always I ask myself, what resources do I have that I can share? This has led me to develop residencies, collaborate on artworks and exhibitions, and resulted in connections and projects that I am so very grateful for. These projects would never have happened if I hadn’t asked simply- what can I share?

Have you had any epiphanies recently that have changed the course of your work or caused you to shift directions?

The current state of the world, the polarized politics, the retraction and restrictions on the rights of women and LGBTQ folks, Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, the pandemic, the climate crisis, all have had a profound affect on the studio. How could they not? There are many ways these have affected my practice- so I’ll just name a couple.

One large aspect has been to think more consciously about the environmental footprint of my objects, leading me to utilize donated, recycled, and repurposed textile as the main focus in my work. I respond to the machismo of big installations through a soft object, one that is adaptable, collapses into parts, able to grow in scale without a corresponding destructive use of resources. Repurposed bio-degradable materials and historic natural dyes allow me to create large site-responsive installations with a small ecological footprint.

The other is a more deliberately and outwardly feminist consideration of these objects. This feels urgent in a moment when women’s bodies continue to be in the peril of legal and social control by governmental and religious institutions and individuals. The aggregation of individual stitches of lace, often dismissed as “grandma's doilies”, into monumental textiles, makes visible the hidden economic labor, and labor of care, in the domestic and work lives of women.

The skirts reference female bodies as architecture, an interior exterior body, containing the community under its voluminous petticoat, gathering everything to them and under them, hiding and protecting, in comfort, intimacy, and survival. In their exaggerated scale and insistent tenderness, they are manifestos of strength and femininity. They demand to take up space in physical terms, without ceding either power or softness. I am interested in the slippage between an appearance of awkwardness, unkemptness, unfinish, and contingency, precariously held by sewing pins and thread, with an underlying architectural stability and strength. The sculptures are objects in the act of becoming, they demand attention in their monumentality, without yielding an inch in their explicit femininity, temporality, and mutability. They remain deliberately and insistently soft, yielding, adaptable, responsive, and as conscious acts of mending, remembering, collecting, preserving. A sewn form has enormous structural integrity, while maintaining resilience, flexibility, and portability. This is language traditionally ascribed to women, often as weakness, that I want to reclaim as strengths for all genders.

The visibility of the lace retains a trace of the economic and craft histories of women, whose names and stories will never be known. These objects can, in some small way, bear witness to those untold stories.

Can you share some of your recent influences? Are there specific works—from visual art, literature, film, or music—that are important to you?

My most important influences are the close artist friends in my life, because of how we gather and share ideas and opportunities, support and push each others work, and form meaningful chosen families. There is also so much amazing work being made today in every genre from communities both global and local that were not included in the art worlds before. The list is too long to not leave crucial artists out! The wider the range of stories, the richer the world. I am enriched by all this, as is my studio practice.

Do you have any tips or advice that someone has shared with you that you have found particularly helpful?

Share share share. We are stronger together as a community. Open your heart - it’s happier to live with love.

What are you working on in the studio right now? What’s coming up next for you?

The last year and a half has been a busy time for me- with numerous solo and group shows in museums and art centers, residencies, and grant projects. I’ve made the largest work in my career, and continue to be interested in the way textile can speak to an architecture of both power and care. The work teaches me daily about myself and about the world. I am humbled and inspired by all the projects and by those who have supported my work. I also hope to take some time to to rest, to have time with friends, and reflect on new possibilities!

To find out more about Patricia Miranda check out her Instagram and website.