North Star

Quilts have remarkable navigational abilities. An artist begins with humble layers of magpie scrap fabrics, chaotic combinations of raucous colors, and dizzyingly discordant patterns, and stitches them together into ordered whole cloths. These collaged material compasses often reflect upon and remix the histories of their individual parts from which they are composed. Furthermore, these potent objects help us orient the complexities of ourselves, our physical/cultural locations, and our positions relative to our communities.

We can find examples of quilts as wayfinding devices throughout the history of the United States. Barn quilts are large painted geometric wooden squares on the sides of rural structures designed to help travelers navigate crossroads or identify family homesteads. The legend of Underground Railroad Quilt Codes tells a story of specific quilt patterns placed on clotheslines to signal directions, warnings, or safe shelters to individuals fleeing slavery. 

The title for this exhibition, North Star, takes its name from a prominent quilt pattern, which symbolically represents guidance, direction, and freedom. Through the use of material abstraction, language, or motif, the artists in North Star use quilts as guides to help us find our way.

Fourteen of the artists in the exhibition have held studio practices at NIAD Art Center, many of whom use cloth as a primary tool of inquiry and understanding. Luis Estrada, a self described “weather man,” muses on meteorological patterns, notes about the news, movies and shows he’s watching through a series of intimately stitched floral works. Maria Radilla’s work, Barbie, connects her interests in muñecas and the eponymous iconic doll to her childhood in Mexico. Shana Harper’s full size quilt features printed images of nature, edged in Ankara fabric as a way to create a conversation between her contemporary environment and her ancestors. Felicia Griffin’s works in the exhibition temporarily jettisons her trademark pom-poms to combine elements of painterly abstraction, braids of hair, hand printed fabrics: mapping out singular somatic landscapes.

Among the guest artists outside of the organization are Bay Area-based artists, Maria Guzmán Capron and Daniel Arthur Mendoza, and Chicago-based artist, William J. O’Brien. Tactile and visual; utilitarian and organic; ornamental and instructive: the works in the exhibition challenge traditional notions of quiltmaking and celebrate a way to chart complicated expressions through maximal loose ends.

Josh Faught is a Sacramento-based artist and educator. His work uses pop cultural detritus, archival materials, and the vernacular of textiles to address the relationships between language, community, and the constructions of identity. His work has been exhibited internationally at such venues as the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Kendall Koppe Gallery, Glasgow; Casa Loewe, London; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; James Cohan Gallery, New York, and the New Museum; New York. Faught is a Professor and a Maria Manetti Shrem Endowed Chair in Art Studio at the University of California Davis. He is a recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2025 Trellis Art Foundation Stepping Stone Grant.