Water | Craft: Textile Knowledge for an Age of Climate Change
On the banks of the Mississippi River in Winona, Minnesota, the Marine Art Museum has assembled an exhibition that will speak directly to anyone who understands cloth as a vessel for memory. Water | Craft, running through 27 December 2026, brings together seven artists whose work in fibre, dye, and weave structure addresses the environmental and cultural questions that water raises across the United States.
Rowland Ricketts, Bow. September 14, 2023 – January 29, 2024.
Rowland Ricketts contributes Bow, an installation of indigo-dyed linen strands suspended the length of the main gallery. Ricketts trained in traditional indigo farming and dyeing in Japan, and the work's title carries a double meaning: the shape of a ship's bow, and also the act of bowing, a gesture of humility toward water.
Tali Weinberg, Silt Studies (2021)
Tali Weinberg's textile translations of climate data offer particularly rich material. Her Climate Datascapes series takes information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US federal agency responsible for monitoring weather, climate, and ocean conditions, and weaves it into pieces that make abstract figures physically legible. Silt Studies (2021) renders data from the Upper Mississippi, Lower Mississippi, and Great Lakes river basins in plant-dyed fibre and fishing line, producing surfaces that read as much as landscapes as records.
Tali Weinberg, Heat Waves/Water Falls (detail) (2023-24)
Heat Waves/Water Falls (2023-24) takes this further, coiling cochineal-dyed cotton around plastic medical tubing to encode temperature data from eighteen river basins, setting natural dye against synthetic material in a way that complicates any tidy separation between care and harm.
Kelly Church, The Teaching Tree Basket, 2021
These sit near the work of Kelly Church, a Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe black ash basket maker continuing a craft passed down through her family for generations. Placed together, the two bodies of work hold space for what the loss of black ash trees means for Indigenous basketry traditions across the upper Midwest, and for the knowledge bound up in harvesting, language, and forest management that Church has spent her career teaching.
Tanya Aguiñiga, Internal Body 1 (2023)
Nicole McLaughlin's ceramic and fibre sculptures use Tencel threads dyed with indigo and cochineal to link vessels inspired by Talavera pottery techniques, evoking maternal lineage and the transmission of knowledge through generations. Sarah Sense's photo-weavings draw on Chitimacha and Choctaw basketry patterns to revisit colonial mapping of Native land. Tanya Aguiñiga's knotted wall works bring terracotta and fibre into conversation with questions of border and belonging, while Therman Statom's glass work brings a different material language to the exhibition's meditation on craft, transformation, and place.
What emerges across these seven practices is a persuasive case for craft as inherited intelligence, one that has long understood water, land, and material as bound together. For readers who want to encounter this thinking firsthand, Water | Craft remains on view at MMAM through 27 December 2026.
. . .
Further Information:
Water | Craft is on view now until December 2026 at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum (MMAM)
. . .
Image Credits:
Lead: Nicole McLaughlin, Hilo de Vida (String of Life)
All further images as credited in captions.