Join us Friday, November 3, from 12:30 to 3 pm, for a textile workshop led by fiber artist Ruby Chishti.

What fragment of you survives in me? This workshop aims to engage participants by dismantling and transforming unknown people’s clothing through the process of hand sewing. It offers an exploration of our relationship to clothing as an intervention in the era of fast fashion, and also raises questions regarding the value, preservation, and elevation of earth’s resources, in addition to the possibilities of building connections with people we’ve never met as well as people we’ve loved and lost. What do these discarded mass-produced garments tell us about ourselves, our interdependence on other human and life forms, how we see, touch, and feel the world we live in without ignoring the traces of those near, far, and absent.

Registration and the waitlist have reached capacity.

Materials will be provided but participants interested in using textiles from their personal collections are welcome to bring their own.

See the artist in conversation with Siddhartha Shah, Director of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, after Shah’s lecture on the evening of Thursday, November 2, at 5:30 pm.

About the Artist

Ruby Chishti is a Pakistani-American sculptor and installation artist. Formally educated at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, she is now based in New York City. Her haunting and enigmatic sculptures explore her complex history of trauma—from family loss and the wanton destruction of her Pakistani home, to the survival of migration and her persistence through transitional impediments. Her work incorporates discarded mass-produced fabric as well as ceremonial clothing. Chishti was the 2018 Critic in Residence at the Fiber Science & Apparel Design, College of Human Ecology at Cornell University; and received the VSC/Pollock Krasner Fellowship in 2022. Her installations, sculptures, and site-specific works have been exhibited at the Asia Society, Queens Museum, Harris Museum Preston, UK, Hudson Valley MOCA, and the Middlebury College Museum of Art, among others. Her major works are in permanent collections of the Qatar Museum, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, the Devi Art Foundation, and the Whitworth Gallery.

About Solomon Residencies

The Alfred Z. Solomon Residency Fund was established by a bequest to Skidmore College in 2005. It supports short and long-term residencies at the Tang Teaching Museum in collaboration with Art History and Art departments to bring notable scholars, artists, and critics to classrooms, studios, and the museum. The residencies address a wide range of issues in the visual arts and feature a variety of opportunities for both formal and informal interaction.