First Generation: Woven Narratives showcases the fiber and textile works of first generation American artists whose practices embody the convergence of cultural inheritance and contemporary Western art traditions. This exhibition explores how these artists translate their lived experiences into textile-based narratives that blend the visual languages of their ancestral cultures with the conceptual and formal frameworks of contemporary art.

In the context of this exhibition, “first generation” extends beyond its conventional definition. It includes artists whose identities and practices are shaped by movement, migration, and cultural inheritance, whether through their own displacement or through intergenerational diasporic experience. These artists navigate multiple cultural lineages and geographies, translating hybrid identities into their artistic practices through form, material, and concept.

Textile and fiber art, intimate, tactile, and historically layered, offer an unparalleled space to articulate identity, belonging, and transformation. The featured artists honor their inherited traditions while expanding them, using fiber as a language of multiplicity that refuses the binaries of East and West, tradition and contemporary, or craft and fine art.