Project Threadways 2026: Cotton, Craft, and the Work of Regeneration
In April 2026, Florence, Alabama, becomes a meeting ground for one of the most urgent conversations in contemporary textiles: how can cotton, one of the world’s most ubiquitous and historically fraught fibres, be reimagined through care, justice, and renewal? Project Threadways Symposium 2026, titled Regeneration, brings together artists, historians, growers, makers, and cultural thinkers for two days of presentations, workshops, and exhibitions that trace cotton’s journey from soil to shelf to symbol.
Libby O'Bryan. The Future of Textiles, Digital Collages.
Since its founding in 2019, in partnership with Alabama Chanin and The School of Making, Project Threadways has established itself as a vital platform for examining the intersections of design, labour, power, and community. Rooted in the American South yet global in outlook, the nonprofit organisation studies and interprets history through fashion and textiles, using cloth as a lens through which to understand systems of extraction, inequity, and resilience. Its annual symposia ask a deceptively simple question: how can making help us better understand the social, economic, and environmental systems we inhabit?
Comoco Cotton, Stephen Satterfield.
This year’s theme, Regeneration, offers both critique and possibility. It acknowledges the harms embedded in industrialised textile systems—environmental depletion, exploitative labour, severed cultural knowledge—while proposing alternatives grounded in circularity, authorship, and repair. For Project Threadways, regeneration is not merely an agricultural term; it is an ethic. It speaks to slowness as care, sustainability as origin, and education as liberation.
Selvedge founder Polly Leonard will mark twenty years of documenting textile traditions with a talk reflecting on the regenerative stories that have shaped the magazine’s editorial journey—stories of makers and communities preserving knowledge while imagining more equitable futures. The symposium programme reflects this expansive vision, and further highlights include food writer and historian Marcie Cohen Ferris examining cotton narratives through the New Deal and WPA archives, and Stephen Satterfield discussing the reclamation of cotton through COMOCO.
Artworks by Shradha Kochhar
Other contributors include Libby O’Bryan on rebuilding textile livelihoods after hurricane devastation, Shradha Kochhar on material memory and cotton legacies, and Marwan Pleasant, who leads a beading workshop exploring adornment as cultural continuity. A screening of Echoes of the Forks of Cypress, accompanied by a descendant panel, extends the conversation into the realm of land, memory, and inheritance.
Beginning with an opening reception hosted by chef Lisa Donovan and closing with oral histories and collective reflection, the symposium is designed as a gathering of practice and purpose. In centring cotton as both material and metaphor, Project Threadways invites participants to consider what it means to restore humanity to fibre—and to the systems that shape it.
Registration is now open, with limited seating and strong demand expected.
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Further Information:
Project Threadways Symposium: 24-25 April 2026, The Factory, Florence, Alabama. Tickets are available now.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Marwan Pleasant, New Orleans, Louisiana. Photo: Erika Golding for "Blinging Just Like Us", Southern Culture Magazine.
All further images as credited in captions and courtesy of Project Threadways.