Fiber art is thriving in Minnesota, and the field’s growth as an artistic discipline now includes the McKnight Artist Fellowships Program, which provides two $25,000 fellowships, awarded each year to individual midcareer fiber artists living and working in Minnesota.

In addition to the $25,000 unrestricted award and public recognition in support of their studio work and practice, McKnight Fiber Artist Fellows receive:

• Critiques/studio visits with curators, mentors, and critics from the field.
• Exhibition at the end of the fellowship period in the galleries at Textile Center.
• Professional photographic documentation of work at the end of the fellowship period.
• Participation in a public discussion or presentation of their work and creative practices.
• Professional development support, such as attending conferences, workshops, and marketing advice for their work.
• Consultation sessions from artist career consultants at Springboard for the Arts on topics of their choice, related to the arts and creative practice.
• Participation in a 1 – 2 week artist residency in partnership with McKnight and Artist Communities Alliance.
• Membership to Textile Center and access to Textile Center’s resources, including library of more than 32,000 books and periodicals, state-of-the-art dye lab, and artisan shop opportunities.

The intent of the McKnight Fellowships for Fiber Artists is to recognize and support talented Minnesota fiber and textile artists whose work is of exceptional artistic merit. These fellowships are in support of individual artists who are at a career stage beyond emerging. Fiber Artists, as defined for the purposes of this fellowship, are artists who use textile and fiber arts materials, processes, histories, traditions, and/or sensibilities in their artistic practice throughout the conception, execution, and resolution of their work. The fellowships are funded by the McKnight Foundation and administered by Textile Center.

ABOUT THE MCKNIGHT ARTIST FELLOWSHIPS PROGRAM

Founded on the belief that Minnesota thrives when its artists thrive, the McKnight Foundation’s Arts & Culture program is one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the country. Support for individual working Minnesota artists has been a cornerstone of the program since it began in 1982. The McKnight Artist Fellowships Program provides annual, unrestricted cash awards to outstanding mid-career Minnesota artists in 15 different creative disciplines. Program partner organizations administer the fellowships and structure them to respond to the unique challenges of different disciplines. Currently the foundation contributes about $2.8 million per year to its statewide fellowships. To learn more about McKnight Artist Fellowships, visit: mcknight.org/artistfellowships.

ABOUT THE MCKNIGHT FOUNDATION

The McKnight Foundation, a Minnesota-based family foundation, advances a more just, creative, and abundant future where people and planet thrive. Established in 1953, the McKnight Foundation is deeply committed to advancing climate solutions in the Midwest; building an equitable and inclusive Minnesota; and supporting the arts in Minnesota, neuroscience, and international crop research. mcknight.org

A focus on racial equity is at the heart of the McKnight approach to funding. Along with Textile Center, our organizations value diversity and equity, seeking to be inclusive and accessible to all applicants. We welcome and encourage applications from artists representing diverse cultural perspectives.

Christine Novotny, 2025 McKnight Fiber Artist Fellow

“Roses in a Broken Vase”

Christine Novotny weaves vibrant and hearty textiles rooted in a curiosity about color, exploring the linear process and documentation of weaving on a floor loom. Many of her pieces are influenced by techniques in Scandinavian tradition, including rölakan tapestry and rya knotting techniques. Her designs are guided by the physical practice of different woven processes, finding bold, graphic forms in tapestry and loom-controlled designs, and sensitivity and atmospheric movement through the technique of rya pile weaving.

Her artistic foundation began in painting with oils and watercolors. Along with years of life drawing, this helped hone her eye to notice varied local color and chromatic moments that are difficult to define. When she began weaving, she explored by optically blending colored yarns. Interlacing and bundling multiple hues in the warp and weft gave her a new way to incorporate chromatic sensitivity and nuance. She moved toward experimentation and surprise, exploring not if colors work together, but how they work together. Her colors derive both from observations in her production work and from her sketching practice, using markers and colored pencils to layer color. Vibrant colors pair with contrasting tints and tones to convey emotional energy. These colors relate to one another through her use of abstract imagery, open to interpretation for all who interact with the work.

Novotny is intrigued by the ways that weaving can be documentary in its linear format. While painting, she worked by moving around the canvas, adding and subtracting as needed. This resulted in an ever-changing piece, and an unnerving freeform approach that never felt “finished”. In floor loom weaving, the preparation begins long before the imagery is woven. The handwork is both methodical and intimate. She starts at the beginning and works towards the end, combining bits and pieces of yarn, disparate and harmonious colors, new yarns and old ones. Whether the weft is composed of a knot of many colors or a bundle of several yarns, each inclusion is a choice, met with chance as it interacts in repetition. Working linearly on the floor loom applies a creative limiting factor, where a shift in design can be pinpointed to a moment in time that happened after all the moments before it. This allows the viewer to connect with the linear evolution of the work.

