Andrew Gardner

Andrew Gardner is a curator and writer based in New York. His work focuses on a wide range of topics in material culture, design, and craft history, including: post-WWII textile design and the fiber art movement; 19th-century New York’s oyster culture; and the automobile age’s impact on 20th century visual culture. His article “Lily-White” for the Museum of Modern Art’s post has led to an ongoing research project into the life and career of designer A. Joel Robinson, whose textiles were recently rediscovered as the first by a Black designer to enter MoMA’s collection.

Gardner has organized a number of exhibitions, the most recent of which include Taking a Thread for a Walk (2019), The Value of Good Design (2019), and Automania (2021) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has also written on the monumental fiber-based sculptures of Mrinalini Mukherjee and contributed to exhibition publications focused on the radical contemporary ceramics of Takuro Kuwata and the furniture designs of Gae Aulenti, one of only a handful of women architects to find success in postwar Italy. He has lectured widely, served on the jury for the 2021 Museum of Arts and Design Burke Prize, and previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Bard Graduate Center.

@gardnerae

Beili Liu

Beili Liu is a visual artist who creates site-responsive installations and performances that address themes of migration, cultural memory, labor, social, and environmental concerns. She has exhibited extensively, in locations including Norway, Finland, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, France, Belgium, Poland, China, Taiwan and across the United States. Liu has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2022-2024), the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2022), the Fulbright Arctic Chair, Norway (2021-2022), the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016), the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant through the Museum of Southeast Texas (2014). In 2018, Liu was honored by the Texas Legislature as the Texas State Artist in 3D medium. Liu received the Distinction Award at the Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2011), and a San Francisco Mayor’s Award (2008) for her contribution to cultural exchange.

Liu’s work has been featured by PBS Arts in Context series, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Art Papers, ArtSlant, The Huffington Post, Climate Progress, Public Art Review, Sacchi Review, UK, Helsinki Sanomat News, Finland, Morgenbladet, Norway, China Daily, Yishu, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Hamburg Abendblatt, and Vita (Life) Magazine, Italy, among others.

Born in Jilin, China, Liu lives and works in Austin, Texas. She received her MFA degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and is the Leslie Waggener Endowed Professor in the College of Fine Arts and a Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

(Philip Rogers, photo credit)

www.beililiu.com

Erica Warren

Erica Warren is a curator and scholar, working with collections, in museums, and teaching. She is currently the editor of Craft Quarterly, the James Renwick Alliance for Craft’s magazine. Her area of specialization within decorative arts and design histories centers on the late nineteenth century through the present day with a focus on alternative modernisms. Research pursuits include the human and ecological costs that attended industrial innovations in modern textile production; color theory, synthetic dyes, and modernists with intermedial art practices such as Marguerite Zorach; the American designer, entrepreneur, and weaver Dorothy Liebes; and the unbounded practices of contemporary artists working with textiles.

Her essay “Fission: Design and Mentorship in the Dorothy Liebes Studio” will be published (summer 2023) in the catalog accompanying the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s exhibition A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes. In 2021, her essay “Beyond Weaving: Transdisciplinarity and the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop,” appeared in Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and the year before, she edited and contributed to the catalogue Bisa Butler: Portraits (2020). From 2016-2022, Warren was a curator of textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she organized numerous installations, including the critically acclaimed exhibitions Bisa Butler: Portraits and Weaving Beyond the Bauhaus. As a complement to her curatorial pursuits, she has taught courses at the University of Chicago, Drexel University, and the Tyler School of Art, Temple University.

www.ericawarrenphd.com