Salt Water Remembers

Join us on September 11 to celebrate the opening of AIR 16's Final Exhibition, 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm, at Textile Arts Center (505 Carroll Street, NY, 11215).

On view: September 11 - 24, 2025

Salt Water Remembers features works by the 16th cycle of Textile Arts Center’s Artist In Residence program, curated by TAC + AIR16.

“What we hold close: fiber, pigment, plants, and scraps.

We gather our work into a living vessel, a constellation of materials and gestures that trace what remains. Salt Water Remembers invites us to see through obscurity, to feel in the dark, to move through the silence where history slips away.

This exhibition unfolds as a meditation on memory, inheritance, and the unseen systems that shape and hold us. Stitched constellations, sculpted roots, and ephemeral installations- we illuminate the cycles of decay/renewal, displacement/belonging, concealment/presence.

Our work is shaped by what the world casts off: fruit skins, dyed scraps, artifacts of daily use. These materials trace lineage, loss, and possibility. From corn husks to mycelial threads, each piece resists erasure. What has been overlooked is honored. What has been detached is re-stitched into form.

These works emerge in a moment when the world itself feels precarious, shifting, splintering, circling back. We find ourselves once again in the midst of upheaval. Wars rage, ideologies harden, and the shadows of empire and division creep forward. Historic patterns repeat, in our memory, and in our embodied reality. In light of these forces, we offer remembrance, resilience, and repair. Networks of care thrive beneath the surface, unseen but alive.

We consider the body as archive, language as residue, and nature as collaborator. We reimagine textiles as sites of ritual, landscapes, maps, and tools for bearing witness to gestures both intimate and galactic. Some works consider displacement and the weight of colonial frameworks. Others meander to magic, sensing the invisible through alchemy and intuition. There is grief here, and also reverence. A tenderness in how loss is held and transformed. Each of us offers a different form of storytelling, rooted in lived experience, imagination, in personal myth and communal memory.” - by AIR 16

TAC AIR16: Quinci Baker, Fay Ku, Josué Morales Urbina, Leo Pontius, Malaika Temba, Mark Fleuridor, Faviola Lopez-Romani, Rose Malenfant.

Follow: @quincibkr, @fay.ku, @leopontiusart, @mvtemba, @markfleuridor, @f.a.v.io.l.a, @rose.mal.enfant

Host or Publisher Textile Arts Center