These documentary concepts are explored in Roses in a Broken Vase. This piece began with a sketch in her early pregnancy, was woven through her third trimester, and ultimately finished after the birth. The colors are enticing and fantastical, like memories in Technicolor. At the top of the piece, the reliable vertical lines all shift unexpectedly to the right. The precision required to make this piece pairs with spontaneity, acknowledging the capacity of a piece to hold a moment from her own life, and our collective lives simultaneously.

Weaving with rya knots introduced a tactile depth to her designs and materials. Rows of knots layer on top of one another, each often a unique blend of colors allowing her technique to be more painterly For Sonia and A Marvel are examples. In For Sonia, the knots follow a geometric grid, referencing a design from artist Sonia Delaunay’s line of printed fabrics from hand-drawn designs. While made up mostly of straight lines and right angles, the edges loosen with the soft tails of the woolen knots. In A Marvel, the linen and mohair knots illuminate the sensitively blended hues of pinks, peaches, and corals. Using linen fibers is a way that Novotny recontextualizes the Rya technique. Lustrous, thin yarns catch light differently, appearing more like soft pine needles than lush pile carpet.

As Novotny comes off of a 2024 solo exhibition at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, she plans to continue constructing color with hand-dyed yarns. She currently has yarn from Minnesota fleeces being milled to use in the coming year, as she plans to continue build depth of color and texture in her work.

2025

“A Marvel”

For more about Christine Novotny, visit ChristineNovotny.com

“For Sonia”

Shannon Lucas Westrum, 2025 McKnight Fiber Artist Fellow

Shannon Lucas Westrum’s love of texture and fibers began in childhood, when she convinced an elderly neighbor to teach her to crochet. She spent countless hours creating with yarn, wood, beads, paper, and leather—weaving materials and techniques together and continually exploring. In her early twenties, she began serious practice as a basket maker through community education programs and fiber arts guilds. When Westrum became a mother, she divided her time between work and raising her daughters, and her art took an intermission. Five years later, her young daughter looked up at her and doubted her claim to have made the basket in her hands—having never seen her create anything in her entire life. That moment inspired her to re-embrace her artistic self, not only for her own sake but so her daughters could understand what could be made with their hands together.

Westrum returned to weaving at home, developing her own style and seeking opportunities to learn wherever she could find them. Her work grew into a blend of cultures, traditions, and technical skills. Living surrounded by Native lands, she had grown up learning Ojibwe art in school as the only form of art instruction available besides drawing and painting. As Ojibwe traditions were not hers culturally, she did not want to work within them and instead began a pilgrimage of sorts, learning traditional European weaving techniques and materials from weavers from the United States, Spain, and Denmark.

Her work was recognized with awards—a fellowship from the Region 2 Arts Council and a residency at Shankill Castle—within months of each other. This funding allowed her to travel to Ireland, where she worked with Joe Hogan—renowned basket maker, artist, and author on traditional Irish basketry—and his son Ciaran, who teaches willow weaving near Galway. She describes her time weaving with the Hogan’s and basket makers from across Ireland, making willow skibs and other traditional forms, as moments of “pure bliss.”

Following this, she worked at Shankill Castle in Kilkenny in the studio of painter Elizabeth Cope and studied with German basket maker Heike Kahle. While the cultural traditions of Europe are only ancestrally hers, their technical foundations became integral to her practice. Through the years of study and research that have followed, Westrum has forged her own style and continues to explore the fusion of modern and traditional techniques, combining manufactured and locally sourced natural materials in her art basketry.

Her artistic practice is also a family endeavor. It was not unusual for excursions with her teenagers to involve beachcombing along Lake Superior for driftwood and stones or gathering grasses, barks, antlers, and rushes from her late grandfather’s farm near Lake Itasca. For Westrum, sculptural inspiration often begins with these found natural forms and objects. It could be the curve of an antler or a burl in a willow root that activates a piece and dictates its shape, flow, and color. These natural elements are combined with primary weaving materials such as round reed (rattan) and willow to create both sculptural works and practical vessels.

Westrum’s art has evolved to embody dialogue between dualities—tradition and innovation, nature and craft, family and community. A recent exhibition that reflected life in the north woods exemplified a collaboration of texture, color, symbolism, and feel, with some pieces sculptural and symbolic, while others were infused with the swirling colors of the environment. With the support of her community, she harvested an abundance of natural materials and completed the works using cords made from daylilies, irises, chives, and rhubarb skins, as well as cattails, sawgrass, and swamp grasses—all weaving themselves into her vision. Each piece became a unique sculptural expression, deeply rooted in place, material, and story.

2025

For more on Shannon’s work, visit Shannon Lucas Westrum

“Autumn Begins”     11″ x 15″ x 11.5″

“Rose” 8.5″ x 24″ x 6″