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INTERWOVEN WORLDS: ART OF APIMEDA DIASPORAS at Circle Gallery
Debra Lee is one of 35 APIMEDA (Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, and Desi American) artists selected to participate in the Interwoven Worlds 2025 exhibition at the Maryland Federation of Art's Circle Gallery!
Exhibition artists share 2D and 3D art that express their APIMEDA cultural heritage, reflect cross-cultural influences, and/or convey their unique American experiences.
Debra Lee's selected embroidery titled, Why Perpetual Foreigners? illustrates the violence inflicted onto the "alien" Chinese in the 1850s being repeated and expanded beyond the Chinese to Asians and Asian Americans in the 21st Century during the COVID-19 pandemic.
See Interwoven Worlds from June 26 through July 26, 2025. Visit with Debra at the reception on July 26 from 4 to 6 p.m. She would love to see you!
Maryland Federation of Art, Circle Gallery is located at 18 State Circle, Annapolis, MD and online at mdfedart.org.
INTRINSIC BEAUTY: CELEBRATING THE ART OF TEXTILES at The Textile Museum
Intrinsic Beauty inaugaurates The Textile Museum's centennial celebration. The exhibition on view until June 14, 2025, presents the juxtaposition of textiles from different regions and time periods to create conversations that shed light on cross-cultural connections and the preeminent roles textiles have played in the social, political, religious, commercial and artistic life of many communities.
To help uncover some of these stories, the exhibition guides visitors along four pathways. One path pairs textiles with commentary from contemporary artists invited to share their perspectives on the quality and craftsmanship of the historical artworks. (See Debra Lee's commentary below.) Other routes explore the legacy of textiles, and intriguing stories of cultural and artist exchange.
The Textile Museum is located at 701 21st Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. The closest Metro Station is Foggy Bottom on the Blue, Orange, and Silver lines.
INTERACTIVE TEXTILES 101 GALLERY
at The Textile Museum
Located in Foggy Bottom of Washington, D.C., The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum opened a permanent interactive gallery called, Textiles 101.
The Textiles 101 Gallery enables visitors to explore how fiber, color and structure influence how textiles are made and allows visitors to enter the mind of designers to discover the creative choices that influence textile design. Visitors can touch different fibers in raw and processed forms, practice various weaving techniques, examine completed fabrics, watch videos of artists at work and digitally design a new textile themselves.
Fiber artist Debra Lee was invited to create an eight-foot by 18-inch banner to illustrate the structure of looped stitches including knitting, crochet, simple looping and macrame for the Textiles 101 Gallery. Watch the video by Pamela Kaplan and Maria Helena Carey to hear about Debra's choices for the banner's design and see the steps involved to create it.
The looped banner hangs in the Textiles 101 Gallery along side of a woven banner created by fiber artist Hillary Steel and a felt banner created by fiber artist Renate Maile-Moskowitz.
TAKING THE STITCH CHALLENGE
In April 2020 Debra and several other hand-stitchers -- some new to stitching and some experienced -- accepted textile artist Julie Booth's stitch challenge to create samples for one or more articles in her four-part series called, Take the Stitch Challenge, for Quilting Arts magazine.
Julie challenged each stitcher to explore the potential of basic embroidery stitches to create interesting marks, textures and layers on fabric. Each challenge had a theme and a set of limitations. The result was a fascinating variety of stitched samples expressing the stitcher's interpretation of the theme created within the given limitations. To whet your appetite, Debra's stitch challenge samples are shown below. Click on the magazine cover to link to the Quilting Arts magazine!
